The first rule of blogging: Don’t cut and paste from Word.

The second rule of blogging: Don’t cut and paste from Word.

Why is transposing copy from Word bad? For starters, Word imposes a lot of HTML formatting onto any chunk of text. Just about everyone uses some kind of template in Word, which in turn can give your copy a nice Georgia font with 16pt type. Which is great when you’re editing on a desktop, but when you copy this into the blog, though, all of that HTML gets carried over. If Word has added div tags and span tags and the like, all the HTML can cause your blog to start looking super funky. This is especially true if you’re using an older browser, like IE6. Not to mention, writing in Word, copying it, and then cleaning up the text can take you three times as long as simply composing in WordPress.

So, I’ll say it again: don’t cut and paste from Word.

Still, as much as I repeat that mantra, I know that for a lot of writers, the idea of composing in something other than MS Word is tantamount to asking that you write your e-mail in WingDings. And judging by the number of posts with wacky fonts, colors, and point sizes, it’s pretty clear that the ol’ Word cut-and-paste method of blogging is not going to die out anytime soon. So, if you must write in Word, please try to follow either of these simple methods to ensure that all that bad HTML doesn’t screw up your post.

Method 1: Click on the “kitchen sink” editor button in the “Write Post” screen. This is the little button, second from the right, that says “Show/Hide kitchen sink” when you mouse over it.

When you click on it, a second row of options shows up. Click on the button half-way across that has a little “W” MS Word icon. That’ll bring up a window for you to paste your MS Word copy. Once pasted, click “Insert” and you’ll be golden.

Method 2: You can also click on the “HTML” tab (next to the tab that says “Visual”). Paste your text from MS Word here. Then click back on “Visual” to return to the visual editor.

Still confused? Here’s a little video tutorial:

Why add a poll?

For one, it’s incredibly easy to do.

Polls are also one of the best ways to get your readers engaged with the blog and the topic you’re blogging about. Whereas posting a comment requires the reader to put some thought into what they have to say — not to mention taking the time to type it out and open themselves up to feedback from other commenters — answering a poll takes almost no time at all.

And once you’ve clicked on a poll, you’re that much more likely to give other forms of feedback, like posting comments and sending in pictures. Consider polls a gateway to more blog conversation.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to add ‘em:

In addition to posting polls to your sidebar, you can also add them to individual posts. Simply paste this piece of code into a post: [poll id="2"]

(Get the poll ID from the POLLS menu.)

Tony Graham at the Asbury Park Press does a great job of adding polls to posts. Here are a few examples from Tony’s blogs: Down on the Farm / The Hawks Nest

You can also create a polls archive page, where you can showcase all your past polls. Just paste this code into a Page (not a “Post”): [page_polls]

Here are a couple example of poll archives: The Girly Blog / The Yankee Scrolls

As your blog begins to gather a head of steam, and more and more comments from readers begin popping up, you may be wondering how you can better showcase those comments. It’s easy.

As you may have already seen, some blogs have a slightly different comments widget in the sidebar, which displays short excerpts. Adding this is simply a matter of switching the old widget to the new one. Here’s what the old one looked like on Fred Snowflack’s “Morris Politics” blog:

Simple "Recent Comments" widget

And here’s the new one:

New "Get Recent Comments" widget with excerpts

To switch the widgets, go into the backend of your blog, select DESIGN –> WIDGETS, and then follow these instructions:

Blogroll — the word might have an incredibly geeky ring to it, but if you’re looking to build up your blogging cred, nothing can things jump-started quite like creating a blogroll. Put simply, it’s a list of links to other sites you like. They can be ones you read on a daily basis, ones you’d personally vouch for, or just friendly strangers who were kind enough to link to your blog.

But beyond simply generating good will, the link love has a more pragmatic purpose: If you’re looking to boost your visibility on Google (and other search engines), you’ll need to get linked to. Google may have a top secret search algorhythm, but it all pretty much boils down to simple arithmatic: More links to your blog = a higher search ranking. When you’re launching your new blog, link liberally.

Pete Abraham, author of the blockbuster LoHud Yankees blog, says that building up his blogroll was one of the initial keys to his blog taking off. He didn’t just link blindly, though; he asked for other sites to link back to him. In his words:

Every team has a network of fan blogs. Some are around for 5 days, some have been around 5 years and are great. You need to pick out 10 good ones, write the owners and say “I’m a beat writer, I’m trying to do a blog and I like the work you do. I’m putting up a link to you blog and I’d appreciate if you link to ours. Let me know the next time you do a post you’re proud of and I’ll link to it.”

That will get a positive responsive 85 percent of the time. Having a blog roll of fan blogs makes you part of the on-line community. Once the word-of-mouth spreads, you have an audience. If you frequent short posts, you’ll get people coming back as opposed to one long post a day.

Pete’s blog now gets about 1.5 million hits a month. There’s no guarantee you’ll reach the same level of success, but adding a couple dozen links to your sidebar will surely put your blog on the right path. Here’s how:

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Why bother with photos?

Well, for starters, when you write a story for print, wouldn’t you rather that it always have an image attached to it?

In our current, web-surfing world, readers can sometimes scan upwards of 100 websites a day. Photos help to quickly orient you to the content on a site, and make you that much more likely to read what the writer has to say. They break up long chunks of text, and help make your post more accessible.

My goal is have some photo or image (or video screencast, in this post’s case) in every post I write. It’s easier than you think. Make friends with Digicol and AP and other Gannett websites. For more detail on what photos are and are not permissible, check out these photo guidelines, originally written by Larry Nylund at The Journal News (a Gannett paper in Westchester, and my blogging alma mater).

But assuming you’ve got a photo ready to go, this screencast will show you how to add it to a post.

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If the title of this blog sounds a tad militaristic, fear not: The goal here isn’t to put you through a series of endurance-testing drills, or to act like a drill sargeant straight out of Paris Island.

That said, the notion of boot camp — and all the discipline and hard work it conjures — isn’t totally accidental.

Starting a blog is easy. By most accounts a new blog is launched every second. The hard part is posting to your blog every day, turning it into the kind of hub for ideas that give readers a reason to return each and every day. Suffice it to say, that’s hard work. It doesn’t just require discipline; it also takes a kind of obsessive enthusiasm for composing and creating and communicating your thoughts.

A successful blog — and by that, I mean, a blog that reaches a regular audience of hundreds, if not thousands — requires more than just great writing. You’ll need a compelling voice, photos or images to help illustrate your thoughts (to the more visually-oriented), and all kinds of audio and video, to boot.

For most traditional newspaper and magazine writers, though, that kind of multimedia storytelling isn’t exactly second nature. And that’s why this blog is here — to help you figure out how to translate your thoughts into the best blog posts possible. To help you understand the nuts and bolts of WordPress, our blog software.

To — forgive the lame pun — allow you to be all you can be, and blog all you can blog.

It’s worth noting that many newspaper sites keep training blogs like this closed or restricted to a company intranet. I’ve decided to keep ours open for all to see. Though this space is primarily intended for the reporters, writers, and designers at Gannett New Jersey’s newspapers — The Asbury Park Press, the Courier-Post, the Daily Record, the Home News Tribune, the Courier News, and The Daily Journal — I hope some other aspiring bloggers out there will stumble upon it and learn a thing or two … or, at the very least, save themselves the trouble of searching the Web fruitlessly on a Sunday night Googling for “WordPress screencasts,” only to stumble upon a handful of overpriced, pay sites.