Legal Marketing & PR

 Blogs have been around for a decade so there are a lot of great blogs out there and a well-established community to learn from. 

Lots of newcomers are entering the blogosphere, and ya'll are welcomed with open arms. However, there are some things that newbie (or noob) bloggers do or don't do that a) make their blogs less usable or b) scream "we don't know what we're doing!" 

So to spare newish bloggers some embarrassment, I've compiled this list of signs that they may lack appropriate participation in the blog community:

?    Comments are disabled (in my opinion, this disqualifies it from being a true blog)

?    No outbound links in the posts

?    No blogroll in the sidebar

?    No indication of who the author is or about the author link/page

?    Too many or duplicative category names, or no categories set up (10-15 is good number)

?    Underlining of text that isn?t a link

?    Walls of text with no subheadings and paragraph breaks

?    Corporate speak, or text that seems "sanitized" by the PR department

?    Approved comments that are obvious spam

?    Calling their blog post a ?blog? instead of a "post" (e.g. ?in the blog that I wrote yesterday?)

?    White text on a black background ? this is not readable! It hurts the eye.

?    Using Blogger.com but not removing the Blogger logo at the top of the professional firm?s blog

?    Ending posts with ?For more information call or email me? or similar pitch. They won?t. That?s not how blogs work.

More ?signs? that a blog is amateur were contributed by my Twitter and Facebook friends:

?    Infrequent updates (Ginger Lewis @Ginger_Lewis, Andrew Rose @NadenLean, and Jason Blumer @JasonMBlumer)

?    Blog features Google Ads (Susan Cartier Liebel @scartierliebel)

?    Internal focus versus external focus (Ed Kless @edkless)

?    Relying on memes instead of creating original content (Robin Wheeler @poppymom)

?    Minutia?quantity over quality can help develop the blogging habit but writing about minute details of life without going deeper screams amateur (Robin Wheeler @poppymom)

?    No clear relationship/brand beyond the blog, itself (Langston Richardson @matsnl)

?    There is no RSS feed (Ginger Lewis @Ginger_Lewis)

?    Links are broken (Susan Gorham @susangorham)

?    Typos (Susan Gorham @susangorham)

?    Consistently poor grammar and spelling (Debra Helwig @dhelwig) who elaborates: ?If you can't take the time to proofread, or have someone check you, how can I believe you'll be careful when you do work for ME??

?    Asking to swap links?gotta earn that (Robin Wheeler @poppymom)

This list is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Social Media Strategies for Professionals and their Firms.