Rules for bloggers

I've been blogging for over 5 years now. The first blog I ever read was political and I was working in politics at the time, so when I started blogging it was all politics all the time.

I soon left the world of politics with a bad taste in my mouth. For the next few years, I blogged a few times a month, but with no consistency, and the subject matter varied widely, from a video I made for my brother's wedding to an in-depth analysis of the actions of a Northern Minnesota county attorney. I debated giving it up a few times, but whenever I voiced that to anyone I was encouraged to keep going.

I've made a lot of mistakes along the way and thought it might be worth sharing a few rules I now try to follow since I decided last October to blog more regularly again. These are listed in no particular order (actually, the 5th is probably the most important).

1. Write like nobody's reading. This rule will cause most of you to ignore the rest of the rules. I guess that's okay. I ended my very first post with, "Let me hear your thoughts." No one ever commented on that post. I kept going anyway. When I became disengaged from politics, I quit blogging about it, moved to Minnesota and lost 75% of my readers as a result. While the direction of my blog underwent a major shift, the readers who stuck around have said they like it better now. And for those who care about the numbers, I now have more readers than when I was expressly political anyway.
2. Be kind. This doesn't mean you can't be passionate or denounce what you believe is wrong or enter into the fray of politics and religion. But write as though you're talking to a friend who disagrees with you on the subject. When you write about the politician or religious leader or neighbor or family member you dislike, write as if they're sitting next to you reading it. I've broken this rule before and it's not good.
3. Be consistent. You should set a course that maintains a fairly consistent pattern of frequency content. If your blog is political, stick to that. If it's photos, stay consistent. If it's random (like mine has become), at least make sense out of it. Jumping from a post on your favorite TV show's latest episode to a gardening tutorial to a scathing critique of your mayor may leave your readers a bit bewildered. Your readers are coming back because they like the content you've been posting. Changes will confuse them and cause them to abandon you. If you're going to change course (as I did in November 2006), at least communicate that to your audience.
4. Set expectations for your readers. Each blog post's title should help the reader decide if it's relevant to them. This is a tough balance to find, but reading your blog is one of many things people can spend their time doing. If your titles don't adequately reflect the content, it's tough for them to decide what's worth reading for them and what isn't, and they'll shut you out completely. Also, your blog's description or "About" section should be informative. My blog's subtitle description has evolved over the years. It began with "Unfair. Unbalanced. Uncommon Sense." It was a corny play on a well-known political news slogan, which set the tone for the content of the blog. When I abandoned an exclusively political tone I switched to "Thinking out loud since 2/11/2006." The current subtitle of "Daily brain dumps" is similar but includes an expectation of frequency. (I'm not a big fan of my current subtitle and will probably just use an "About" page for this info when I switch to WordPress.)
5. Respect your readers' time (and yours!). I like the way Jon Acuff put it:

   We'll say, "Well, they're just reading my blog or my Twitter feed, why should I worry about the quality or why should I be consistent with it?" The reality is it's free from a money point of view, but you're charging them the most expensive thing they possess: their time. ... So when you create whatever it is you create, create it understanding that this is going to be expensive for them. They're going to give me 30 seconds or 30 minutes that they'll never have back again.

   My goal is to post once a day at 6:45 AM. I came to that frequency and time based on what I thought my readers expected and what I could keep up with, but that frequency is different for every person based on their content and time commitments. If I happen to write a few posts in a day, I just schedule them to go out in the future. I don't want to bombard people with a lot of posts at one time, especially if they're longer posts. But if I don't have something worth writing, I'll let a day pass without a post. Yesterday I didn't post until 2:00 PM because I couldn't think of anything worth writing the night before, so I didn't write anything. It's not worth your time to publish something that doesn't matter or doesn't really interest you and it's not worth wasting your readers' time just to say you met your quota.

There are other rules but they are less significant to me. These are my 5 primary guiding principles.

What about you? Did I leave anything off this list? Do you disagree with any of the points here?