Things to do on your blog

1. Enable search on your blog

Again, search should be a standard feature for any website. Your blogging provider would normally provide the feature. You just have to find out how to enable it for your blog.

2. Link to your profile

Write up your introduction "elevator pitch" and link it from your blog. People want to know who you are. Celebrity bloggers can ignore this comment :)

3. Provide a way to contact you

Other than posting comments on your blog, provide a way (email, phone or both) for your readers to connect with you. I have made quite a few new friends from all over the world.

4. Create meaningful categories and chunk content

Very soon you will have a lot of content on your blog and your readers will get confused where to go. One option is to create meaningful categories and file content appropriately. That will be a great service for your readers.

5. Put your photo on the home page

Blog is a conversation that you are having with your readers and it becomes more personal with a photo.

Things to do off your blog

1. Register a domain name and redirect it to your blog It costs less than $10 per year but the return on investment is huge.

2. Include your blog link in your email signature Again, it takes only a minute but it will help spread the message quickly.

Registries and Directories

1. Get a creative commons license for your blog content
Creative Commons makes it easy to assign a license for your online content. I use a license called "Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0"This means (in english)You are free to* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work* to make derivative worksUnder the following conditions:* by Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

2. Get a feedburner account and direct feeds through feedburner
Most probably your blogging software will automatically provide an RSS feed capability. However, chances are that you may not be able to track how many readers are subscribing (and how they are subscribing) to your feed. By burning your feed via feedburner, you can get those statistics. Again, it only takes a few minutes to setup a free account on feedburner.

3. Implement subscription chiclets
People use variety of RSS readers and you want to make it easy for them to subscribe to your feed from those RSS readers. Feedburner provides scripts to create those subscription chiclets. I suggest that you should take a look at the available options and add those chiclets to your blog site.

4. Claim your blog on technorati
By registering yourself at technorati and claiming it, you have an ability to put your photo with your profile. When people search for stuff on technorati and your blog comes up in the search results your thumbsize photo appears with the search result. Every single thing helps.

5. Provide email subscriptions to your blog
You will be amazed how many people want to read your blog via their email. It's easy to set that up. You can get a script to do that by registering at Feedblitz.

6. Link to your photo album
If you have an online photo album with a service like Flickr, put in a link to that as well.

7. Announce your blog to the world
The first thing that you can do is to use a service like Pingomatic to ping a few servers. Of course, best would be to write compelling content that would make others link to your site.

8. Link to your online bookmarks
If you have an account with del.icio.us and are tracking some interesting websites, you can link to your bookmark page.

9. Validate your feeds
Simple way is to subscribe to your own feed in your RSS readers. Other way is to use FeedValidator to check if everything is OK

10. Geo-tag your blog
Feedmap provides a simple way of associating your physical co-ordinates (city, zip) to your blog. As more people sign up for this service, your blog will appear in the "bloggers nearby" for your neighbours blogs.

11. Claim your blog at Feedster
You claimed your blog at Technorati. Now, please go ahead and claim it in Feedster as well. If you do well, you might even get into the feedster elite club "Feedster Top 500" :) You can add an icon or your photo to personalize the search results

12. Register your blog at Findory
Findory aggregates some of the finest blogs and they recommend content based on users' interest. So if a user is reading an article in another blog that has similar content, he or she may be presented with your blog to consider reading.

13. Register at Blogwise
Blogwise is a directory that is created manually by a bunch of cool folks. You can submit your blog for inclusion and someone over there will add it to the directory if they find the content appropriate. You can check out the listing for Life Beyond Code and may be leave your comments on this blog there.

14. Register in the TTLB ecosystem
TTLB (The Truth Laid Bear) eco-system ranks blogs by links.

15. Register at Blogarama
Blogarama is another manually moderated registry.

16. Get Clustrmaps for your blog
Show visitor count and the regions from where the visitors are coming

17. Enable MyBlogLog click tracking
MyBlogLog is really cool. It takes about 2 minutes to implement on your blog and provides real-time tracking (Pro Version) of user behavior (where did they come from and where did they go) on your blog.

18. Publish your conversations from other blogs to your blog via CoComment
Succeeding in blogging requires participating in conversations. How do you bring all your conversations in one place? Well, CoComment has an answer via their Firefox plugin.
Selected blog posts on..well, blogging

May 2006: 11 ways to kill your blog
This is very common among many things in life - its easy to start but hard to maintain. As a bonus its easy to kill - character, reputation, trust, integrity - the list can go on.Add blogging to this list as well. It's easy to start, hard to maintain but reasonably easy to kill.

Jan 2006: 11 Ideas to maintain your blog
One thing is to start a blog. That's easy. But how can you maintain one?

Jan 2006: Open Source and blogging; We can change the game
There is a need to get more quality bloggers into the blogosphere

Jan 2006: Why you can't ignore blogs?
Blogs, I think, provide the fastest way to understand the current reality globally

Nov 2005: One more reason why you MUST focus on creating GREAT content
Content is still the king!

Oct 2005: I started a blog; now what?
Key message: Blog is not your brand!

Aug 2005: Building blog traffic - Blog Business Summit
Notes from a seminar led by Dave Taylor and Robert Scoble at the Business Blogging Summit
Check your progress

Blog popularity and ranking is only ONE way to check your progress. Here are some resources to do just that

Check your alexa ranking
Alexa ranking is skewed in the sense that it is only restricted to people that have downloaded the alexa toolbar. Even than, its a reasonably good indicator

Marketleap's Link Popularity Check
You can compare your blog's popularity with three other websites

Check PubSub sitestats
PubSub provides LinkRanks for upto 60 days

Check your blog $shares value
Blogshares is a fantasy market where every blog is equivalent to a stock. Your blog may already be listed there. Check out the value there.

Search results count on google
May sound too simplistic. The number of search results for your blog name is still one indicator of the popularity.

Check Page Rank for your site
If the site ranking is less than six, you got some work to do :)