Watch your p's and q's

If you consider yourself enough of a writer to have a blog, you should be enough of a writer to care about the words you use and the sentences you use and the paragraphs you use.

Polish the piece as though you were going to submit it to a magazine or a newspaper for them to consider for publication.

Make sure the sentences flow, that they are clear, that they communicate what you want to say. Watch for spelling errors that are not detectable by spell-checker programs.

Make each post not only a post worth reading but also one that is a pleasure to read.

Stay on topic

Choose a topic for each blog post and stay with it. Make sure the title reflects the content. If you want to describe how useful you find a new application you have just discovered for your personal digital assistant, it is not necessary to meander into explaining why you bought the particular PDA you did. Save that for another post.

The nice thing about the Internet is that you can always add another entry on a related subject, and you can even link it back to this one if you want to. The shorter and more to the point each post is, the better. Your readers will learn to trust that you are going to talk about what you said you would talk about, and then let them move on--and if you do that for them consistently, you will keep them coming back.