1) Name. Include a name that people can attach to you. It doesn’t have to be a real name, pseudonyms and nicknames are fine, but people like to have a name attached to authors. It’s a little awkward to refer to people by their blog title (unless, of course, their blog title happens to also be their nickname).
2) E-mail and other contact info. Make sure your e-mail is easy to find. If someone wants to get your permission to feature your work, interview you, or ask you to guest post, they need your e-mail to contact you. If you’re active on other websites that relate to your blog like Ravelry, don’t forget to include a link.
3) RSS Feed. You want it to be simple for people to follow your blog. Some browsers like Chrome don’t auto detect RSS feeds without a plugin so if you don’t link to your feed, people can’t find it to subscribe.
4) Useful Stuff. Use pages to highlight useful posts and your favorite posts. If you’ve taken the time to write useful content, don’t let it get lost in the archives amongst other old posts. Organized and link to that stuff in pages or your sidebar so readers can jump to it easily.
5) Old Posts. Your archives should be easily accessible. Be sure to have a “More” or “Older Entries” button, and put it at the bottom of the page. People who have read through a whole page of posts won’t want to scroll back to the top to get to more posts. An archive list broken up by date is also useful for readers who are looking for a specific post.
6) Home. When readers go back a few pages, they’ll want an easy way to get to the main page. Make sure that you can get to your main page by including a “Home” button and/or by making your header a link to the main page.
Are there any other must-haves for blogs you like to read?
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