Blogs are a form of regularly-updated website that shows articles in a reverse-chronological order. A blog can be part of how you communicate with a community, or the blog can be a community in its own right.
Common features and patterns[]
- Group blogs are blogs with multiple authors
- Most blogs support Blog comments. Some blogs institute a Comment policy
- Blog Aggregation can help bring blogs together, or expose a blog to a wider audience. Planets are a popular way to do this.
- There are a variety of Blog software platforms available
- Blog metrics help you understand your blog's reach etc.
Best practices[]
Please add best practices! This article needs more examples of best practice. Please go ahead and edit this page to add any you can think of.
- It's generally best to update blogs regularly, to maintain reader interest. At least once a week should be a minimum, and daily (or more) is best if you want to build a strong following and community.
- Make sure you provide an RSS feed so that people can subscribe to your blog via a feed reader, Aggregation facility, etc.
- RSS feeds for comments are also very useful
- Allow comments. Blogs which do not allow comments do not build community.
- Provide an organized, carefully-edited list of recommended blogs in your sidebar, and frequently link to related websites and blogs in your posts. This is both a service to your readers (who may want to explore related material) and a service to other bloggers in your community. If your links are helpful to people, it will often inspire them to keep coming back to you.
- Be a human being. Readers are more likely to connect with a blog if it comes tied with some personality and identity. Faceless corporate brands are hard to form relationships with.
- Be consistently trustworthy and interesting. If your readers sense that you're being dishonest or superficial, they will lose interest quickly.
Further reading[]
- Blog on Wikipedia
See also[]
- Microblogging
- Social media