Here's my latest InformationWeek column: "17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You." It's a checklist of the stuff that keeps me — and many other bloggers — from posting about sites. There are companies and causes out there spending their time and money trying to get people to talk about them online, while shooting themselves in the foot by not having permalinks (duh), by resizing your browser window (duh), or by having "linking policies" that seek to set out the circumstances under which you can link to them.
Have a link. Seriously: if you want bloggers to link to you, you need to have something linkable. Your upcoming TV show, protest march, product or soccer tournament is literally unbloggable unless you put it on the Web somewhere first.
Have a permanent link. Don't just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future, and not point to the upcoming address by Paris Hilton when you change it next week. Put up a separate, permanently linkable page for everything you want to get blogged.
Have a link for everything. Don't have a single page with ten items on it. Blogging a link to the top of your fifty-screen-long page with a blurb about something halfway down generates 200 e-mails from readers who can't find the referenced item.
Use real links. Don't have links with expiring session-keys that are no good if someone revisits the URL later. If a blogger can't send the URL to a friend or put it on the Web, then that blogger can't send people to go look at your stuff. Likewise, avoid the giant, 800-character gobbledegook URLs filled with junky alphabet-soup GUIDs — if it can't be pasted into IRC without linebreaking, there's some group of compulsive communicators who'll be unable to get to it.
