Here are my top seven lessons in blogging over the past year.

1.      The realization that to do it well takes time, much time. This may seem obvious but when I first began blogging I thought all I needed to do was to sit down at the computer and write. The challenge is the content. What I write on my blog will be for all the world to read and so I feel a responsibility to write about something important, something that I am passionate about and something that has substance for my overall emphasis on faith at work. So it takes time to think through the content, do the research to back up what I am saying and to present it well.

2.      If you want some attention paid to your blog, you need to pay attention to what others are writing and interact with them. You do this through trackback technologies. The key is that you MUST mention the blog you are tracking back from in your post otherwise it is not good form to put a link on their blog without in turn providing a link in your blog.

3.      It doesn’t hurt to get a little controversial. My most popular month was the one in which I was having a spat with the heresy hunters at Emergent No. You can read about it at this link.  Smacked by The Other Shoe of a Heresy Hunter

4.      Connect with what is going on in the wider culture. My most popular article last year was the one entitled It's not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you. This was the ‘take away’ line from the Batman movie that came out in May last year. I readily applied it to living one’s faith in the work context.

5.      Spice up the blog with something different. I have been using the ‘mouse over’ feature of html links that enables me to put a brief excerpt of the article I am linking to in the actual link. This way people can get an idea of what the link is all about before going there. You can try it be dragging your mouse pointer over the link to the articles above to see what I mean.

6.      Write your article in draft form on your desktop and then cut and paste it to your blogging software. I had several great entries I was working on that were lost in cyberspace when the ISP decided to upgrade their software just as I was about to post the article.

7.      Get a Free Tracker  or Hit Counter  from Site Meter or Extreme Tracker. These items sit in your side bar and track visitors to your site. They give you an idea of how people find you and what level of readership you have. These are important tools for evaluating the effectiveness of your blog.

I discovered that by using the Batman quote in the title of that article (see above) I had many visitors through Google to my site. These were presumably people who were searching for information on that quote. I could see this through the tracking service provided by Site Meter.

So, my New Year’s resolution for 2006 is to blog at least once a week. I know that blogging etiquette is that one needs to do it daily but I am reluctant to fall into the trap of the banal, so I think a reasonable goal is to aim for at least one article per week, but I hope to do more.  Have a great New Year everyone! Thank you for reading the Faith at Work blog!