Running a blog is easy. I’d love to come up with 10 rules for running a blog, but I couldn’t think of 10 really important ones. The ones I’m going to list are the bare minimum though.
If you have a blog, you need to post occasionally. If you’re not going to post something at least once a month or so, then it confuses people. Is this blog alive or dead? There are some good posts here, but the last one is 4 months ago. Should I subscribe? Is the author going to say anything else this year? Also, watch out if you find yourself doing a post like this: “Wow, I haven’t posted here in 6 months. I’ve been so busy doing [whatever]. But I promise I’m going to start posting more often.” If you have two or more of those in a year, and not much else, it might be time to give it up.
Ensure your blog has a link to its RSS feed. Most people not going to bookmark your blog and check to see if you wrote anything every day. They’re going to look for that RSS link and add it to their feed reader. The link should ideally be near the top of the page. Don’t make your readers hunt for it. They want to find it and click it because they like you!
Somewhere, say who you are and how people can reach you. At the very least who you are. You’d be surprised at how many blogs don’t actually say who the author is. If you want to blog anonymously, I guess that’s your choice, but don’t be wind up being nameless just because you didn’t think to put your name there.
Make it easy to find older posts on your blog. Minimally a list of archives. Ideally also a search box. I’ve seen the occasional blog where the last half dozen posts are there, and there’s no way to get at anything else. Again, if you’re doing that for a reason, fine, but don’t do it out of carelessness.
Last, but most importantly, for the love of God, enable your comments. In fact points 1-4 are really just fluff so I can rant about this one. 😉 There is nothing worse than reading all the way through a blog post, and either agreeing with it completely, or violently disagreeing with it, or just really feeling like you have something to add to it, and forming up a reply as you are reading it, and then getting to the end of it and finding that there is no way to comment. It’s infuriating. Whether you mean it or not, it also comes across as arrogant. It says, “I have something important to say, and you should read it. But I don’t give a poop what you have to say about it. Your voice doesn’t matter. Only mine does.” It also says you don’t get the web. Get a radio show or a newspaper or magazine column. But if you can’t handle feedback, you shouldn’t be blogging. Sure, there’s spam, but there’s plenty of software to combat that. Sure there are trolls and a-holes, and oh my God, there are people who might actually DISAGREE with you!!! The horror. There’s also comment moderation. Even so, in the 7 years I’ve had this blog, I think I’ve only censored 2-3 comments (other than obvious spam). I’ve had plenty of people calling me all kinds of names and being all troll-like and some really pissed me off. But hey, that’s life. There are real people out there. Some are jerks. Some are insane. As Stacey says, “suck it up, princess.” And please, really, really, really, really consider NOT making your users register to comment. I almost never do, unless it’s a close friend. And then I curse them under my breath. I’m talking about the ones where you have to make a user name and password and get a confirmation email and click on the link, blah blah blah. Your blog is not a social network. I have enough passwords to remember without needing to remember one more just so I can make a comment on your blog. Sure, this cuts down on the amount of random, “Thanks for the post” type comments or “You spelled TEH wrong” stuff. But if someone is all riled up to troll you, they’re going to make the effort. It’s your call, but know that you’ll be pissing off many of your readers. Some people don’t even like comment moderation. I do the one-time moderation thing – I’ll moderate your first comment. After that, your info is in the system and any other comments go through immediately. I think it’s a decent compromise.
All of the above is supported with any popular blogging software right out of the box. If you’re rolling your own blog software, you really should support the above or it just looks kind of lame.