Seven Habits to Learn from Successful Bloggers

David Deleon Baker reports:

"Hitting Publish to push your post out to wherever it lives on the Internet is far from the final act of blogging...Tweet the link to your post. Share it with your Facebook friends...Go where you socialize online, and tell those people. Don’t just throw the link to your new blog post at them and consider your effort a success, though. Here’s an important word: relevance. Ingrain it into your objectives for blogging. Why is clicking on the link to your post important to the people you’re sharing it with? Give them a reason to click...[A]lways ask for feedback. If you give this some thought before you start the effort, it should take you only about 10 to 15 minutes to accomplish...[M]aximize the room you have to lay out the premise for your blog post by running it through a URL shortener. Not only does it economize character usage, [but] it also serves as a way for you to track clicks and shares of the post’s link...Select the top keyword phrase matching the topic of your blog post, and make sure that this chain of words has been integrated into your title, URL, meta description, and tags...[T]he post will be easier to find in search engine results. WordPress users, I highly recommend the free WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, which makes it painless to find a focus keyword. That’s probably enough. But if you really want to drill down, you’ll want to spend some time on keyword research...If you don’t actively use sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon, forget about them. Unless you are a frequent participant on those sites and have a track record of sharing content other than your own, posting your own blog URL will just get you ignored...You’ll probably have older, related posts on your blog that add relevance to the new post. Find them. If you’ve used tags and keywords appropriately, this is as easy as doing a search of your blog...[P]rimarily, this exercise provides an easy way for your readers to find other posts related to what they’re reading...Do a quick online search for the top results on your post’s keyword phrase. Go to the highest ranked two or three blogs and leave a comment on the post. Warning: Fake reciprocity runs afoul of the objective of this exercise. Don’t waste your time if you’re not going to add relevance. The reason you’re doing this is to offer a new angle or insight not seen in the post, which your new blog post does cover. Readers of that blog will visit yours by following the link. More important[ly], the author of that blog might just become a reader and in turn add more reciprocal links to your blog...[T]he payoff is worth the time invested...Look through your contacts and identify at least one person you believe would truly find the subject of your new blog post helpful and interesting. Send that person a personal message. Don’t forget to include the link. If it does actually help the reader, he or she will likely share the link."