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Blogging Tips
Now that I’ve been blogging for over a year and have 100 blogs under my belt, I’d like to take the opportunity to share some advice and insights that I’ve learned which can help fellow bloggers or folks looking to start up their own blog.
Blog From Experience
One of my biggest mistakes in blogging early on was writing lists and talking about what I was going to do, but not following through. I’d like to point to Musical Goals for 2010 in particular, as it’s quite laughable because the only one of those goals that came to fruition this year was the first one. Pipe dreams are great and all, but it’s best to keep them to yourself until you actually start working on them.
My pieces on fitness and finance (more recently) have been more inspired, as these are areas that I’ve spent a lot of time working with and learning about over the months and years. They both encompass parts of life that hold significant importance to me, as do music and gaming.
While music is an area in which I spend a lot of time, I often find it hard to find the passion to write about it, because I would rather be listening to it and creating it. Gaming, on the other hand, is something that I can write (and have written) many things about that mostly wouldn’t pertain to a blog, which is why it has its own tab on the header. Though there’s nothing there yet, there will be at least a few things by the end of the month.
I know that the part about gaming strays from the idea of not talking about unaccomplished goals, but I’d keep from saying anything if I hadn’t already written up a fairly detailed strategy on how I’m going to create and build that section, as well as set the time aside early next week to start on it.
Also, there’s no need to blog about everything you’re doing. I used to be more guilty of this than I am now when I was still writing three times a week, so trimming to once a week was beneficial for me in that it concentrates the amount of useful output I’m able to produce. I also figured out which areas of life are best for me to blog about at this time and I try to focus on those.
Balance Personal and Impersonal
This will vary depending on what your articles are about and whether or not you’re writing for a business site or a personal site. Obviously, since you’re reading this blog entry at a site that has my name in the address and the header, this is a personal site and it allows me to be a little more informal with my writing.
I’ve tried to keep my recent blog posts more business-like as I’ve been refocusing my efforts to make this blog more helpful to people, but you can see that there are still lots of I’s and you’s in my writing. I also know that there will be posts in the future talking about things that have happened in my life (like next week’s post) and my cats, though that’s about as personal as I’m going to make it.
Were I going for a strictly business approach, everything would be in the third person and written like a tutorial, rather than written as someone sharing their life experiences as I do here.
Target Keywords for Traffic
If you want more than your friends to read what you write, you need to incorporate SEO (search engine optimization) into your blog. That includes honing your meta tags, naming your blog topic after a phrase that people are looking for, using that phrase in your blog at various intervals (which I’m still working on), among other things.
For example, I was going to call this post “Blogging Mistakes to Avoid”. I plugged that phrase into the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and found out that the title I’d chosen had a whopping zero search results! I did a little refining (obviously) and found that “Blogging Tips” netted a more voluminous result.
I’m certainly no SEO expert, but incorporating these ideas (among many others) will help drive traffic to your blog that may not have ordinarily found it.
Utilize Social Media
As for wanting your friends to read what you write, the best way I’ve found to do so is to post the link to your blog post in your preferred social media sites. I’m partial to Twitter for the conciseness it forces, and I have my Facebook account linked into my Twitter account through a Facebook application so I can post to both at once. It certainly saves some time.
I also recently figured out hash tags on Twitter, which allow people to find your post if they’re searching for a certain thing in particular. With my songs, I hash tag the genres that the song encompasses, and with this blog post, I’ll likely hash tag the words in the title. It’s also rather easy to do, as all it requires is putting a pound sign in front of the word you want people to search for. So for this blog, I’ll use #blogging and #tips to help people find what I’ve written.
Message boards are also a great way to get the word out, though actively promoting a blog post through a new thread is generally frowned upon in some places and can get you banned from others. It’s best to put a link to your blog in your signature and post a beneficial contribution to a thread – preferably one that pertains to your blog and then you can reference it in your post.
Also, I don’t know if they’re necessarily social media, but posting your blog to a relevant blog carnival can drive traffic to your work as well as build a link from another source to your website, which helps your post show up in a higher position if someone is looking for your specific topic. It’s also considered good form to link back to the blog carnivals that you’ve submitted to, which I will as soon as they post their respective carnivals.
Enjoy Yourself
While I’ve been striving to be informative as of late, I certainly wouldn’t put in the effort to do these posts if I didn’t enjoy writing them.
When I first started blogging in earnest, I wanted to sharpen up my writing skills for writing stories in the future and to generate a stream of passive income. I had read in more than one place that blogging three times a week was the best way to achieve both.
I might have stuck with it at that frequency if that passive stream was more than a trickle and I didn’t have a ton of other things going on in my life at the time, but trimming down to once a week has worked out for the best. I was beginning to burn out and run out of topics at three times a week.
With blogging once a week, I enjoy writing more and it gives me time to really think about the topic I want to write about. It’s also a frequent enough interval that my writing skills don’t degrade from inactivity.
Get to Work
Of course, all the tips in the world are useless unless you do something with them. You’ve got to plot out the time that you want to commit to blogging, then sit down and do it. It helps to set a recurring schedule, so folks will know when to expect new content from you.
I hope this post has been somewhat helpful in your pursuits for building (or fixing up) a blog!
Discuss this post at the For the Love of Creativity Forum!
Posted on December 4th, 2010.
External Links
• Blog Carnival – Blog Carnival – Blog Communities Publishing Magazines
• Blogger Daily – Blog Carnival (December 6th, 2010)
• Blogging for Good in the Modern World – 23rd Edition of Blog Carnival – Bringing More Traffic to Your Blog
• Google AdWords: Keyword Tool – Google AdWords: Keyword Tool
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