Blog Etiquette and Rules Of Engagement

Applying good manners and protecting yourself while blogging which for the sake of this post I have called Blog Etiquette and Rules Of Engagement .

1. When posting remember that your words may well be read by anybody and everybody and if you say things you may regret later they will still be available even if you delete them ( there are archiving tools which keep old copies of your page ) if your not sure post something and edit and change , and then look at Google's cache of the page often it is the original version

2. Over a period of time be careful how much information you put up about yourself for example
You may say in one post you live in a converted barn on 2 acres and in another post talk about local area high school Elkhorn , in a different post you may talk about getting a new Dodge Truck .

Now if we put the information from those 3 posts together
Elkhorn, Converted Barn, Dodge Truck the chances are you could be found quite easily .

I know of somebody who was in the process of bankruptcy and when they arrived in court the lawyer had traced a number of posts she had placed on her blog about things she had bought and owned and used it in court against her because she had not declared them as assets on her paperwork.

Also remember that we all do things as kids in School or College we think are funny or cool at the time as we get older we realize how dumbarse we were and they could affect a professional career at a later date, plus what we thought was pretty cool could provide major embarrassment as we get older.

3. Always use a spell checker it looks so much more professional and most blogging platforms do have spell checks built in.

4. Try to make the post easy to read and understand even if you have to go back and edit and change it.

5. If somebody takes the time to comment on your post , please post a reply to their comment and make them feel you appreciate the time they took to place a comment.

6. Also take the time to go out to their blog if they have one and make a comment on one of their posts.

7. When going out to a blog to leave a comment take the time to go back to see if the blogger has replied to your comment

8. Comments from spammers or those just posting comments on your blog to gain traffic.
This is difficult and left up to each bloggers personal discretion but my advice is if comments have links in them just delete and do not post or you will encourage others, but if the link provides a great resource related to that post and will be good for other readers of your blog allow it.

9. Blocking comment spammers . I always turn on Captcha if you have it available turn it on ( stops or least slows down automatic comment spamming ) . My own personal view is to turn on comment moderation so post only appears after you have approved but up to personal view.

10. Never post your email address without some protection against email harvesters , I use a form run by an outside company for contacting me for exactly that reason , but another option is to have your email address as a graphic , there are a number of other options javascript etc. etc.


I have decided to leave the question of blog roll links until a later post as there are very specific ways you should and should not try to get other blogs to link to you and what makes your decision to link to another blog