How To Improve Your Blog…..Starting Today!

by Joan Harrington Network Marketer/Coach/Full-time Blogger

How To Improve Your Blog…..Starting Today!

 

How To Improve Your Blog…..Starting Today!

 

Ways To Improve Your Blog…..Starting Today!

 

Blogging is hard work, don’t let anyone make you believe it is a piece of cake.

There is always something else you need to do on your blog, update it, add a plugin, fix this, fix that…

To be honest, you will get discouraged very easy and end up being one of the 80%+ (if I am not mistaking) of people that gave up on their blog in less than a year.

So my number one tip before you jump into this is – Don’t Skip Anything!!

You would not build a house on water, so don’t build your blog without making a solid foundation.

Believe it or not, there are things you can do in matter of several hours to make your blog much better.

However, we get distracted and forget what was that little thing we were planning to do, that will bring new visitors to our blogs.

 

 

Here is a list that will remind you of all the important things you can do today, to make your blog and blogging better immediately.

 

 

THE BASICS:

 

1.  Register for Gravatar!

Do it now!

It is very annoying to see the mystery man on your blog especially if it is a person that comments all the time.

Choose an image that will be easy to remember.

 

2.  Join The Social Networks

I would be surprised if you are blogging and haven’t done this yet, but in case you haven’t, create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linked In.

 

3.  Plan how you want to build “The Brand Of You And Your Blog”.

Just jot down a few words that describe you and the vision you have for your blog.

This is very important so you would have some focus in your blogging.

You have to have some idea on what you want to accomplish. That way you will always know what would be a good thing to write about, where you should share your posts, which blogs to visit and which bloggers to connect to.

This would be something like finding a niche within the blogging niche.

(For example, you would create a blog about Wordpress, but instead of blogging about everything (like a lot of us actually do), you would only create video tutorials about Wordpress.)

Not many people are doing something specific and you would probably have a pretty big audience.

 

4.  If you have a free blog, buy a domain name and hosting plan and move your blog to it today.

(If you are a newbie to blogging, I suggest you start with The Empower Network blogging platform….here you will find all you need to know for blogging like an expert!)

You don’t have money for that now?

At least back up your whole blog, because if your free host decides to remove your blog today, would you want to lose all of your writing?

 

THE NITTY GRITTY:

 

Social Media

Add links to your social profiles in your sidebar.

Choose a set of icons, instead of making each icon have their own story.

Don’t add links to all social networking and bookmarking sites you ever registered for.

Choose those that matter.

General rule of thumb would be Twitter and Facebook.   Since recently, Google+ and maybe LinkedIn.

If you have a photo blog or a blog with funny posts/videos/images, you would definitely want to have Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon there.

Why?

Good and funny content often becomes viral.

It will become viral faster if you connect with people on those three sites, because they will give you the initial push.

 

**Add social proof to your sidebar.

**Add social sharing and voting buttons to your blog. You can use plugins or add code to your blog.

First you need to decide which buttons will you use.

Then choose a plugin (Digg Digg, Sharebar, Sexy Bookmarks) or add the social buttons code yourself.

This is a must today.

How many times have you read a good post and wanted to share it just to learn that there are no sharing buttons on the post.

 

YOUR BLOG’S USABILITY:

 

**Add the About me page to your blog this is how your About me page should look:

*what will your blog do for the visitors

*opt in form

*what qualifies you to run the blog and help people

*opt in form

*something about you

 

**Add the Contact page to your blog.

This should be one of the first pages your blog should have.

There are many reasons why people will try to contact you and it is very frustrating not to be able to find a way to do it.

 

**Add the Most popular widget to sidebar to promote your best posts.

Make sure they have at least 20 comments so they look somewhat popular. Or choose not to display comments until they are in the 50 and up range.

Most popular widget will lower your bounce rate because a lot of people want to see why did a certain post get so many comments. That brings even more traffic to those posts and of course, from time to time, some additional comments.

The best location for this widget is under your opt in form, in the sidebar.

New visitors will be able to spot it quickly and if you have posts with great titles and a lot of comments in the widget, that will give you instant social proof.

 

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Start doing that keyword research finally.

Go to Google Adwords Keyword tool, if you don’t have any of the paid tools and do keyword research for the next post.

You don’t have to find the most profitable keyword in the world, but at least find one that looks interesting and has good numbers.

Focus your whole next post around it.

Keyword research is the foundation of good rankings, free search engine traffic and – more money.

 

SHARING IS CARING!

 

To Your Success,
Joan Harrington

Created on Jan 24th 2012 10:09. Viewed 93 times.

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