How to (& how not to) design the dynamics of your professional blog

Having considered yesterday the ins and outs of how your professional blog can look (based of a case study of, well, this one :o) today’s instalment is looking at the dynamics of your blog… in particular how you can use RSS, comments, email and more to engage your blogging (& those who just find you) readership.

First up a favourite of mine… comments. Ever since my blogging salad days of Radio I’ve been yearning for a simple ’subscribe to comments’ function which allows people to get an email when someone else posts a comment on a feed and well, my dreams have been more than answered by the WordPress subscribe to comments plugin. Now not only can people simply subscribe but they can even subscribe without posting.

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The significance to me here is that it turns a ‘bulletin board’ where you post and go away into a conversation where you can really get to the meat of the discussion. You more discussion you have the more you know, the more you know and the more comments on the post, the more valuable that post is and the more other people engage with it the more likely you’ll get links. Subscribe to comments is a very very good thing!

I’ve also put ’subscribe to comments’ default as ‘on’… this feels a bit sneaky but might work out well, will see how many people I annoy!

Next… RSS. Now, I choose to use my own RSS feed rather than run it through feedburner because:

a. I’m not going to be putting in any ads to the feed, it’s all one big ad for me.
b. I like to have control of the feed… lose that / feedburner has problems and I’ve lost all the subscribers. Not. A. Good. Thing.
c. I’ve got plenty of trust in how WP handles my feed.

Also, I’ve chosen to provide only extracts through the feed… a tough choice as I really want to provide full content. But, again I’m after comments / involvement and the most likely way to get that is to have people getting engaged at the actual blog (which they won’t be if they just use a reader).

Now you could argue that this might also meant that people are less likely to write and link about you on their blog… but I don’t reckon there is that is that much of an impact there.

Granted, this might annoy some purists but, to be honest, as the number of feeds I read has grown I’ve actually ended up *choosing* summaries rather than full feeds…

Finally… email. With incorporated subversion I am very much blogging, it is definitely not a news service… much more a place for opinion, rants, ideas and general ’stuff’. However, this is certainly aiming at being more than that, instead this is ‘information’ that I hope people will find valuable, engaging and of use. The weekly email newsletter will hopefully help with that.

I’m using notifylist because it’s so reliable and effective and the plan is to publish summaries of ‘key’ articles on a weekly basis so that, again, people will come over and comment and experience the site.

So… I think I’ve got bases covered in that area. Am still not sure about whether my summaries are the right size and feel like playing with WP a bit to try and make my RSS summaries a bit bigger. Also I need to get some branding in my feed, but apart from that I can’t think of much else?

Do you reckon I’ve got it right?