infinite42

Don’t link to other blogs.

If you can avoid making any references to other blogs then should be able to limit the chances of:

1. Anyone else finding out about you
2. Learning about other interesting topics to blog about
3. Your Google Ranking ever increasing
4. Helping out your visitors by referring them to other useful information

You don’t want anybody to find you anyway, right? If you don’t need links to other blogs then this avoids the need to read other blogs, so this will save you a ton of time. Also don’t forget that Google values pages that link out to other relevant pages. You don’t want Google to think you are valuable, do you?

Finally, your blog is just for you anyway, isn’t it? Why should you help your visitors when they do find you?

Create a blog and only put one post on it.

There are a lot of blogs like this out there in the blogosphere and there are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Someone starts off with good intentions, then forgets to add any more posts
2. The blog was built purely to create a link to another site

At least #2 is deliberate, but it does tend to fill up the internet with useless spammy sites. It also uses up all those “useful” URLs such as asdfgh.com

If you don’t keep updating your blog then you might get an initial spike of interest and you might pop up on Google for a couple of days. These will both disappear after a while though. Not really a long term solution, is it?

If you want a successful blog then you need to add posts regularly so that search engines find you and your visitors keep coming back for more.

Are you feeling brave? How about upgrading your customer guestbook with a blog?

If you have a business with a guestbook (vacation rental, restaurant, tourist attraction) then this can be a great source for customer feedback. Other customers will read the guestbook and hopefully see all the positive comments from your satisfied previous customers.

If your guestbook is, well, a book, then the problem is that the only people who can read this are those who are already physically there. Those people are probably already your customers (or are likely to be very soon).

You can improve on this by putting a guestbook on your website. This makes those positive comments visible by anyone in the world who has an internet connection.

The problem with this is that your guestbook is probably written by you. Your customers might provide the original comments but you’ve probably entered them yourself. Did you make any changes? Maybe you left out some of the less positive ones. Even if you didn’t, there’s always a slight suspicion that this can take place.

If you have a blog then you can open it up and allow your readers to add comments to your posts. Why not create a post called “Guestbook” and invite your customers to start commenting. It’s a great way to get real feedback and your website visitors will appreciate your honesty and openness.

Does this make you feel slightly nervous? Are you worried that negative comments might appear in your guestbook?

Well, if your customers are complaining, why is this? Is there a problem with your product or your service? If so, you’d better get this fixed anyway. Stop reading this right now and go fix it!!

Assuming you don’t have a defective product, the best way here is to respond positively to the complaint. If your customer stayed in your vacation rental and there were no saucepans, tell them how you supplied some new ones immediately. If your restaurant customer’s food was served cold, apologize and say you reheated it immediately (joke). In general, customers understand that problems occur occasionally, and they will like you if they know that you correct problems for them.

So what do you think? Why don’t you throw away the old book and start connecting to your customers via the blogosphere? Positive comments only please!

Write something that everyone else agrees with.

This is a great way to guarantee that your readers (the ones that are left) become bored and uninspired by your writing. If you write the same as everyone else, why should anyone read your stuff?

Successful blogs usually involve some discussion through the comments and the best way to get this going is to be interesting. Take a stand on some issues and be controversial. There are a million other voices out there - why should anyone listen to yours?

Seth wrote a great post on how to Write Like a Blogger. If you want a quick start on how to begin your life in the blogosphere, why not start here. Maybe you’ve seen a few blogs, or maybe you actively read a few of them. You might have decided to integrate a blog because you’ve heard that they are useful for increasing traffic to your website.

There are a lot of blogs out there. Millions. Most start with a post or two and stop there. This is a great way to guarantee that your blog will get lost amongst the others. The key is to keep updating it and make those updates interesting, relevant and authentic. You also need to promote your blog by building links to and from other blogs and websites.

Remember that the content is key here. Keep updating it but make sure it’s the best you can do.

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