Jacob Nielsen on writing for weblogs

I stumbled upon on a very interesting and informative article on the proper writing of weblogs by web usability guru - Jakob Nielsen.

"To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.", he said.

To gain a world-class weblog Nielsen advises to:

• avoid commodity status - B2B sites with long sales cycles need to build up long-term customer relationships based on respect. Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments.
• demonstrate leadership - the Web thrives on specialized content, so it's better to conceptualize yourself as leading a smaller subdiscipline, unless you're so good that you're #1 out of millions of people.
• estimate variability of blog posting quality - posting quality is more variable than expertise. The beauty of the blogosphere is that it's a self-organizing system. Whenever something good appears, other blogs link to it and it gets promoted in the system and gains higher visibility. Thus, the postings that are better than our expert's very best attempt will gain higher prominence, even though they're written by people with lower overall expertise.
• beat the Internet - change the game and create content that's so valuable that business users are willing to pay for it. You should also focus on material that lower-ranked content contributors can't easily create in their spare time.
• keep up to in-depth content as value-add content - in-depth content provides more value in less time than numerous superficial postings. The fatter the report became, the more it is sold. Thorough content's added value can rise above the threshold where customers become willing to be separated from their money.
• evaluate expertise vs. content usability - follow the content usability guidelines for Web writing: be as brief as you can; use bulleted lists and highlighted keywords; chunk the material; and use descriptive headings, subheads, and hyperlinks.