In some form or another, most bloggers give advice. Ranging depending on their niche, blogs are full of a bunch of at least semi-unknown people spouting off about random subjects. Yet over time, as readers, we begin to trust the information that we’re receiving and from time to time might even follow it.

Knowing that as a reader of another blog, it’s likely that we’ll follow advice of another blogger, we need to consider the effect our own advice has on our readers.

When handing out advice, the quickest way to lose authority and trust is to consistently hand out bad advice. But, there’s a way we can avoid bad advice altogether, it’s just a matter of a few simple thought processes when writing advice posts.

Experience

Before you throw out advice, the best possible situation is to have experience about the subject you’re giving advice about. If you’re telling your readers that Blog Catalog is excellent for sustainable traffic, you need to have used Blog Catalog and give details about what you did on the site that brought the traffic.

The truth is that we all have tried and true methods and nothing pleases readers more than getting step by step mini-tutorials to achieve positive results on a wide number of things. So, the best way to give your best advice is to have some experience in the subject that you’re talking about.

Research

If you don’t have enough up in the ol’ noggin for a post, do a little research. While I realize that most of us haven’t researched for a writing assignment in quite some time, this is a great time to pick up your skill again.

By researching sources for information on a blog post you can link out to other bloggers, generate interest in your own blog by sighting sources, and keep yourself credible with your readers.

Truthfully, few of us actually know everything about our subject which is probably why we decided to start writing about it in the first place. By writing a post based on research you’ll also get some great information from commentators to add to the discussion.

Ask or Interview

When you have little to no knowledge on a particular subject that may be of interest to your readers, try going to a source that has a ton of information on the subject by asking questions or conducting a formal interview.

The benefits here are two-fold when you post about a subject your readers are in and you give a link to the person you’ve talked to about the subject or interviewed. OK, a third benefit – interviews done correctly with key people on important subjects tend to draw a lot of traffic.

Think if I interviewed Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, I might get a lot of attention? OK, so maybe this is an extreme example as I can’t see Matt giving me an interview but you get my point. :D

Good Advice Gone Bad

So, it happened to you – you thought you had good advice but an on pour of feedback or comments let you know otherwise. Fix it! It’s not too late, even though the post is published and out there.

Write a new post – explain why you thought your advice was good, how you realize that perhaps a better technique or way around the subject is better now, and give shout outs to those who help to correct your information.

Explain your opinion – opinions are like ____ we all have one. Edit the post with a statement about the advice being of an opinion and keep your stance. As an alternative, you can create a new post explaining that the previous post was an opinion and explain with further detail why you feel the way you do.

Next time – follow the steps above so that it doesn’t happen to you again.

Your Thoughts

What can bloggers do for you, as the reader, to keep your trust when they have written some bad advice? Have you ever followed the bad advice of another blogger and did it have an impact on you? Or maybe, you have handed out bad advice, how did you handle any situations that were raised from your post?