Practical aspects of building traffic to your blog.
Is content what really matters? You can have great content, but never be seen or used if you don't put some things in place that help. Blog technology can help.
Have a business plan for your blog- know very specifically what you to do with your blog- who you want to reach, etc.
Choose the best engine for your needs
Brand your site thoroughly
Hire a professional designer
Make sure you can post regularly or your blog will die
the holy trinity:
Comment systems can help build community; blogging technology makes comments easy; beware comment spam; don't enable comments unless you can manage them.
Comments enable sites to have the ability to have an interactive element. "The accidental blogger"- relates to the directions in which comments can take a site.
Trackback
Pings sites and creates a circle of linking love. Trackback links together sites who are talking about one another.
Trackback is something that is done by the technology. It doesn't take a lot of knowledge or manual work to make Trackback- the technology does the work.
Point from Darren Barefoot: I don't use it because it is confusing for most people. It is not simple enough yet. Everyone agrees.
Spammers will figure out how to exploit trackbacks eventually.
See also: Trackback Described in Plain English.
Content Aggregation (Feeds):
A feed is a bit like the "push" model, but are here to stay. Almost all blog software has a built in RSS or Atom feed. All professional and business based blogs should have an RSS feed.
Question from Boris Mann: You talk about "blog software" Isn't blogging just a feature as opposed to something specific? She says: No, most are specific to blogs. I think Boris is alluding to Drupal, which has blogging as a single feature among many.
Quick poll in the room: With RSS feeds, do you use excerpts or full feeds? The crowd responded with more folks voting for full feeds. Either way, it's important to have them.
Use web standards- they can increase the speed of your site and your search results.
Use user friendly URLs. Title your links appropriately. Care for your blog, feed it with yummy content, love your blog and it will love you back.
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