Manila Freelancer

Shankar Ganesh lists 11 things that you should do as a blogger before you hit the publish button. I have a few more that I would like to add.

**Sleep on (some of) your posts. I have often done this to keep myself from making bad choices in publishing some items.

**This is more for after I post something. I strongly believe that edits are a necessity and should not be avoided. If I make changes to a post after it has been published, I mark my posts to display the changes clearly. It makes the message clearer and adds continuity to the “story”.

**Preview posts before publishing them. This is more true for blogs with active feeds and especially important for blogs that use Feedburner.

**Formatting and WYSIWYG are nice but it is also quite easy to go overboard. Make sure you are helping your reader understand your point of view and not vice versa. Remove unneeded formatting. Make sure your formatting is not breaking the structure of the blog. In addition, if your feed is easier to read than your main blog, you might want to take a closer look at your design.

I am not so sure that using the “read more” feature just to increase pageviews is a good idea. That feature has its own place in breaking up long posts but can be annoying to readers and is detrimental if not used with care.

What other things do you do before you publish your post? Are you obsessive compulsive about tags? Do you feel compelled to add lots of links? What would you suggest to other bloggers if you were asked?