Top Tips on Starting a Blog from HR Case Studies

It seems that Start Writing a Blog features as a New Years Resolution for quite a few people this year, so the editorial team of HR Case Studies offer the following tips and hints for getting your blog off the ground and noticed. Some of the content below is adapted (that's code for "stolen") from the rather excellent "Killer Web Content" by Gerry McGovern.

Keep it concise:
By 100 words you will have lost 25% of your readers
By 300 words you will have lost 40% of your readers
By 500 words you will have lost 60% of your readers
By 1000 words you will have lost 80% of your readers

Follow other blogs, and make it easy for others to follow you.

Give your blog a title that reflects what the blog is about! Pig Farming in Patagonia as a title for your blog on Strategic HR may appeal to your sense of the absurd, but it won't attract the readership you are seeking!

Before you make the plunge, decide on which blogging platform to use. Find out what those blogs that you read are based on, and choose one which you think reflects your aims.

Get what McGovern calls "Care Words" into your blog titles (i.e Top Tips on Starting a Blog from HR Case Studies)

Don't use more than 60 characters in your blog titles. That's about eight to ten words with spaces.

Avoid placing links (especially to other sources) inside the body of your blog: if you do that, people will click on them, leave your blog and fail to return. And you don't want that, do you! Better to put any links to external sources after your content, not within.

Use the various tracking mechanisms to work out what people were looking for when they found your blog. For example, early in the life of this blog, a lot of individuals stumbled across HR Case Studies when looking for an HR case study on Performance Management. There wasn't one, so I wrote one! And yes, I've just ignored the rule I mentioned above, although that link is to a page within this blog!

Invite feedback from other followers, both as to how they rate your content and if there's anything that they would like you to write about.

Invite traffic to your blog from twitter and other social media sites. But don't overdo it! If all your twitter stream contains is an endless series of links to your blog, you'll eventually lose followers on twitter!

Make it visually attractive, so use pictures and images within the blog. But be careful with copyright!

Fellow bloggers: feel free to add any suggestions to those above!