Here are my five tips for a new blogger who wants to catch on.

1. Name your blog well.

By “well” I mean informative, memorable, and search-engine-friendly. My blog name is grundyhome.com, which doesn’t mean squat to anyone else. But when I became serious about blogging, I decided a tagline was needed – “web marketing in higher ed.” Ideally, I would have started with a domain name that included some of these keywords in the URL itself.

2. Craft Good Blog Post Titles

Titles should accomplish three things:

Attract readers with an interesting title – a question (“How can you accomplish ______?”), a challenge (“Secrets of a Successful _______”), or a list (“5 Must-Do Tips for a New Blogger”).

Attract search engines by including keywords that you want associated with your blog. A blog about neuropsychology should have titles with keywords related to that field. Search engines put a lot of emphasis on the title of a page or post.

Be informative about the post content. If you wanted clicks, you could always just title your posts “the latest dirt on Lindsey Lohan!!!!1″ and some people would click through. But if your post is about peacebuilding in Africa, you’ll draw the wrong audience (and they’ll be disappointed, too).

3. Search-friendly URLs

Go to one of your blog posts and look at your URL bar at the top of the browser. If it looks like this…

http://example.com/?p=43

…then you’re missing an easy opportunity. For this post, my URL will be something like…

http://example.com/5-must-do-tips-for-a-new-blogger

…which includes any keywords that I made sure to include in my title. This is an easy thing on most blog platforms – it’s in your Settings area.

(In WordPress, it’s under Settings > Permalinks, and I always choose “Day and Name” or “Month and Name”.)

4. Keep Comments On, Comment Spam Off

Users who comment care enough to be engaged and influenced by your content. And conversations are the difference between a blog and a plain ol’ website. If you’re afraid of negative comments, you can configure them to require approval before they show up on the site. It’s not that much work, and the value is worth it.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of spammers trying to use your blog to their advantage and you’ll begin to see junk coming through your comments. Use Akismet to prevent spam – there’s a great Akismet plugin for WordPress to make it easy to use.

5. Full Content in your Feed

Most blogs offer the choice between publishing feeds with your full article content or just showing an excerpt (forcing users to click through). Many new bloggers think, “Great, people will have to click through to read the story!” The reality is far more depressing. Rather than reading your content because it’s conveniently flowing into their feed reader, they’ll read your headline and excerpt and move on. Don’t be so arrogant as to believe that users will click through.

What else should you know?

Whether or not you’re new to blogging, there’s always more to learn. Here are some resource I recommend for new bloggers:

• Getting Started with WordPress
• WordPress for Beginners
• If I had to Start My Blog Again

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Years ago, when I was running my own little web business, one of my clients was a car insurance company. We designed their website, but had inherited an online quoting system written in approximately 100,000 lines of terrible Perl code.

Every few months, my client would send me updates that required me (back in my programmer days) to dive into this horrendous tangle of if-then conditionals and half-assed subroutines. In short, it was a mess. But their business depended on it.

One day, I got a call from the president of the company. He accused me of holding their website hostage because I wouldn’t let their marketing person, Becky, update the quoting system. Becky was very nice and I’m sure she was quite good at her job, but she wasn’t technical and there was no reason she should be plunged into code. I tried to explain why this was a bad idea.

“You don’t think she’s smart enough?”

I pointed out that it was a specialized skill and I’d been programming for many years – and it was hard enough for me to do it.

“You don’t think she can learn?”

I grasped at straws. Knowing that he was a car collector and had a full-time mechanic on his staff (to work on their beautiful showroom of classic vehicles), I asked him,

“Would you ask her to work on the engine of your car?”

He immediately responded with an emphatic “hell, no.” From there it was easy to connect the dots and convince him it was in his interest to keep Becky out of the code and leave it to the professionals.

The right job, the right tools, and the right person.

Since then, I’ve learned a valuable metaphor. If you need to hammer a nail, chances are you can learn how to hammer a nail. If you need to cut down a tree, you might learn how to use a chainsaw. But it’s a lot more dangerous. You can hurt yourself. It only takes a small slip-up to do a lot of damage. And it certainly takes more training. At some point, it’s better to pay someone else to do it for you.

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Learn some of the terms, definitions, buzzwords, and otherwise confusing jargon related to usability with this handy usability glossary.

CollegeWebEditor has a great post about why it’s important to invite people into your usability testing process.

The entertaining and brilliant Steve Krug gives away sample testing scripts (PDF), consent forms (PDF), and even chapters of his book. Go check them out and then buy his books.

Steve’s latest book is all about DIY usability testing and it’s exactly what you needed.

Finally, if you haven’t seen my Ultimate Usability Testing Toolkit, that’s a good place to jump into the tools and tactics of DIY usability testing.

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A great comment on Andrew Careaga’s recent review of DIY U suggests this isn’t as easy as it sounds:

However (there’s always a however), I have a couple of concerns with the premise that students right out of high school can “cobble” together a meaningful education. A very motivated student possibly could, but I have my doubts when it comes to an average college student. We handhold them through orientation and class scheduling, advising, first year experience, etc. Can they really create an education on their own? I think age plays a big role, the average age of a University of Phoenix student is between 33 and 36, not 18. DeWayne Purdy

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Enterprise means “does everything”

Enterprise content management represents a $3 billion market, with major software players including IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and EMC. These companies offer robust systems that do many things, from web to search to email to document management. They are intended to own the breadth of services around content.

So how do these companies offer everything? They buy companies and glue them together. Or they build lackluster solutions and tack them on. The result is a mess of software that acts inconsistently, creates data islands, and often fails to keep up with more specialized competition.

Look at the separation of Google Analytics and Feedburner as a simple example: Google bought Feedburner and spent the next few years trying to integrate the authentication, migrate data, etc. So why can’t I link my Feedburner data with the rest of my Google services? Imagine tracking feed subscriber counts along with your Google Analytics data. This is a phenomenal opportunity for integration, but sadly these great services are on separate tracks.

Features means broad, not deep

Large institutions have a lot of differing needs. Because one tool does everything, it’s easy for customers to be fooled into believing that they can have one solution to many problems. This forces nearly every single user to compromise something for the sake of having a single tool. It might save money or time and it might be easier to support, but it doesn’t necessarily do the best job. It’s practically an institutional admission that we should sacrifice quality, innovation, or results for the sake of easier management.

An alternative is to use many different tools to accomplish many different jobs. There are two problems with this. First is the time spent searching for, evaluating, and selecting the right tool for the job (often by people unqualified or ill-informed to make these decisions) – and with no guarantee that they’ll end up getting the best option. This can be handled by selecting a small set of specialized tools that may serve a wider range of needs. The second problem is that of integration: enterprise content management is about eliminating redundancies, improving efficiency, and repurposing content. The answer? Interoperability.

Interoperability means duct tape

How easily can you push data in and out of a system without a manual (upload a CSV) process?

Software should not hold you hostage. In fact, software should be built with the realization that new services may pop up that the vendor didn’t anticipate. So rather than play catch-up all the time, software should have an API. In other words, it should allow for integration with outside software packages. Yes, this may be a custom job for many of the independent pieces of the software puzzle. But it’s what will allow your Development Department and the Admissions Office to have their own tools without forcing one or both to compromise on what’s critical to them.

Let’s imagine that Development (read: fundraising) needs a CRM tool to manage all the people in their system. Every phone call to a donor, letter to a prospect, etc. will need to be recorded and tracked. They’ll run reports by donor frequency, readiness to give, capacity, etc. It will probably include some donation processing mechanism. Meanwhile, Admissions wants to use a CRM to track every interaction with a prospective student, use workflow to manage an application, track yield rates, etc. While the overarching concept (CRM) is the same, the solution is not. Admissions has very different needs than Development, and any tool that claims to be perfect for one will likely be terribly frustrating for the other.

However, you may wish to store all of the actual people records – the names, contact info, etc. in a central database. Or you may wish to push all of the dollars into a single place for accounting purposes. Maybe you have a great email marketing tool that both offices could use. This is what we call integration (or interoperability, if you want to use a fancier-sounding term). A few well-placed software tools to glue these together could create a more functional and effective system than a single, all-things-to-all-people package from a major eCM vendor.

So what should you do?

Just because large enterprise products are expensive and aren’t necessarily the best at every little thing doesn’t mean they’re worthless. The reality is that you don’t need the best in every category, and the professional level of support is a very useful and attractive feature. But with a bit of vision, the right attitude towards software, and some creative engineering, you can cobble together your own vastly superior system.

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I’m loving the high-profile attention to the changes we’re experiencing in higher education, and the tremendous shifts coming our way. From DIY U to Frontline’s College Inc. to Seth Godin’s recent post, people are taking note.

But I’m also frustrated by a disconcerting trend: to play it off as a generation gap or “how to get through to kids by using technology.” As if this is all about helping old people get through to young people.

That’s bullshit. This isn’t about using Twitter in the classroom. It’s not about using video games for research. It isn’t about Millennials, Generation Y, Digital Natives, or any of the mildly derogatory terms for “kids these days.”

It’s about change on a massive scale driving all the way down to the micro level.

It’s about broken business models and finding ways to fund ourselves without creating more student debt.

It’s about revisiting all those sacred cows of academics and wondering if there’s a better way.

The higher education revolution is about embracing change, not just surviving it.

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After reading a thought-provoking article by Nikki Massaro Kauffman on privacy and digital tattoos I realized something:

I don’t want my work and my personal life separated.

Leaving Work Behind

I don’t know about you, but I can’t turn my brain off when I go home. Likewise, I can’t ignore personal obligations and interests during work hours. The result is a constant tension.

My aunt once worked for a paper company where dozens of people worked in complete silence, in cubicles, Any attempt at conversation was quashed immediately – if it wasn’t work-related, it was costing the company money. No personal email, phone calls, or internet use.

The result was a lack of relationships, both inside and outside of the company. People didn’t work together, which meant everyone was on their own to accomplish their work. Everyone seemed unhappy. It was easy to leave work behind at the end of the day.

Do you think these people worked hard? Did they go the extra mile? Were they motivated to make things better? Of course not. Some employees found ways to be even more inefficient so they wouldn’t have to work as hard. My aunt quit after several months of this, stressed out and dissatisfied.

Work Has to be Fun

Fun comes from a number of areas: the culture, the people, and environment, and the work itself. The culture must be supportive and forgiving.

In order to have happy, engaged, and motivated employees they have to enjoy what they do. The more you like something, the more you’ll do it. The more you do it, the better you’ll get. The better you get, the more you can get paid to do it.

Given how much of your life you’re going to spend working, shouldn’t you try to find work that you enjoy?

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