Robyn’s Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

successful business bloggingI purposefully am avoiding reading the other entries until I finish this one, because I want to truly give you my opinion on successful blogging habits without being influenced by the other submissions.

Early Birds Get the Scoops
One of my favorite habits is blogging in the early morning. I find out a lot of information much earlier than the rest of the blogosphere because I start my RSS reading in the very early am, when the rest of America is still snoozing.

Read many, many feeds
And, I read small blogs. Of course, I would suggest this blog ;), but there are many, many smaller blogs that end up giving you the best scoops (my opml). Remember, the larger blogs find those scoops somewhere (and are usually kind enough to provide a source link). One of my favorite habits is to subscribe to those ‘scoop’ links when I see them. If they are horrible I can always ‘one-click’ unsubscribe. If not, I may be able to pull some great info from them as well.

business blog planning

Preblogging Preparation
For those times when news is slow consider series blogging. I use Google Calendar to plan out my blog series. I have a seperate calendar for my blog post ideas and series planning. I only make it viewable when I need to see it, otherwise it’s hidden to prevent confusion in my appointments, podcasts and other scheduled items. I like doing it this way so I can pull the data from any computer with a browser.

Mobile Blogging
Which brings up the fact that I blog all over the place. I am very mobile and can take my computer anywhere (see my blogging schedule article) so I am almost always online. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, but I actually enjoy what I do so I like to stay plugged in a lot. I have an EVDO card (mobile wireless for the laptop) and a Palm Treo 700m (mobile email when I leave the laptop behind) so I can literally be blogging riding down the road, waiting for my car to get serviced or even sitting in a restaurant.

Few Ads
Going crazy with ads is the worst mistake bloggers can make. I’m skirting on too many ads already. If a site has too many ads they run the risk of scaring away readers. …enough said.

Networking
Link a lot, comment on other blogs, form collaborative projects, join email lists, participate in the online conversation… I would say this has been my most important ‘habit’.

Great Content, Useful Content
If your blog doesn’t help people then they’ve no reason to come back, day-after-day, much less subscribe to it. Your content should be so good that they’ll feel they can’t miss a minute of it. Otherwise, you won’t *earn* their viewership.

Passion
If you don’t enjoy blogging, you probably are taking it a little too seriously. While I admit consistency, picture usage, niche focus and uber professionalism are important, if there’s no fun involved, take a step back and rethink your strategy. My number one blogging habit is definitely passion.

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