Lost Post Series: Posts that have otherwise been forgotten, accidentally deleted or blogged elsewhere are reposted here. Enjoy!

This is a repost from Blogging Charlatans: I re-read the original post and felt the content of this stood better as a single post than attached to that.

Five Values for Blogging: Learning, Voice, Authority, Integrity and Audience

So what should the budding blogger do to save their blog? Actually, it’s quite simple: I think there are five qualities that will ensure you do get back links, traffic, money, and whatever your definition of success is.

1. Learn to Write.

Sounds simple enough. But it’s amazing how many bloggers fail at this first hurdle. Learning to write is a skill that takes time, effort and practice to develop properly. Of course, your average Blog Your Way To Success PDF will not tell you how much of each you will need. It will take you much longer than you first suspect, certainly longer than you hope, and likely will end up being far longer before, as an accomplished blogger, you actually dare to call yourself a ‘good’ writer. I’m somewhere in the second stage right now, most likely nearer the beginning than the end. Where are you?

2. Find your voice.

That’s been the hard step for me. But finding a voice in the hundreds of millions of blogs out there with many blogging on similar themes as I do. How do I define my blog in relation to all the others? By finding my voice. A voice can be defined in so many ways, none of which are exclusive. Your voice could be your blog’s niche, or your blog’s choice of topics. It could be the way you treat your topic. Or it could even be the way you write about dull subjects and inject personality, enthusiasm, and a sense of humor. It could even be as simple as your posting schedule or mix of posts through the week. Have you found your voice yet?

3. Build your authority.

No, I really don’t mean anything to do with another of the web’s charlatan’s: Technorati’s Authority Measure. I don’t even mean ‘pagerank’. Neither of these is a measure of your authority, rather it’s a measure of their decision making vis-a-vis your blog and its readership. As such, it’s subject to arbitrary adjustments up, down and sideways. Your authority is your ability to be thought of as someone who has understanding, insight, learning or skill and which achieves a greater degree of respect from your readership. That is your authority: do people approach you for advice (as readers or as emailers) or help when they come across issues that you have faced?

4. Keep your integrity.

With many companies out their encouraging bloggers to blog for dollars, it’s easy to sacrifice all of these qualities that you need for a few dollars in your PayPal account. Very easy. There have been times when I have sacrificed my own integrity for a few dollars. I regret it now. Now, I don’t tailor reviews to advertisers’ whims and unspecified needs, I try to tell the story as I see it, I try to keep readers informed of my conflict of interests, I try to keep my words honest and pure. I still do reviews, I still do buzzes but I will not write something that is dishonest or shortsells my readers. Do you feel you sold your integrity?

5. Connect with your audience.

That’s always the hard part. Blogging, for me and many readers, started out as an expression of personal and private writing that somehow managed to garner a small audience. If I’m always caught up in my own little bubble, and it’s pretty easy for me living where I live, doing what I do and seeing things from an “Asian” or “European” perspective, I will fail to connect with my readers and their interests. I’m trying to remind myself that I should be striving to connect more with my readers, wherever they are. How do you connect with your readers?

While I can’t guarantee that these alone will lead you to success in blogging, I feel strongly that success in blogging without these values will be fleeting.

One of the reasons I pulled Entrecard from my blog before was because I couldn’t see its value, couldn’t see where it was going, couldn’t understand why things changed… Now it seems we’re all in for a new ride: EC has changed things AGAIN without providing any advance notice.

Any business needs a steady hand… If you don’t have a steady hand at the tiller, you get this situation: sudden changes to the system without notice, promises that go unfulfilled, new users barred, old ones excluded, parameters changed without notice, …

EC, this is why I dropped your card before from ALL my blogs; don’t make me drop you again! PLEASE.

Keep a steady hand, announce changes, keep people informed… I have still no idea why you did what you did. But one thing is sure: you depend on your users, not the other way around. If you didn’t have users, you wouldn’t have EC. And the web is littered with failed dot coms for the same reason.

So, try to respect your users, even if you disagree with them. Remember: you can disagree and say:”This is my website. We’re going to do things this way or that, please understand.”

But don’t do this. Don’t suddenly pull features, concoct half measures that don’t work properly, and treat your EC users like dirt.

If you treat us like this, then that is what you will get.

Kenneth

On a forum, one of the worst things that you can do to members is to reset the forums, remove all the posts or reassign privileges. It is the fastest way I know of to kill an entire community.

Take a look at the GeekySpeaky Boards to see what I mean. These boards have been around for over two years, but last year the owner cleaned out the forums, reset the users and set everything back to zero. It’s nearly a year later, and of 10,000 members, there are ONLY 436 articles.

A forum used consistently over a period of several years becomes a valuable source of wisdom, information, support and community among its users; a group of people who become involved and will give back to the community far in excess of any monetary gain they may have; and the SEO benefits of having a large inventory of posts, searched, stored and organised in Google bring residual traffic for years.

Unfortunately, all of this is user-contributed; and as such, they members become co-shareholders in the ‘community’. Their opinion counts, as does their support. To ride roughshod over users as EntreCard has done.

Other posts: EC founder fakes his own posts.

These days there are so many good blogging tools it’s hard to know which one to use. But there are three that are worth mentioning.

Qumana: a blog editor that allows you to use their adservice, too! Of the three tools I like, it’s the ONLY one available as a cross-platform blog editor!

BlogDesk: a simpler tool that I use for most blogging that I do. Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with Blogger at all. WordPress and Movable Type are fine.

LiveWriter: Of course, my favorite application is LiveWriter because it seems to be the most powerful. Unfortunately it isn’t supported on older installations of XP.

And for those who like integrated applications: Flock, which includes a browser, social media tools, and a blog editor in one package.