Or, how not to annoy your readership!

Jennifer Slegg, of JenSense offers tips on how to help keep your blog neat and clean for a better user experience, longer-term readership and consistent revenues.

I have a huge number of blogs in my RSS reader. But while I may not read all of them daily, at the very least I’ll skim the headlines. But when it comes time to clean house, why do some blogs make the cut, while others I send to RSS exile?

Looks Count
Yes, call me vain, but looks count. You have to be writing some pretty spectacular blog entries for me to keep reading a blog that is supremely ugly, uses a design that breaks in certain browsers, uses a trendy but hard-to-read font face, or uses the “out-of-the-box” blog design with zero customization (if it still says “Just another WordPress blog,” you are on shaky ground). Jeremy Zawodny could change his background to migraine-inducing black, change the logo to some hideous dripping blood goth design, make the text lime green with hot pink links, and I’d still read it. But for some blogger who might post a single gem every other month? RSS exile it goes.

Don’t Hit Me Over the Head with Ads
Yes, we all want to monetize our blogs. But I get easily annoyed when I see the blog entry title, then one (or even two!) 336 x 280 ad units before I see a single word of the actual entry. True, a placement that is in your face may get more clicks initially, but the drop in traffic from annoyed readers dumping your blog will result in lower ad impressions and earnings. If you have your heart set on that placement, change it to a banner instead, and save the large rectangle for the juicy spot after the entry but before the comments.

Use RSS Ads Smartly
If you use RSS ads, give the entire entry in the RSS feed, and not just a snippet. Or better yet, offer me a choice of either an ad-supported full entry feed or an ad-free snippet-only feed.

Write Regularly
We are all guilty of allowing a week or two go between entries. Sometimes there is nothing newsworthy to report, or we are busy with clients (or vacations!) But once you allow a couple weeks to go by without an entry, people start to wonder if maybe your blog has joined the thousands of other defunct blogs cluttering the net. So have a few entries ready to go for times when life interferes. And if you know you are going to be busy, have a few entries set to future publish every few days while you are away to give the illusion of an active blog even if you are really at Disneyland.

While some of these tips seem obvious, trust me when I say that many a blog has gone to RSS exile because they commit one, two, or yes, even all of these faux pas. So do some housecleaning to get your blog ready for the holiday season, and ensure that your blog doesn’t get exiled the next time a reader decides which blogs are worthy enough to make the cut, and which ones will end up on the RSS cutting room floor.

—Jennifer Slegg