Learn 17 lessons for Successful Blogging

The best teacher in life is experience. This is also true in blogging as successful bloggers have their fair share of success and failure experiences. New bloggers like me do not have the kind of experiences they have. But we can be smarter, we can learn from their experiences.

Those who do not learn from others or from their own experiences miss the fullness of life and invite so much unnecessary misery. If you want to be successful in blogging you need to learn from successful bloggers. And if you want to be more successful you need to learn from the mistakes of successful bloggers.

So what's the highlight of today's post? It's the blogging experiences of Online Marketing Blog as they learned the ins and out of blogging in their over 3 years of existence. Here are the 17 leasons they learned from blogging:

1. Blogging has been their single most effective marketing initiative.
2. Blogs can serve as a very effective platform for connecting online social networks and offline interactions.
3. One of the most effective ways at getting into the media is to become the media in your industry via a blog.
4. Finding your "blog voice" is important. People will visit and interact with your blog based on whether your regular communication patterns resonate with them or not. If you're all over the board, you'll hold some people for a while, but not long.
5. A rushed blog post that is not well thought out can quickly cause the wrong kind of attention or misinterpretation.
6. As your blog grows in popularity (RSS subscribers and visitors via links and search engines) the more you have to lose or gain with the quality of your posts.
7. The whole transparency thing is great in theory, but is only as effective as your ability and willingness to articulate.
8. Don't do it all on your own. Invite guest bloggers and include other bloggers from your company.
9. Don't blog when you're mad, really tired and especially not if you've been out on the town.
10. Blogs can be excellent conduits to connections and friendships with people that you may never meet in person.
11. Blogging is forever. Once you hit publish, it's out there. There's no taking it back.
12. The feedback loop to blogging can get addicting and like other addictions, can have serious side effects. Consuming a large part of your productive and free time without a corresponding return on effort is one of those side effects. These effects can be abated by having a clear blogging strategy and following blogging guidelines.
13. Blogs can be exceptional tools to boost visibility on search engines as well as social media channels.
14. Poorly configured, badly optimized and infrequently updated blogs are nothing more than spam magnets.
15. It's just as important, and maybe more, to link out from your blog as it is to get incoming links.
16. Widgets and plugins can be very effective if not necessary enhancements to default blog configurations that will assist in building community, making administration easier and for blog optimization.
17. Online Marketing Blog has been a very effective tool for building credibility and opening doors to connections with search engines and people in the search marketing industry that would otherwise might not have happened.