The Blog Tips Meme
featuring
Thirteen Fabulous Bloggers You Should Get to Know
(Volume 2)
Write good titles. They are the first thing people see and it is what determines whether or not a new reader is going to stick around and read your post.
Whether you use www as part of your domain name or not really doesn’t matter in the long run. But you need to make a decision and stick with it: You are effectively diluting your effectiveness to the search engines if you have both since the search engines will treat both as two different sites. One called www.yourdomain.com and the other one called yourdomain.com. If you stick with one you wonβt loose any traffic, ranking, βpointsβ or statistics in the long run.
Have fun with it. It’s great to do serious posts if there’s something you are passionate about, but also have fun getting to know others in the community. The best way to do that is to visit other people and get to know them. If someone leaves you a comment, visit them and comment on theirs as well.
Read a lot of blogs. You are not blogging alone. The blogosphere is composed of millions of people who have lots to say about so many different things. You can also get ideas from the articles you read!
Comment verification vs. comment moderation: Personally, I think comment moderation is good for several reasons. First, you can catch all the spam comments, and the second reason is you’re able to read comments that are posted to archived posts. Someone had asked me the other day how far back, being on WordPress, I catch comments, and of course that’s one reason I love WordPress: Never missing a comment.
Everytime you write a post and link to another blog you should always send an email to them letting them know that you have written a post and linked to them. This creates a community and they will in turn go to your site to read and most likely add you to their blogroll and/or write a post about you and your blog.
Michelle’s article entitled Ten Housekeeping Tips for Your Blog is a great tool to help you assess your blog’s strengths and weaknesses, and “get back to the basics” of blogging.
Stephanie recommends getting some rest When You Run Low on Blogging Ideas and You’re Tired. She includes a few other suggestions in her article, too, including asking your readers for suggested topics.
Looking for inspiration? Running out of topics to write about? Lorelle’s 16 Tips for Blog Idea Brainstorming is a great resource to help you get out of a writing rut.
Darren recommends that you Run a First Time Reader Audit on Your Blog. Have a friend or relative who has never visited your site review it while you watch them and take note of their reactions and how easy they find it to navigate. (Yes, I included Darren in Volume One, as well, but the two articles I’ve highlighted for you are so helpful, I did not want you to miss either of them.)
In a series of posts, Yoav explains why you should license your blog’s content using Creative Commons.
Kevin recently ran a debate contest so that his readers could sound off about which blogging platform is better: Blogspot or WordPress. If you are trying to decide which software to use, a lot of excellent comments entered may help you make a decision.
Take a peek at who won the debate on the WordPress side of the aisle — and $100. Thanks, Kevin!
Submit a guest blog to another blog. Once your post is live, do your best to impress your host by driving traffic to the post. Link to it from your blog; encourage friends, family and readers to visit it and pass it along; and vote for it on social networks (StumbleUpon is a favorite of mine). If you guest blog often, you can do a weekly roundup post like Lorelle on WordPress, reviewing your best posts on several websites.
Want to play?
Tag some friends, post your article and let me know you are participating so that I can link to your post!
[tags]Thursday Thirteen[/tags]
19 Comments
Great list! I already read a few of these, but will have to check more out!
Great list and great advice! I used my URL without the www for most of the time I’ve been blogging and recently someone told me I should use the WWW. I have noticed my stats have gone down, but I didn’t think about it being that. Good advice π
What a great list! I have bookmarked a few of them.
Happy T13!
I,m already doing a couple of them, but some I’ve never thought about!! And I would defitebvely be checking the Creative Commons site!!
Thanks for your kind words!
One thing I would add to your lesson from Cactuus is the fact that other people will link to your site with or without the www—so a lot of it is beyond your control. If you have access to your .htaccess file, you can control which one is the default to help consolidate your “link juice.” Her full post covers this, though.
Interesting information from Cactuus. I’ll have to go and read the whole post.
I have to nicely say I disagree with Christine about the verification/moderation thing. I tried moderating but found that comments piled up unless I was on top of them constantly. People can’t see the latest comment unless the blogger is constantly approving them. With Blogger verification I hardly get any spam, even with all the comments that come through each week, and I can still get comments on older posts just like in WordPress I can’t see the benefit of slowing up the comment dialog when with verification the spam issue is nearly non-existent. I know people say that asking people to type the captchas discourages commenting but that hasn’t been my experience.
Sorry to be so wordy, but Shakadoo says to email people to let them know about their links, but that’s really unnecessary–I check Technorati each day to catch my links because it shows each link to your blog and in Blogger it shows “links to this post” at the bottom of each post which shows other links if Technorati didn’t catch them. I think emailing people is a good idea sometimes, if–for example–you’re responding to an issue they raised, but otherwise it tends to look as if you’re begging for their notice. Am I sounding too harsh? Hope not, this is a great list of resources and I’ve bookmarked it to refer to later. Definitely.
Great tips and a nice tribute to our fellow bloggers π
As one of the administrators of a newish blog, I REALLY APPRECIATE all these links….
What a great list! All great pointers. Happy TT!
As a new blogger (since June 2007), I was glad to stumble on this! Great suggestions and I’m going to check out some of these sites!
thanks! Happy TT
Thank you for that list. Some of these I know already but I shall enjoy discovering the ones who are new to me.
I’ve seen several versions of this, and they’re all good tips. Happy T13!
I will definitely visit these bloggers. Happy TT!
Great resources, thanks for sharing.
Great TT–thanks for sharing. I’ve bookmarked a few of these also. π
Nice list this may help me a lot thanks π
Great blogging tips list. Sorry haven’t got the chance to say thanks for including me in the list — lately been so caught up with the carnival of family life. I am hosting for the first time and very nervous about it!