Better blogging means better personal and business branding, gained credibility and in the end better business. Better blogging also means fair competition, better learning and better growing opportunities.

The idea of better blogging is not new – we start blogging and always try to improve our skills. Some for traffic, some for more readers, some for gaining more credibility in their own businesses. There are as many reasons as blogs – not always fully stated by their owners, at times not even acknowledged. But the truth is that blogging doesn’t just happen. There is no such a thing as blogging for no reason. And when things happen for a reason it is up to us to make the best out of them.

Sue at Sueblimely tagged me to share my thoughts on a better blogging meme. Her idea is to spread this meme on as many blogs as possible to serve as an inspiration and model for novices to follow.

Actually, Sueblimely put up together a few rules to follow in response to this meme, and as the meme etiquette requires, I’ll copy and paste them here, then follow up with my answers and my own tags.

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The Blogging Better Meme by Sueblimely

The idea of this meme is to:

1. Help us stop and think about how we could become better bloggers and what we need to do to achieve this.
2. Share our blogging knowledge and experience.

Please answer these questions in relation to your blogging (in as little or as much detail as you wish):-

1. The most important thing I have learned over the last year.
2. What I would like to achieve within the next year.
3. What I wish to learn more about.
4. How could I be more productive?
5. One new thing I plan to try.
6. The blogging tip{s) I have found the most useful
7. The 4 (or more) people I am passing this on to. (please include someone quite new to blogging if you can - to help them along by introducing them to your own readers and giving them some backlinks).

Here are my answers. You can use this to give yourself ideas, approach the meme in a completely different way and add or change the questions to suit what you would like to know. You can even choose not to take part at all if you are not keen on memes.

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Better blogging is about choices and ethics pretty much as it is about style, inspiration, dedication and communicating. Blogging is also about relationships: with the readers, with the other bloggers, with the employers and the family. And blogging is pretty much about understanding responsibility.

As Sue underlines in her original entry a blog is not a personal diary. Once you go online, you go public. Everything you write and publish is there to stay. Think of a boomerang effect: words you just throw can and will come back to you. So it is pretty important to assume responsibility for what you do and say online. I once wrote an entry for my former employing company Red Dog. It was called “Naked in a Public Garden” and it dealt precisely to assuming responsibility for what we do online. I quote from that article three golden rules you should include in your blogging routine if you want to stay on the “better blogging” path:

• never publish something (not even under password protected login) that you wouldn’t want your children/mother to see;
• never publish information about your employer, colleagues, job;
• never publish a story without checking it twice, or thrice if necessary – just make sure you don’t pervert the truth;

Now to answer the particular questions of the meme:

1. The most important thing I’ve learned over the past year is that there are better chances of getting good business contacts and achieving success when we work together instead of competing against each other. Although I cannot call myself a writer (as English is not my native tongue and obviously I have enough grammar errors) writing is what I do. The public relations consultant communicates mainly with written materials: press releases, articles and reports. I work with native writers and bloggers to deliver good quality materials to my clients. I win by learning from the people I work with and I believe they win by working with me too.
2. The next year is the year of many changes. There’s a lot happening in my life already, but from a blogging perspective, I have a few important projects to bring to fruition. An SEO book is planned for the end of January, then I will try to boost up the popularity for eWritings and start in cooperation with Alina Popescu a blog about Romania.
3. I wish to learn more about social media. There are some channels I either don’t use or don’t want to use, partially because of some misconceptions (Twitter for example) – and I will explore them more in 2008.
4. Productivity will be achieved through better planning and a bolder approach to doing business. I need to organize my stuff effectively – I already have to do more than I can and delegating tasks to different online collaborators seems to be the next logical thing to do.
5. A new thing I plan to try… well, there are no “new” plans there. There are, however, a few waiting in the queue.
6. The blogging tips I find useful come from many different blogs, but one in particular has something of real value almost every day: Liz’s Successful Blog.
7. This particular meme is worth spreading around, so here are the people I think that could really contribute to the topic: Yvonne, Laura, Lillie and for the newbie John Raul – a young blogger from Malaysia who shows a lot of potential.