Blogging advice

Salon blogger Dave Pollard tells what it takes to build a blog in "The Top Five Ways to Improve Your Blog" and "The Five Top Ways to Attract More Attention to It."

Here are the tips for improvement, stripped of their explanatory material:

1. Provide something unique
2. Provide something valuable
3. Be first
4. Do your research
5. Learn to write very well

The key is to give the reader something to take away. Maybe from somewhere else on the net, but he says don't forget about sources off the net (real people, print publications, documents and so forth).

And here are the attention-getters:

1. Use other media to pull people to your blog
2. Write, at least sometimes, about "hot" topics
3. Make a great first impression
4. Learn by studying who's reading what, and what works
5. Get outside more

Blogging can teach a lot about marketing--what people want to read and how to tell them about it--at a level of experience that would take years in print publishing.

The page is a treasure chest of links. He's done a Blogging Table of Contents with more, more, more. Pollard's articles on blogging are the best I've run across.

He also links to a University of Southern Mississippi site called the 39 steps with practical info about writing stories--both fiction and nonfiction.

Big thank you to Douglas for posting the link.