This Blogging STRUCTURE post is a part of “2 Weeks To Launch Your Blog“.

Setting Up Your Blog For Maximum Effectiveness

Unless you are blogging purely for your own record-keeping, or for a very small, closed group, you are likely to want more readers to follow your blog.

And even if only a small group become readers, it is to your advantage to have them interact with you. By structuring your blog to encourage reader involvement, you can achieve this target easily.

Here are some ways to do it:

1. Invite comments

Most blogging software includes a way to let readers post comments on your blog posts. Set it up to require moderation before publishing and you’ll ensure only highest value content finds a place on your blog.

2. Link to a forum

At the end of each post, you can invite readers to discuss it on an online forum where interactivity may be higher because people can post and respond to other’s posts, generating a conversation.

3. Use social bookmarking links

By displaying a link to Digg.com or Del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites, you will make it easier for blog readers to spread the word by adding your post to their preferred bookmarks - which are then shared with other readers of those services.

4. Solicit guest contributions

It’s what I’m doing here with this blog, asking you to contribute your favorite tips on blogging strategy and tactics that have helped you launch a blog quickly and easily in 2 weeks.

5. Run a poll or survey

A quick and easy way to find out what your readers want to hear about is to conduct a short survey or run a poll on your blog. There are many serices offering a readymade solution to plug into your blog.

6. Rate your posts

Another way to judge audience reaction is to have them vote for or rate your blog posts, indicating which ones they found most interesting, useful or irresistible.

7. Position your ads

Web surfers have preferred clicking patterns that are remarkably similar, and by positioning your ads and ‘pay per click’ income streams where they are more likely to get clicked will enhance your results from them. For instance, placing Google Adsense ads right in the middle of your blog page, and at the end of a blog post have been known to outpull other locations.

8. Use graphics and design elements

Planning and carefully selecting the right kind of graphic and design elements can ensure more visitors to your blog are driven to take the action you want them to.

9. RSS buttons

Many blog visitors prefer to follow interesting content in their blog readers. By making an RSS Subscribe button available, you’ll snag many first-time visitors into becoming repeat consumers of your blog content.

10. Tell a friend

Using a script or a simple mail-to form link from each blog post will let those who are interested in your blog post to spread the word.

I’m sure there are many more effective interactivity building tips and tricks - do you know of any? Post them here or on your blog (and send me a link to your post)

Plug Ins and Widgets

We could fill up pages with the list of plug-ins that enhance the value of a blog, and each blogger has a set of ‘favorites’.

I’ll list mine here - and you can share your list too, either by posting a comment or blogging about it and sending me the link to your post.

PLUG-INS

WordPress plug-ins I use on all my blogs include:

• Akismet - Spam filtering and moderating plug in. Saves a ton of time managing your blog
• Short Stat - a basic stats plug in that gives you data including visitor count, source of referral, and a list of SE crawlers/bots that visit your website
• Ultimate Tag Warrior - adds an element of SEO and makes it easy to add tags to
  individual blog posts
• Socializer - makes it easy for a blog visitor to add bookmarks to social network sites
• SEO Title Tag - adds on to Ultimate Tag Warrior and optimizes blog titles for better ranking

WIDGETS

I don’t use too many widgets, though I try out a few from time to time. The ones I use often are:

• Technorati - the modified widget lets you display your blog’s ranking on Technorati, a list of links from other blogs and the top tags for which your blog is known on Technorati.
• Feedburner - there are a set of widgets with different functions, I like the RSS feed news scroller best

So, what are your favorite/preferred plug-ins and widgets?

And if you use non-WordPress blogs, what do you use to get similar results?