15 Steps to Improve Your Blogging

15 Steps to Improve Your Blogging

It is very important to keep up with your blog and the truth is that there is always some space for improvement. As a blogger, you need to know what your audience is looking for and you should be willing to implement that in your blog.

You should always scan your blog, find the glitches and fix it before you get dragged into failure. If you love your blog, get prepared to work hard for it.

Check out the following list of tips that I have developed by doing stuffs on my own blog:

1. First, the most important part of your blog is the content. You need to continuously update your blog with fresh and original content so that your readers have a reason to visit your blog frequently. This part is very important and ignoring this can be detrimental to your blog.

2. Scan through your blog once again and analyze it; find any unnecessary plugins and widgets and remove them right away. Keep your sidebar clean and relevant. People don’t want to see piled up junks and adverts all the way. Irrelevant and unnecessary widgets not only slow down your blog’s speed but also divert the focus off your content.

3. Make sure you don’t have any weird and huge flash images or videos that take up huge space and are not at all required or necessary for your blog. From my experience, I realized that readers love clean and straight to the point blogs.

4. Format your content so that it is user friendly and blends smoothly with the blog’s layout

5. A lot of blogs lose their reputation because of bad posts and grammatical errors. Before submitting any posts, make sure you scan through every word and run a spell and grammar check. Ignoring this can mess up your reputation and credibility.

6. Add relevant images wherever you think it is applicable. Do not add huge images or videos that will slow down your blog. The new WordPress 2.9 has the option to edit an image within the platform so make sure you resize it to fit the screen.

7. The font used in your post should be bright and visible (should not hurt the eyes). This is very important and should not be ignored because if your fonts are not user friendly or clear enough then you will lose a massive number of readers.

8. Include an archive section so that your readers can easily navigate and browse your older posts. This will also enable the search engines to index your posts much quicker.

9. Include a related post widget or create a map to make navigation through various posts easier.

10. If you are using or posting other peoples stuff then make sure you add a copyright note and give them credit. If you don’t, there are chances that your will get screwed up and your reputation will go down the drain.

11. Internal linkup can be very helpful in terms of SEO. Add internal links within your posts wherever it is relevant. This helps you promote your older posts and gets your reader’s attention.

12. Create a favicon for your blog. It is obvious that the new bloggers do not know the importance of it at first but remember that a favicon is a great method to differentiate your blog with the rest in the blogosphere. It is very appealing and gives your blog a unique identity. You can easily create a favicon by visiting favicon.cc

13. Design and layout plays an important role for a successful blog. Choose your theme wisely and keep it clean. Themes are very important so make sure you chose the right one that caters to your niche.

14. Contact forms should be simple and easy. Do not add lots of unnecessary fields. The purpose of blogging is to establish a connection and a dialogue with your readers so keep it straight to the point.

15. Last but not the least; use your blog domain email address whenever possible because this will give you much more credibility over the free emails.

To wrap this up, go through all these fifteen points once a while and make sure that your blog is tip top. Scan through your posts regularly and remove any errors if you find any. Keep your blog up to date. And remember, being a blogger takes much more than being an author or writer because in blogging, you not only focus in your writing but also your audience. You are here to create a dialogue with your readers so always do the best to help them out and listen to them. This is the number one rule for me and many bloggers out there.

To your extreme blogging success….

{ 4 comments }

Future of Twitter

Future of Twitter

Twitter has changed so much since they started in early 2006. It was not much different than a “facebook status” thing. All you do is just update your status and that’s it—well that’s what I thought at first when one of my friends introduced me to twitter in the early 2008.

Twitter is the largest and most popular social networking platform today and it has done so much. When people realized its potential, they started taking it seriously. And of course, when things get popular people start misusing it. A lot of spammers took advantage of twitter for mass spamming affiliate links and other B/S.

You can’t eliminate spam forever but twitter has taken drastic steps to overcome this problem. Now how do I know this? Well, I have done my research and found out about it. So lets see what twitter has done so far:

Moderating Spam

Twitter Spam

Twitter Spam

Recently, I opened a new account to test this out. What I did was, created a brand new account, updated the bio and also tweeted a few links. Later, I started mass following 500+ people to get some followers in return. Things were ok so far but Alas! In the next hour, the account was suspended “due to strange activity”—that’s what it says although I didn’t see anything strange happening :) . What impressed me was that they were fast–really fast.

Twitter allows you to follow less than 1000 people in 24 hours but in this case, it didn’t work out that way. Well maybe if I used a proxy and tweeted some valid and useful links this wouldn’t have happened. But, the main point is that twitter is working hard to control spam.

Introduction of the List

Twitter List

Twitter List

The “list” was introduced in the last few months.  Although, I do not use this feature that often but it seems like that a lot of people found it useful. The “list” feature allows you to categorize your friends and followers on twitter. This helps in being organized; it also improves communication because you do not have to waste so much time going through all your followers to find a particular someone you want to connect with. You can easily put him in a list and Walla!

Trending Topics

Trending Topics

The trending topic on twitter is also a cool feature. Now you can find out what’s happening in your area. It is fairly new so it doesn’t include all the cities and countries yet but, twitter is definitely working on it. I found this pretty cool since it is easy, simple and displays on the right side of the page (sidebar).

Twitter is about following and followers but mass following random people makes no sense to me. If you are interested in video games and follow people who are into something else and has no interest in your stuff then you are probably just wasting your time. So instead, find people who are interested in you and start interacting.

Browse Suggestions & Follow Like-Minded People

Browse Suggestions

Browse Suggestions

Twitter has introduced another feature that will help you to find people in your niche and communicate with them.  You can browse suggestions and topics and see what people are talking about. You can also find people in your area. If you are interested in a certain group then you can start following and building up your list. It is that simple now :)

Future of Twitter

Future of Twitter

What Can We Expect From Twitter In The Future

First, twitter should give us the option to mass delete the Direct Messages (DM). I am sure there are lots of twitter tools that can do that but I want to see this feature in twitter itself so I think they will definitely come out with a solution to this.

Next, they “might” increase the character limit for the bio and the tweet section. I don’t know if this is going to work because I am happy with 140 characters but a lot of people find it insufficient. We shall see if twitter takes this into consideration.

Twitter will do its best to survive in the digital world and we can expect a lot from it. Let me know what else you want to see in twitter. Now go ahead and start spreading knowledge.

Have a question for me? Hit me up at @s_ahsan

{ 0 comments }

7 Scientifically Proven Methods to Get ReTweeted on Twitter

by Salman Ahsan

People who constantly talk about themselves or are involved in self promotion do not make many friends. The same logic can be applied to twitter. Twitter is a social media platform which connects millions of people together.
When tweeting, you should bear a few things in mind: be careful with your punctuations, do not self promote, [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Top Five YouTube Marketing Tips

by Salman Ahsan

YouTube Marketing is a popular subject to talk about. I have been promoting and broadcasting my sites on YouTube for a while now. You have no idea how much you can make from YouTube if you can provide informative content and gain loyal subscribers.
If you plan on starting a brand or want to promote your [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Tools That Let You Post Longer Than 140 Characters Tweets on Twitter

by Salman Ahsan

A lot of people find it very difficult to express their thoughts or share a view on twitter due to their character limits. To be honest, I can make the most out of 140 characters; maybe because I have been on this thing for a while or maybe I know too much J.
If 140 characters [...]

Comments Read the full article →

3 Steps to Maximize Your 140 Characters on Twitter

by Salman Ahsan

When you are twittering at first, you might have no idea what is going on. Although, twitter seems easy, a lot of newbie don’t understand how it works. Twitter is an elite micro-blogging platform where you can write anything in 140 characters or less. Many of you may think that it is difficult to say [...]

Comments Read the full article →

8 Tips To Make You A Professional Blogger

by Salman Ahsan

Being a professional blogger is not easy if you are not passionate about it. You can’t simply write for money. You make money from blogs when you are dedicated and completely passionate about it. I still don’t consider myself a professional blogger because I am involved with so many things right now that it is [...]

Comments Read the full article →

Top 8 WordPress Tricks And Hacks

by Salman Ahsan

Imagine if you knew how to code wordpress themes and designs then you wouldn’t have to spend massive amount of money on purchasing it. Usually, I work on the themes on most of my blogs. I enjoy tweaking all the time because it is very essential for your blog.
I am sure most of you would [...]

Comments Read the full article →

How To Display Feedburner Subscriber Count In Text With A Script

by Salman Ahsan

A lot of websites and blogs use text-based Feedburner subscriber count instead of the chicklet. This makes it look for real since you are displaying the real subscribers instead of fake ones unlike some sites. Now when you see 20-30k subscriber counts on various blogs, I hope you don’t think that the authors of the [...]

Comments Read the full article →

8 Ways A Blogger Can Use Twitter Effectively

by Salman Ahsan

Twitter can be used in various ways. I have come across so many people, believe me when I say this but there are tons of people who have no idea about effective twitter marketing. Some people treat it as a joke while some play it as a game. There is much more to Twitter. You [...]

Related Posts with Thumbnails
Comments Read the full article →