Over the last couple of weeks I’ve started to understand why John Chow runs such a popular site. In amongst all the gaming of Google, Digg, Technorati, Alexa etc basically any site that does ranking (and to be honest John does most of it for fun, to prove that it can be done) John puts together some great posts.

John Chow’s latest post is called The Seven Habits Of Highly Successful Bloggers (there’s your anchor text John!). This great post puts together some great tips for improving the quality of your blog. Just about all of these habits hit the right spot for me. The seven habits of good bloggers are:

1. They Blog On A Consistent Basis
2. They Are Passionate About Their Topic
3. They Interact With Their Readers
4. They Give Out Lots Of Link Love
5. They Know How To Bran Themselves
6. They Are Good Writers
7. They Read John Chow dot Com

For anybody who wants to grow their readership, Blogging On A Consistent Basis and Being Passionate are the most important in my view. I’ve been blogging for two years and I think the biggest mistake I made was not keeping my blog active during most of 2006, which meant I lost a lot of readers, who haven’t returned. I also as John recommends try to post at a regular frequency, which for me is everyday. Yes I miss the occasional day, but not often enough for my readers to notice.

Being passionate for me is easy, as I tend to blog about what interests me, rather than what I think will get me the most traffic or the best ads. I tried doing that with a new experimental blog, but it never got off the ground as I wasn’t genuinely interested in posting about Microsoft’s next operating system, even though in 1-2 years time the site could have been huge if I built up the links now. I also work in the sector which means I would be reading the same feeds, even if I wasn’t blogging. I constantly find it funny when someone at work sends me a ‘hot’ link or is panicking about something they’ve just read, and I have to tell them that the story broke a few days/weeks ago, and it’s old news or no longer interesting!

I’m a big believer in Number 4, Giving Out Lots Of Link Love. My regular readers know that I try as best I can to read their sites and link to their posts. I’m tired of sites that only link to the big sites all the time, or always try to suck up to people like Scoble in every other post, hoping that they will get a link back.

One of my pet hates at the moment is also sites that don’t credit where they get their topics from. There’s one particular site that most of you read that will remain nameless, that for a few weeks was totally ripping off the format and posts of nearly every post on one of my sites, without ever giving credit. I even knew that it wasn’t an accident, as everyday their MyBlogLog avatar would be displayed! In fact, almost everyone of its posts are ‘borrowed’ from other sites, without giving any link love. Because of this I will never link to that site ever again, as I think it is bang out of order.

If you had to add to John’s list, what would you add? What tactics have you seen employed by blogs that make you return, or make you vow to never return?

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