If You Have A Blog, You Must Ask Yourself These Questions
For professionals in every discipline be it IT or not, blogs are not uncommon or unknown. Blogs are —a simple way of carrying a message, be it a piece of interesting news, some pictures of interest, or a video. They are easily set up on any number of platforms and provide individuals and companies with an official voice, albeit in a more casual and conversational tone.
“A well-written blog, kept up-to-date with regular and informative posts, is in fact a gold mine…”
Whether you have been blogging for a while or setting up a new blog, there are a few things you have to do before you start a blog or you can do now to improve your blogging experience and outcome:
- Ask yourself what your aims are. Is it about just PR and news, or are you going to provide help and support?
- Be careful your readers don’t bounce off the page thinking “so what?” They’ve taken the time to come to your site, so make sure there’s some kind of action involved or they feel enriched in some way for having spent time reading your words.
- It becomes harder to keep up the blogging spirit after sometime of blogging. So decide “Who is going to manage the blog? “ It must be kept current. If you cannot write daily or on tight schedules, you should write 3-4 posts at a time and publish them later, but keep your posting on schedule.
If you can’t be bothered to keep your readers interested, how can you keep your customers happy?
Once you’ve set your blogging mantra, it is important to set up goals. It helps to have goals as they keep you focused, and help tell your story internally. Ask yourself:
- How will you measure success?
- Increased traffic?
- More comments?
- How do you define your ROI? What’s the return on investment or the return on inaction?
No matter you are newbie or a veteran, you can always improve your blog by considering these questions. I have found these questions apparently basic yet powerful enough to bring an overnight change in your blogging experience. I suggest you to write these key questions on simple sheet of paper and hang them besides your writing desk. This will not only help you keep focused but also provide you enthusiasm and passion by constantly reminding you the goals, you had in your mind the day you started blogging.
So what is your blogging mantra? share in the comments below.
Robots.txt Syntax
Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to search engine robots or crawler on how to crawl & index pages on their website. Generally, Robots.txt needs to be placed in the top-level directory of a web server in order to be useful. e.g: http:/www.example.com/robots.txt
Robots.txt Syntax Help:
- Block all web crawlers from all content
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
- Block a specific web crawler from a specific folder
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /no-google/
- Block a specific web crawler from a specific web page
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /no-google/blocked-page.html
Important Points To Remember:
- In most cases, meta robots with parameters
"noindex, follow"should be employed as a way to to restrict crawling or indexation. - It is important to note that malicious crawlers are likely to completely ignore robots.txt and as such, this protocol does not make a good security mechanism.
- Only one "Disallow:" line is allowed for each URL.
- Each subdomain on a root domain use separate robots.txt files.
- Google and Bing accept two specific regular expression characters for pattern exclusion (* and $).
- The filename of robots.txt is case sensitive. Use "robots.txt", not "Robots.TXT.
- Spaces are not accepted ways to separate query parameters. For example, "/category/ /product page" would not be honored by robots.txt.
Acknowledgement
How To Blog
I have recently created a video covering the tips to efficient blogging and get long term success, I hope you will like it.