Joy Victory wrote an article on the official WordPress blog entitled Five Ways To Get Featured on Freshly Pressed. What is Freshly Pressed, you ask? It is the WordPress.com homepage where about 12 dynamic, seemingly random, recently posted blog entries (by WordPress users only) are featured. It may seem trivial but, trust me, you want to be there.
Although it may seem so to some, these featured postings on Freshly Pressed are anything but random. They are carefully selected by the WordPress.com staff based on a certain set of criteria. Not coincidentally, this criteria is also the very same as what SEO experts recommend for getting picked up by search engines. And what online marketing professionals recommend for attracting an audience. And what pro bloggers recommend as good practice for quality writing.
How To Stand Out in a Crowd of 10,000,000 +
Here is the list of criteria, as per Victory (although perhaps reworded a little by yours truly):
How to Get a Snowballs Chance in Hell at Getting Posted on WordPress (and to get someone to actually read your blog, get picked up by Google, get Tweeted, dugg, Stumbled, etc, etc, etc.)
- Don’t steal other people’s work and don’t be a downer. Plagiarism is not cool and neither is being a hateful jerk. Be fresh, be fun and be positive.
- Post a Picture. Or a graph or a chart (See above). And if the image is not yours, try to give some credit where it is due.
- Tag your post. Many newbies or non-professionals (yes, there is such a thing as professional bloggers) forget to tag or do not tag properly. As an example, if you are posting about curing your dog’s snoring habit, a good tag might be Canine Snoring Remedies (at least I am assuming that would be a good tag), not I Hate You John Smith for Cheating on Me. Along the same lines, it is important to properly categorize your entries.
- Use the effing spell check! Spell check and then double check your work. Spell check is a marvellous tool. Yet even though I use it whilst writing all of my blog entries, I still manage to find a typo or two (usually after I have clicked the publish button, urgh). So believe me I know it is not easy to publish error-free work; it is worth the effort, however, because a typo-free post is will add credibility to what you have written.
- Write a captivating title. The title is arguably the most critical part of your blog entry because this is where you either catch a reader’s attention or you don’t. As important as it is to write an attention grabbing title, it is equally important to write a descriptive or pertinent title. As an example, if you are writing about your snoring dog cure, you might want to let readers know this instead of inserting the header I Hate You John Smith for Cheating on Me. My rule of thumb is to try to include a keyword in the title.
So these are the five rules of effective blogging…I mean getting featured on Freshly Pressed. Happy blogging folks and good luck at getting found online!
Find the above graph here. duh.