Do you blog to promote your ADR practice?
If so, I highly recommend John Thomas’ Common Weblogging Mistakes. His advice is sound and simple to incorporate into your blogging work.
Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.
Tammy: Thanks for a great link. While all these mistakes detract from what you are trying to accomplish with a blog, I feel a critical mistake was omitted. On many blogs I have looked at there is a button or link that reads “Next blog”. I wonder how many mediators have looked to see what the next blog is. I was surprised that on several occassions the next site was a porn site or another inappropriate site. Being new to blogging, I had assumed the “next blog” would be some what related to the topic at hand. Not knowing much about blogs and how they are created and hosted, I don’t know how much control people have over this problem. Perhaps, the next blog is simply random. Sadly the wrong “next blog” is not going to help your professional image.
Tim, thanks for raising this. I think what you’re seeing is a feature of the free blog site, Blogger.com. Maybe other free sites do it, too. In return for letting users create and host blogs for free, they create automatic links to “next blog” and users can’t control what comes up next. It’s not really a blogging mistake, per se, since it’s beyond the blogger’s control. This is one of the reasons (and I’ll talk about this more in my upcoming mini-series on blogging) that I recommend avoiding free blogging platforms for business blogs.