The #1 Rule of Blogging

Someone on a mailing list I'm on was interested in setting up a blog for her business and went looking for advice about what to do. My response to her was that there was only one thing that really mattered.

Be interesting.

Oh, sure, there are lots of technical details to explore and lots of decisions to be made about which blogging platform to use, what theme to use, whether to use partial or full feeds, whether to write long posts or short posts, etc. etc. If you want to know more about these kinds of things, read ProBlogger and Copyblogger. I can only bow to the masters.

But the #1 Rule of Blogging, the “one to rule them all”, is to be interesting:

• Be interesting to prove that you're human, not just some bot that mashes and reposts other people's content.
• Be interesting to incite readers to revisit, because usually you only get one chance to make a good impression. (It's kind of like dating.)
• Be interesting to communicate, because Lord knows it's hard for anyone to pay attention when they're bored.
• Be interesting to reach your readers on an emotional level, in a way that dry recitations of facts (“Hey, let's publish our press releases to the blog!”) and obviously overhyped sales material (“It's the best thing since sliced bread!”) can't and don't.

Perhaps the best reason to be interesting, though, is that it makes the world a more interesting place. And I'd argue that a more interesting world is a better world.

Don't create yet another boring business blog. Be interesting because you don't have a boring business blog. Ideally that means having an interesting business blog, but if you can't manage that then just don't have a blog!