Keeping it Professional

One of the most difficult challenges you will face with developing a blog for your business is keeping it professional. The word, “professional,” may conjure up all sorts of different definitions, but I am referring to more than how the blog looks, although that is an important element. I am referring to the way the blog actually functions.

The more you blog, the more tips and tricks you are sure to learn, such as the tags that work best for your readers, the best placement for ads and widgets, popular subjects, etc. However, what makes a blog professional requires a bit more looking and effort. Think of it like learning a new language. At first, you communicate with basic words and sentences (the basic blog) and, as you get more comfortable, your speech relaxes and you use the words you know better (experience). However, if you never attempt to learn advanced tenses and different words (advanced blogging), you will never be fluent in the language (successful).

Successful blogs are professional blogs; they have good design and stellar functionality. To increase the professionalism of your blog, consider the following adding the following elements.

- SPAM PREVENTION: Professional blogs have a minimal amount of spam comments, if any. The reason is not that they have a team of bloggers constantly monitoring comments. Rather, it is because of clever plug-ins that take care of the issue, such as Akismet, a WordPress plug-in that monitors comments for spam and blocks them with over 99 percent accuracy, or Spam-free, a plug-in that captures automated comments.
- SPEED: Professional blogs are also fast. This is not because of a super computer locked in someone’s basement; it is due to facilities that create static pages of the blog, such as the WP Super Cache plug-in, so that the time it takes to load a page is reduced by over 60 percent.
- SITE MAPS: Professional blogs have site maps that are updated in tandem with the blog’s content as well. This is done through the use of an XML Sitemap plug-in (i.e. Google XML Sitemap) that automatically updates the sitemap when content is updated.
- SEO: Additionally, professional blogs are optimized. When one of your readers tells his friends what an amazing blog he found, you want that friend to be able to find your blog easily just by the name. In order for that to happen, you need to make sure that your blog is optimized for that.
- SEARCH: Lastly, professional blogs have stellar search and navigational capabilities. Think of the best blogs you have read; they tend to have easy-to-read searches, solid tag categories, and the ability to search by the most popular blog posts, the newest posts, etc.

The most amazing part about these elements that make your blog rise from hobby to professional vehicle are that they are, for the most part, free. You can include these elements in your blog by using downloads that are available free-of-cost from the designer’s website or via the plug-in menu from your blog’s dashboard. Just like the language example, it only takes a small amount of time and effort to learn something new to enrich your language or blog. So, why not? Your readers will thank you for it.