The Blog Tips Meme (Volume 1)

fea­tur­ing

Fab­u­lous Blog­gers You Should Get to Know (Vol­ume 1)

If you want to build your read­er­ship, respond to com­ments by reply­ing via email or vis­it­ing their blog. They’ll appre­ci­ate it and more than likely come back again.

The value in your traf­fic and read­ers depends on you the blog­ger. You need to write engag­ing and mean­ing­ful arti­cles and you need to hon­estly seek out and sup­port other blog­gers. I have found that you get what you give … blog­ging is no excep­tion!

Auto­post­ing — On Word Press you can auto­post your posts and set them to pub­lish at any time that you want. It’s great because you can go on vaca­tion or what­ever and the blog is still get­ting new con­tent every­day. I set many of my posts to pub­lish at 2:22 in the morn­ing when I’m sound asleep! Love it!

Be your­self! Don’t try to pre­tend to be some­one or some­thing that you aren’t. Peo­ple will even­tu­ally see right through it.

Reach out to blogs in your area, hav­ing “real-life” mee­tups is so much fun!

For­get about com­pet­ing to be the most pop­u­lar, the most vis­ited, the blog with the most com­ments … Focus on read­ing, think­ing about what you read and writ­ing with author­ity and authenticity.

When you’re try­ing to think of a new great post, or deep in thought on how to make it bet­ter, just remem­ber — try­ing is crap. Try­ing to think is worth­less. Think­ing is the great­est sin­gle hin­drance to a writer. Relax, don’t try to think. Let go of your thought and ego. Only then is real thought able to nat­u­rally flow on it’s own, with­out being con­sciously dri­ven. Just a lit­tle some­thing not to think about.

In your writ­ing, offer a kind word, dis­play a gen­er­ous spirit, con­vey your attempts to grasp mean­ing in the mun­dane, and con­cep­tu­al­ize and give con­text to your life and the lives of those you love.

Cri­tique Your Design: Take a good look at your design with fresh eyes by ask­ing the 11 ques­tions she pro­vides — ques­tions you can answer that, when com­bined, should give you a gen­eral idea of the effec­tive­ness of your design, as well as iden­ti­fy­ing areas that could be improved.

Don’t be an impul­sive blog­ger; be a plan­ner. In fact, he con­cludes his arti­cle by assign­ing home­work: Plan next week’s blogging!

Start with a blog­ging soft­ware plat­form that will serve you for the long-run. If you’re not sure which one to use, take the time to set up a cou­ple of test blogs and give the soft­ware for each a solid test run. Wait to go live until you are sure that you want to stick with that plat­form because the tran­si­tion from one soft­ware pack­age to another after a long period of blog­ging is time-consuming, labor-intensive and will cost you some links and read­ers. After more than two years on Blog­ger, I made the move to Word Press and could not be hap­pier that I did. But I am still work­ing out all of the details, includ­ing, just for starters, telling every­one that all of my links all changed!

Want to play? Tag some friends, post your arti­cle and let me know you are par­tic­i­pat­ing so that I can link to your post!

Tech­no­rati Tags: Thurs­day Thirteen

On the Same Topic:

• Colloquium’s Best of 2007
• Thir­teen Mem­o­rable (for the Par­ents) Vis­its with Santa Claus
• A Thir­teen Ques­tion His­tory Quiz for Baby Boomers
• Thir­teen Obser­va­tions About Life
• Thir­teen More “Lesser Known” Help­ful Word­Press Plugins