1. Keep it short. Five to seven paragraphs is plenty. People are busy so cut to the chase. Trim, tighten, cut the fat. Offer the best advice in the least space. Let them get in, read your words, digest them and move on. Don’t make them skim or they’re likely to leave without reading – or ever coming back.
2. Include pictures. People are visual. Include artwork and photos to grab attention and highlight your article.
3. Link to other blogs. Use links to other blogs to contribute to your article and show that you know what you’re talking about. Prove you’ve researched your topic and have something valuable to add.
4. Stay on topic. Rambling posts are a turn off.
5. Use bullet points and section headings.
6. Use smaller paragraphs and make sure there’s plenty of white space to keep people reading.

A new study reports that blogs influence purchases more than social networks.

While I’m not sure how accurate that is, it does make me wonder where authors pick up the majority of their readers. Do blogs really influence readers? Do book reviews and recommendations matter? Do social networks help at all? I know of readers and authors who’ve told me that they (or their readers) have purchased because of networking on myspace. And the same is true for blogs. I’ve had plenty of readers buy because of the reviews and information they find on the catanetwork sites.

So how do you know where to spend your time? Good question. Unfortunately, we may never know the answer.

I recently visited an author’s website (an author I’ve known and respected for years) and at the bottom of the site there’s the standard “do not copy without written permission” but there was also “ask for permission before linking to my website.”

My jaw dropped a bit when I read that.

Repeat after me folks, link backs are not a bad thing.

In fact, you should be on your hands and knees begging for link backs. You should be actively collecting reciprocal links, writing articles to direct traffic to your site, leaving smart comments on blogs, and anything else (legal) you can think of.

Take it one step further and provide text and icons for others to link back to your site. Include a link to a page of that information titled Link to Us, so that others will know what to look for.

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One method websmasters use to fight spam is the no follow attribute on links. Basically what this does is tell search engines not to follow that link essentially killing all search engine crawling and indexing of that site.

This makes your site less attractive to spammers.

The problem is, it doesn’t work. Spammers still spam sites who use no follow. Most of the time spam bots don’t even seem to notice if the site uses no follow or not. If you’re using a system like wordpress, akismet works really well. And other blog systems have other spam options that help a lot.

So if it doesn’t stop spam, what’s the point? That’s a good question. The only outcome I can see is that you’re hurting the people who visit your site and make legitimate comments. You’re denying people who participate on your site from receiving any kind of kick back or better search engine ranking.

Something to note: if you use wordpress and want to disable the no follow feature, there’s a plugin called DoFollow that does an excellent job.

For the record: the catanetwork and Pixelware Design are removing nofollow attributes from our sites. If you take the time to post a good comment, you should be rewarded, not punished. So comment at will!

Trying to build your Facebook fan page? Boost your exposure by leaving thoughtful comments on blogs and using your facebook address where it asks for a website address.