Jeff Vilimek

Welcome to my first blog post! Yes, it may seem strange that I’m starting by giving blogging advice, but I’ve been doing quite a bit of research and planning to get to this point and wanted to pass that information along. I’m also trying to jumpstart blogging for my team at Technoligence and wanted to help out by outlining some guidelines. I expect to update this over time and certainly ask anyone reading this to comment with your own tips.

 

As an experienced author of other types of technical and business content, I had some ideas of my own to start with. After reading up on blogging from some of the experts out on the web, I was able to both validate my own thoughts as well as come up with some excellent additions. I’ve collected these thoughts in the following set of guidelines and based it all on the principle that a blog is a product, and that by treating it like one it will be more likely to succeed.

 

Here is some of what I ran across while researching this:

• I’d recommend this blogging series on problogger.net. There are some excellent points in that beginner series that I’ve added to my guidelines.
• I really enjoyed this article entitled Blogging Is About Writing on problogger.net authored by Lorelle VanFossen, who also has a blog of her own dedicated to better blogging. Her comments about the concept of writing as a skill being central to blogging really struck a chord with what I was thinking.
• I also wanted to call out this entry from Pat Doyle that talks about blog usability, in particular for the introduction to Browsershots.org. This is a free online tool that will show you your site rendered on a variety of browsers and platforms.

 

Blogging Guidelines – Version 1.0

The Roadmap (The Plan)

Remember this from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

 

Just like Alice, if you don’t decide where you are going with your blog it won’t really matter what direction you take it and you shouldn’t expect for it to go anywhere in particular. In order to avoid wandering aimlessly make sure you pick a direction and give yourself a roadmap for how you want to proceed. You can always change direction in the future if necessary.

 

A useful tool to help create the roadmap is to realize that, as I mentioned above, your blog is a product. If you treat it like a product there are plenty of tools and tricks you can use to create an appropriate plan. Here are some basic steps for creating your roadmap:

1. State your problem or opportunity – You need this guidance to frame your vision and focus for your blog.
2. Come up with a vision/mission – This gives you something to go after with your blog and must be tied to addressing your opportunity.
3. Understand your users – Understanding your audience and their goals and desires will help you ensure that your blog talks to the right people.
4. Come up with a plan for building and shipping – With the first three items in place outline your plan for what you are going to write, how often and how you’ll manage what comes next.

The Compass (Guiding Principles)

Once you have the roadmap you can think of these guiding principles as the navigation tips that help you use the map effectively:

• Blogging is writing: This is a key principle and I’ll break it down since there is a lot here that is useful. I’m no expert and have to work at this as well (I had to devote a whole editing run through of this post to commas!) Overall you need to keep in mind that what you are doing in a blog is “writing” and all the traditional rules apply if you want it to be effective:
  • Strunk and White are your friends: If you don’t know who those guys are look them up and get to know them. All writing rules apply – use paragraphs effectively, punctuate appropriately, use proper tense, case, etc.
  • Avoid jargon and acronyms: You taking the extra 1.5 seconds to write out the acronym or explain your technical terms actually saves your readers time and since there are hopefully many more of them than of you that is a good time investment.
  • Less is more: It actually takes more time to express ideas concisely. Take that time.
  • Learn usage of their vs. they’re vs. there, your vs. you’re, than vs. then, affect vs. effect, less vs. fewer, etc.: These are pet peeves for many people. Using them appropriately helps you look like a pro. Grammar Girl can help.

• Be your users: If you did the work in your roadmap to define who your users are you can use user experience design techniques to do some really effective editing. Read through your writing as if you are each distinct user group and make sure you are addressing as much of each of their interests as possible.
• Make content timeless: Content that persists and is useful tomorrow as well as today grows your product value over time. This isn’t always possible and in certain circumstances you may steer away from this principle but make that a conscious decision and make sure it is in line with your vision.
• Use versioned releases: Updates to blog features and structure are a good thing but only when they follow your vision and have minimal/positive impact on your users. Templates and navigation and other features changing constantly is sure to give your users trouble. To avoid this, do what product development teams do and package up changes and feature updates into cohesive manageable sets and roll them out on a reasonable schedule.

 

That’s all from me for now but since I’m doing this for the exchange of ideas I encourage everyone to post their own tips and best practices for blogging.

 

What is the roadmap for your blog? What are your guidelines?

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Blogging by Jeff Vilimek