Getting the Most out of Your Blog - Backbone
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Another important factor to note before picking your open source CMS is the kind of programming language that is under the hood. Most use PHP/MySQL code to write all the applications. If you are customizing, ensuring that the code is built in a form you are familiar with is very important. I reiterate, getting a non-extensible CMS for a large sum is not necessarily a good idea; getting a free non-extensible CMS is not a good idea either. Now we can leave the technical aspects and go to how to write for blogs, and how to manage your writers and yourself.
Writing For Your Blog
Content is King, and the whole point of your CMS is getting fresh content to your users in a timely fashion -- and also in a fashion that won't demand you overwork yourself. I subscribed to Debbie Weil's newsletter. If you can get past the "buy my book" parts you should be able to pick up a few things on how to write for blogs. Another excellent resource is www.divinewrite.com, as well as Jill Whalen's site. Pretty much anything on SEO copy should give you the basics of writing for search engines, blogs , copy or otherwise. I'm going to share with you a few tips I got from Debbie Weil; others I got from reading and working on tech blogs. After this list of tips I will list three of my favorite blogs.
Write Frequently
If you can do this, you are a true blogger. Most blogs update daily, some update three to four times a week; several bloggers do twice-daily posts in the first two to three months. Blogging consistently will ensure that you get crawled frequently; you get good marks from the algorithm for activity and people see you as a source of news for a particular topic. This means that they check you regularly and link to you.
The best part is that, as you write in volume, you will start ranking high for pretty niche keywords, because if you write frequently you will "accidentally" start writing on niche keywords. Some blog entries are 250 words; a lot are far shorter. Hundred-word posts are pretty common, though if you have a short post it's a good idea to put in a large picture or a podcast. Think of blog postings as snacks instead of full course meals.
Of course if you are like Developer Shed, with 1500 words or more per "post" (more like essays if you ask me), then you will probably get away with weekly updates. Note that each one gets divided into four pages (at least) so that's still a lot of volume for the spiders to crawl. Writing frequently can only be done if you are an expert in the topic on which you are writing, or if you have contributors who are experts. You also have to actually love the topic. Blog writing is intense, but it has a major pay-off at the end of the day.
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