Sunday, 9 May 2010

Blogger Basics: 10 Simple Tips & Tricks for Effective Blogging

This article provides simple tips and tricks for effective blogging. Following this advice will help you maximise your chances of reaching your targeted audience, gaining subscribers, and successfully monetising a Blogger blog. Some of the following tips apply mainly to those blogging professionally, but many apply equally to those blogging for pleasure.
  1. Marketing: Effective blogging requires that you know and understand your market. Choose a topic or a small number of related topics and stick to blogging about those. Niche blogs receive far more traffic and are more relevant to readers, who are usually looking for information - not a glimpse into your inner world or to find out what you had for breakfast.
  2. Appearance: Design is important. A cluttered blog with poor navigation will almost certainly put off visitors. Keep it simple and clean. Use categories or stand-alone pages to enable readers to find exactly what they are looking for. Install useful widgets and add relevant ads, but don't crowd the site. List interesting or useful labels, and provide a search box.
  3. Subscriptions: Make it easy for visitors to follow your blog. Add social bookmarking buttons, provide an RSS feed, enable email subscriptions, and add similar applications, such as Facebook's Networked Blogs. Keep important buttons close to the top of the blog.
  4. Blog Titles: Use appropriate titles for blog posts. They should be clear, concise, and contain relevant keywords. Choosing a rare keyword combination as a title-phrase can be one way to reduce competition and increase traffic. Detailed information can be found in my previous post, How to Choose Successful Blog Titles.
  5. Blogging: each post should ideally contain from 300 to 500 words. The title phrase should be repeated more than once in the text, and individual keywords should appear numerous times, at the rate of around 5%. Break each blog post down into short paragraphs, and add a small, relevant image whenever possible (only ever use images you own the rights to, or that were published under the creative commons attribution and marked as suitable for commercial use). Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors before publishing a blog (Blogger draft now includes an integral spell-check but professional software such as Office Word or a dedicated writing program such as Whitesmoke is essential if you have major problems in this area). Not only do errors look unprofessional, but they can also affect page rank. 
  6. Domain Names: Buy a custom domain and host with whichever company fulfils your needs, but don't use a free Blogspot or Wordpress domain name if hosting on these platforms. A blog is more professional-looking to visitors if it has a private domain name. Blogging on a custom domain also provides SEO benefits.
  7. Post Frequency: Blog regularly, but don't swamp your readers with several page-long blog posts per day. Keep it short and sweet, and if you have nothing to say simply keep quiet. Most people wouldn't remove a blog from an RSS reader due to not receiving enough feeds, but they may do if they are frequently overwhelmed with irrelevant or lengthy posts. Besides, blogging about nothing is pointless!
  8. Advertising: Avoid using pop-ups and/or too many brightly-coloured or moving images - some readers will find these off-putting and leave your blog as a result. Advertise products relevant to blog content.
  9. Promotion: Promote your blog using social bookmarking sites and blog directories. Network a little and find people with similar interests to the topics you're blogging about. Viral marketing can be hugely successful, if the right person promotes your blog. 
  10. Content: Use only original content. Not only is it disrespectful to steal someone else's work, it will usually work against you in search engine results.
Detailed information concerning many of the above tips can be found in individual posts on this site.

Here are some useful books providing more tips and tricks for effective blogging. You can add them to your Amazon basket without leaving the site. For more great books about blogging, marketing, monetising, and promoting a blog please visit the Tips & Tricks for Blogger Blogs Bookstore.


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