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Estimated Time: This should take you about 20 minutes to read through and several hours to implement on your blog.  This lesson assumes that you have completed our Blogging Basics lesson or that you already have an active blog up and running.

What will I learn? In this lesson, we'll offer 50 hints and tips to improve your blog's visibility, grow your audience and deliver fantastic content to those who want it most.

Equipment/software needed: You will need a computer, Internet connection and an updated web browser.

Introduction: A blog gets updated regularly, typically by an individual, with posts structured in reverse-chronological order, with the most recent content at the top of the page. True, blogs were originally used by people to easily share the details of their daily lives with others. But over time, blogs evolved into a unique style of web publishing, aided by the fact that blogging software made web publishing accessible to a larger segment of the population by obviating the need for HTML and coding knowledge to publish content online.

Why you should care:  Believe it or not, Twitter, Facebook and the newest social networks haven't killed blogs.  In fact, more and more people are relying on blogs for daily news and information.

In-depth Explanation: So you've launched a blog.  Congrats!  Now it's time to take the groundwork you've laid and transform your site into the kind of blog that people link to, comment on, reference, tweet and retweet, and even print out to share with their grandmothers.  

Below are 50 tips and tricks to help you improve on what you've got...

Overview
1. Blog on a granular topic. Rather than “sports” or even “college athletics,” pick one topic that you can delve into endlessly, such as “women’s basketball” or “major league baseball.”

2. Check out your competition.  Who else is covering the topic you’ve chosen?  

3. Read your competition daily -- hourly, if they post often.  What can you learn?  What stories are you missing?

4. Create your own 12-month editorial calendar.  What events will you cover?  

5. On that calendar, keep track of what topics and kinds of posts your publishing. Work hard not to repeat yourself.

6. Are you blogging for business or because of a personal mission?  What’s your goal in blogging?  Write down your goal(s) and post them somewhere near your computer.  (Or keep them in your laptop bag.)  With every post, remind yourself why you’re doing this and stick to your goals.

7.  What’s your action plan for your readers?  Do you want us to learn from you and then hire you to do something?  Do you want us to support our cause?  Do you simply want us to agree or disagree and tell you in your comments section?

8.  What are your benchmarks for success?  10,000 daily readers?  20 comments per blog post?  Establish a beginning set of benchmarks, and then decide where you want your blog to go in the next 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. What will it take to get your blog there?

Content
9. If you don’t have something compelling to say, don’t blog.  It’s okay to skip a day or two.  And don’t just post a handful of your tweets or a link to someone else’s blog simply because you feel like you must have something fresh on your site.

10. Develop different templates for blog posts.  They might be interviews, lists, charts/ graphs, short breaking-news stories or longer features.  Make sure to use each of your templates rather than posting the same kind of story over and over.

12. If the topic you’ve chosen to cover involves lots of new events or developments -- local crime, social media, sports -- realize that you must stay on top of the story.  Keep track of what’s happening and blog about it before your competition does.

13. If your topic is less newsy, you still need to incorporate recent events into your posts to capture a digital audience.  You can use Twitter’s trending topics or Google Trends for ideas.

14. Ask for feedback within your posts.  Give your audience a reason to communicate with you.

15. People love infographics.  Trust us.  If you can produce a killer infographic every now and again, you’ll create buzz and find dozens or hundreds of new blogs linking to you.  Examples include: these Venn diagrams and This Is Indexed.

Writing Style

16.  Write concisely.  Unless you’ve put together a writerly blog, one that’s meant to explore language and the fine art of long-form storytelling, get to the point.  Be interesting, but be brief.  There is no magic length or word count for winning blog posts -- but we can assure you that 5,000 words with lots of scrolling will turn most of your visitors away.

17. Use what you already know. Offer a compelling lead, give us the point in your nut graph, let us know the significance of the story, and then fill us in from there.

18. Give us lots and lots of examples.  

19. Use hyperlinks to let us read more.  There are other tools, such as Apture, which enable your readers to click through links without ever leaving your blog.

20. Use anecdotes and personal stories to illustrate your points.

21. Stories and narratives connect readers to the story you’re trying to tell.  Use them.

22. Reference other bloggers if you’re adding to a conversation that’s already happening elsewhere. Link to them and let them know you’re talking about the topic, too.

23. If you want to impress folks with your vast knowledge on a particular subject, do so through explanation and context.  

24. Save the foul language for another day.  Write your blog posts as if you were speaking them in natural conversation to a group of colleagues.  Would you drop the F-bomb to describe something?  If not, leave it out of your post.

25. On the other hand, if you’re known for being a “colorful speaker” and folks are used to hearing you punctuate your point with lots of four-letter words, go ahead and use them in your posts.  

26.  Let your personality shine through.

27. If you’re blogging for an organization, it’s okay to opine as long as you don’t cross the established blogging rules.

28. If you’re running a personal blog, offer your opinion. But unless your career path includes only gigs as a pundit, keep extreme controversy or viewpoints out of your blog posts.

Tech Secrets
29. List your blog on Technorati: link removed.

30. List your blog at Yahoo: link removed.

31. List your blog at Google: link removed.

32. List your blog at Bing: link removed.

33. Don’t pay a listing service that promises to get your blog to the top of every search engine.  It won’t.

34. Take a look at the suite of cool tools at Feedburner, which will let you embed various social networking tools into each blog post. Claim your feed here: link removed.

35. If you’re on Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger, make sure to look through all of the free plugins available to download and use.  They’ll let you do things like embed your latest tweets onto your page, show readers their local time and weather, etc.

36. Use a metrics tool to track your audience.  Take a look at Google Analytics (link removed.), StatCounter (link removed.) and Crazy Egg (link removed.).  Monitor daily.

37. Test your blog on every operating system and browser to make sure you don’t have compatibility problems.  Few people remember to do this.

38. Use a tool like Scribd to embed PDFs: link removed.

39. Use tags. Make sure that your tags are accurate in describing the subject matter of your post.

40. Put your blog’s URL into every message service you use: your email signature, profiles on LinkedIN, Facebook and Twitter, on your business cards, etc.

41. If your blog platform allows it, include buttons to let readers share your content on Digg, Facebook and Twitter.

42. If that’s not easily done, take a look at AddThis: link removed.

Rules For Improvement
43. If someone leaves a comment on your blog post, comment back.  Engage your audience.

44. Don’t use Twitter and Facebook to let us know about every new blog post.  You’ll lose your audience fast.

45. DO share your very best blog posts on your social networks.

46. Use a metrics-enabled URL shortener, such as link removed, to share the links for your blog posts.  You’ll be able to go back later and see how many people clicked on your link and where they were from.

47. Link to people, places and things.  But don’t over-link.

48. Fail fast.  If you have an idea, try it.  If it doesn’t work out as planned, recognize that quickly and move on to Plan B (or revert back to the original).

49. Make sure whatever you post is actually interesting to you.  Is the post something that you’d read and tell all your friends and colleagues about?

50. Keep at it.  Getting good at blogging takes practice.  Let yourself develop a digital voice, learn new tools and develop a pattern for success. That won’t happen overnight...but it will happen.

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Amy Webb is the founder of Knowledgewebb and Principal Consultant at Webbmedia Group.