CALLING ALL BLOGGERS and aspiring bloggers as well! I’ve got a great FREE resource I want to share with you.
Let me introduce you to BLOG SMARTER, NOT HARDER:How to Start a Successful Blog that Attracts a Readership and Grows Your Influence Online!
This FREE 40 page ebook covers all the essential topics for starting a blog, especially if you are someone who is interested in using a blog to earn an income or as part of your online marketing for a business.
After reading the book, you will understand:
→ Why blogging is a helpful tool for growing your influence online
→ Which platform to choose for your blog
→ How to name your blog (and online brand identity if applicable)
→ How to develop great consistent content
→ The Do’s & Don’ts of good blogging ettiquette
→ How to get organized and manage your time for blogging
→ The software and hardware essentials you’ll need
→ How to use other social media to promote your blog
→ How to take great photos for your blog
→ How to network with other bloggers to grow your following
Blog Smarter, Not Harder {FREE eBook & Blogging Quick Start Course}
Have you been thinking about starting a blog but aren’t sure if it’s the right platform for you, or how you will create a name for yourself in the highly competitive and saturated blogging market? Blogging is a excellent way to grow your brand online, but their are essential things you need to know if you want to ensure your effort yields influence!
After over 8 years of blogging, I’ve definitely learned a thing or two to help you start your blogging journey on successful footing! That’s why I have created this Blog Smarter, Not Harder FREE eBook and 10 Day Online Course. In Blog Smarter, Not Harder you will learn how and what you need to get a blog started, how to come up with interesting blog posts and digital content, and how to grow a readership and traffic to your blog!
No matter how much I write and share about strategies to use for building up your blog following, I am always confronted with readers who believe they are doing everything right and still wonder why they are not receiving much traffic to their blogs. Whenever I look into these cases, I tend to see many of the same issues over and over again that are keeping these bloggers from reaching their potential despite their best efforts. I know first hand how exhausting and demoralizing it can be to work very hard at something, thinking you are making all the right choices but are oblivious to the major errors you are facing that are holding you back. In this post I would like to share with you the 5 most popular reasons I find that blogs do not get page views.
#1. You don’t have a following yet online
This is a big one. If you are starting a blog, not seeing many page views, and don’t have a following online elsewhere, you can’t really expect much traffic until you are creating a fair amount of content on your blog to draw a crowd. I believe that it takes a few months of steady, high-quality content creation to gain a steady stream of page views via SEO (search engine optimization, the process by which you affect the visibility of your site’s content in search results). From there you really need to do more promotion yourself to get your blog’s name out there and I’ll talk more about that a little later on in this post!
#2. You’re not posting consistently
Like I said above, consistent posting for a significant period of time is necessary before you can expect to see results in the form of page views. This means defining the number of times you will post, the format and the types of topics you will post about and sticking to it! I know that consistency can be hard to establish in terms of your quality when you are first starting off blogging, and to some extent, I think it’s important to spend some time working on the craft of blogging so that you can develop your own style, but if you are looking for quicker results, you really need to do your research into other popular blogs to understand the level of quality that is expected in order to gain popularity. In order to gain significant page views, your blog will need to be consistent with the level of quality expected of popular blogs if you plan to be one of them!
#3. There is no cohesive theme to your blog posts
This is a common problem I see very frequently with people just starting out, but also with those who have been blogging for a significant period of time (about a year) but haven’t seen much of an upturn in page views. I can’t tell you the number of times I go to a blog and as I read through the posts, I ask myself, what is this blog about? Post topics are too general, and although they may be well written and have nice images accompanying the posts, their is so cohesion that helps me, as the reader, understand whether or not I want to read this blog consistently. To address this issue, I want you to create a quick elevator pitch for your content. If someone asked you what your blog is about, how would you respond in a few sentences? If your explanation includes terms like “variety”, “general”, “broad” or is defined as a documentation of your personal life, most likely the theme of your content is too vague for readers to develop a personal connection to it. I realize that you may think having variety in your posts will mean you will appeal to a broader audience, but that philosophy is actually the complete opposite of the one you should execute on when blogging. It’s better to be more specific, more specialized and as niche as you can be. Not so niche that you isolate yourself from most of the world, but then again, I bet you’d get more page views being incredibly niche than you would being incredibly general. To combat this, choose just a few topics for your blog posts but make sure they all roll up to a central unifying theme and stick to it. You may find that once you have the unifying theme that you can actually just tweak some of your old content to better fit the theme so that you aren’t wasting old content, but repurposing it to flow well with your new direction.
#4. You’re not using great images
If you aren’t using images in your blog posts, you are missing a significant source of SEO. Not only do images add interest to your blog posts, but they are also the quickest way to form a connection between your content and your reader. Using great images to help illustrate your content will add to the richness of your reader experience. Make sure to use images at the start of your blog posts, and throughout long posts to break up long walls of text. Make sure your images are large enough to fill the width of your blog post and whenever possible use real images and photographs as opposed to text graphics or illustrations. Most of all, make sure you have the right to use all images you post on your site or else you are in danger of a copyright violation. The way I prevent copyright violations on my blog is to always use my own images. I take nearly 100% of the images I use in my posts with very few exceptions coming from fair use images. If you would like to learn more about how I take my own images and start developing your own photography for your website or blog, click here to learn more about Styled Stock Photography!
#5. You’re not promoting your content
This is another common issue and it’s important to remedy this, especially if you don’t already have much of a following online because the good content that you create on your blog is the best selling point to get you loads of new followers on social media! When it comes to promoting you content, I find that the best thing to do is to identify one two two social media platforms that you enjoy and find yourself spending a lot of time on. No matter what the platform is, it can be leveraged to help you promote your content and gain a following. Once you have decided on the platforms you want to use, I suggest finding out everything about how they operate and what great content on that platform looks like. In my Empire Building Communication Workbook, I cover the major social platforms (including blogs) and share the secrets and strategies to mastering each. Once you understand what content does well on those platforms, you should create similar content related to your blog posts. Yes, you will need to develop a consistent schedule with this platform as well, but if you understand what does well and mimic it with your account, your content will shine and you will gain new followers and traffic to your blog.
I hope this post has been helpful to you if you have been struggling to identify why your own blog isn’t gaining traction on page views. Leave a comment down below with which issue you believe you have a problem with and we can brainstorm some additional strategies to help you work past this hump in no time!
One of the reasons I absolutely adore WordPress as my blogs content management system is because I get complete control over the way my website looks and functions through the use of plugins! Seriously, nearly every website or blog customization you can think of is most definitely a WordPress plugin. Everything from sidebar widgets to social media integration- WordPress plugins are the single reason that WordPress is the most customizable website building platform online. And guess what? Most WordPress plugins are actually 100% FREE to use, including the five plugins I am sharing with you today that you need to download and start using on your WordPress blog or website immediately!
Akismet
Spam comments are THE WORST and having to manage them can be filed under the highly annoying part of being a blogger, but thanks to a free plugin called Akismet, I thankfully avoid dealing with the thousands upon thousands of fake and fishing comments my blog receives on a regular basis. If you have comments enabled on your blog or website, make sure to install Akismet to deal with the spam for you, and then all you have to do is regularly take out the digital trash every once in a while.
Google Analytics
I’ve expounded on my love for Google Analytics as a platform in the past many times, but it begs repeating that you should really have a great analytics tool installed on your blog to keep track of your key stats. I have used many analytics tools in the past but Google Analytics is by far the best, most reliable and industry recommended tool available. Even if you don’t plan on doing heavy analysis of your site every week or month, its great to have this tool installed collecting data that can be used later on. Trust me, I regretting not downloading this tool sooner, so do yourself a favor and get it installed on your site asap!
Lazy Load
One of the essential parts of a great blog is photography and as someone who does tend to use lots of images in there blog posts, I can tell you that the one downside of images is that page load times tend to lag when there are lots of images on a blog. Usually when a blog or any website loads, the website tries to load everything on the page, every word, every image, everything from the top to bottom of the webpage, even if the viewer never scrolls down to the bottom of the page! This ends up taking a long time if you have a lot of images on your site. To combat this, I use the plugin Lazy Load which essentially manages my page load speeds on my blog by loading text first and loading images into the page as the viewer scrolls through it. Thankfully, this plugin has greatly reduced my page load times which helps with the SEO of my blog!
Yoast SEO
Speaking of SEO, if you are looking for a way to maximize your SEO, Yoast is the plugin for you! Yoast adds a special SEO panel to the bottom of your new blog post window, so that after you write your posts, you can go in and optimize for search! It helps you add meta data, check for keywords and readability- all the essential criteria for SEO ranking is in this one plugin that is constantly being updated along with Google’s ever changing standards for search. It’s very reliable and another industry standard plugin that you should be using if you have WordPress!
LinkWithin
Ever notice that at the end of my blog posts there is an option for other related posts you might be interested in? Well, that is a handy little plugin called LinkWithin and not only is it incredibly handy and helpful for readers of my blog who want to find related content to a post they just enjoyed, but the use of a related posts plugin has been proven to increase page views on blogs across the board! Again, this is just another one of those great, best practice plugins you want and NEED to be using as a blogger if you are serious about growing your audience and your influence online!
If you’re using WordPress to run your blog or website, you are well on your way to a gorgeous, fully customized website! Just make sure to add these plugins to your site to optimize everything from loading to SEO to page views! Have any other plugins for WordPress that I MUST know about? Tell me about them in the comments!
I hear it all the time, “Blogging is dead! You can’t grow a brand with a blog anymore! Starting a blog is a waste of time!” There are a lot of people out there on the internet who believe that blogging as a medium is dying. Sure, blogging isn’t what it used to be, things have changed drastically online in the last three to five years with the rise of certain social platforms, but that doesn’t mean that blogging is dead or even in decline. With the passage of time, things change, there are a lot of new cool kids on the internet block who are jockeying for position and page views, but to say blogging is dead underlines a fatal misunderstanding of the nature of online marketing and current digital content trends. If you’ve been worried that blogging is dead, rest assured, I have 7 signs (and statistics) that prove that blogging is NOT dead, and in fact underscores the power of great digital content creation.
1. Over 12 Billion Searches are conducted each month
That’s 12 billion opportunities to attract a reader to your blog by creating engaging, thoughtful and useful blog content. Okay, so not all 12 Billion of these searches are going to pertain to your blog, however, the popularity of search via google and other engines is a sign that the time and effort you spend blogging can pay off if you are creating the right content! Remember, unless you are already a famous or influential person, the way your blog is discovered online is through search. This is why topics like SEO (search engine optimization) are so important for bloggers to understand. Although the concept of SEO or effecting the visibility of your blog in search may seem like a complicated and high tech endeavor, the truth is, most principles of good SEO are common sense. If you are interested in learning more about good SEO habits and principles, click this link to read more!
2. Blogging gives brands a 13x higher ROI
ROI meaning return on investment. This means that the time and effort you spend blogging can pay off big time for your brand in potential viewers, sponsorships, sales and general influence. The fact that blogging is so effective is a testament to the fact that the practice is alive and kicking! From a digital marketing standpoint, content creation via a blog is the best form of advertising so long as you practice good principles of SEO (as explained above) and create compelling content. There are billions of people online right now searching for content, answers and entertainment, and if you can attract the right eyes to your site with great content, the pay off is massive!
3. 80% of blog traffic comes from new viewers
Although this number is just an average, I can personally attest that even in my own statistics, I see that a majority of my page views come from people who are new to my site. Each of these new, one-time only hits is an individual that I have an opportunity to turn from a one hit wonder, to a regular loyal reader. With such a high average for one-time visitors there are things blogs and bloggers are doing right to get the eyes on their posts, but still have work to do to keep those eyes coming back for more. With that amount of potential influence and traffic, I am fully aware that I have many opportunities to expand my blog, and if 80% is an average number, it’s a big sign that blogging still has a long life ahead of it.
4. Blog posts with 1,500 words or greater receive 68% more Tweets and 22% more Facebook Likes
Now, this is probably my favorite stat because not only does it illustrate that blogging is not dead, but it also explains why some people may believe blogging is dead, when it really isn’t. The trend with blogging really seems to be that longer blog posts do better. Why? Because longer blog posts provide a greater amount of content to attract readers via SEO; more words mean more chances of your post popping up in search results! Longer posts are also more engaging because they theoretically go deeper in content and information, which means the quality of the post is better and a reader that finds quality content is more likely to share it! Finally, these longer form blog posts are trending because they give blogs the ability to do what they do best- showcase great writing! One of the major reasons some people believe blogging is dead is because social media platforms have changed the game for how we share content online. Years ago, a blog that posted a daily OOTD (outfit of the day) picture with a short description may have been heavily trafficked, but now, it’s easier to create (and view) that type of content via Instagram. So, the type of content that is working for blogs specifically tend to be longer form posts with a lot of writing and a lot of illustrative images on top of that as well! Blogging isn’t dead, but the definition of what makes a good blog post is certainly changing!
5. 61% of US online consumers have made a purchase based on a recommendation found in a blog
If this stat doesn’t seem like it pertains to the topic of this post, you aren’t paying enough attention! The life or death of blogging is always going to center around the successfulness of blogs to do one single thing- help readers! The more readers, or customers in this example, that go looking for answers and finding them on in a blog post, the more reliable blogs become. If most people who buy things online turn to trusted bloggers to give them a recommendation and then take that recommendation and turn around to spend their money, this co-dependent relationship between consumers and blogs illustrates how important blogs remain to our economy. When people like things enough to spend their money on them, you know you have something good, and when people go to blogs to find answers for what they should be spending their money on, blogs become a very powerful living force!
6. 21 to 35 year olds make up 53% of the total blogging population
Blogging is debatably a younger persons game. With over half of bloggers ranging from 21-35, we aren’t talking about an age group that is going away any time soon, but again, this statistic is a sign that may explain why many believe blogging is dead, when it really isn’t. If most bloggers are under 35 and blogging has been around for a solid decade at this point, it’s clear that in time, many bloggers are getting out of the game and closing up shop. Not all, but many. This high turnover may lead some to believe that the medium is dying, when in fact the change is all just part of the churn (churn is a business term that refers to the average change in an industry, people come and people go, it’s all part of the churn). All industries experience some sort of churn, however, its easy to get distracted by one side of the churn, either the negative or positive results, and forget that two sides exist together to come to an overall result. If we are focused on the number of blogs that are dying and ignore the number of new blogs that are joining the churn, we end up seeing only the decline!
7. Blogging is still the #1 Digital Marketing Strategy
From business’ big to small, blogging is still the #1 way online marketers create digital content. Granted, social media is hot on it’s tail, and for good reason, however, blogging is a form of content creation that works for businesses which means it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Now, if you are a blogger or want to start a blog but you don’t have a business, you may think that this and many other of the statistics I have shared in this post are not relevant to you, however, you don’t have to be a business to benefit from the strategies and information businesses use to advance their brand online. The topic of this blog post is the 7 Signs that Blogging is Not Dead, and if you came to read this article, you most likely are concerned that your time and effort spent on blogging may not pay off in the long run for you, whatever your blogging goals and aspirations may be. The fact remains, however, that if businesses are still spending their time and money blogging, it’s for good reason and you shouldn’t worry about the future solvency of blogging as a medium. It’s going to be here for a while, you can bet on it!
What do you think? Is blogging dead or has it just reinvented itself? I’d like to hear your thoughts on the subject in the comments, so make sure to let me know your experience with blogs as either a reader or writer of blog content!
When you’re first getting started as a blogger, it’s easy to get obsessed with your site traffic stats and get discouraged if you’re not seeing immediate results. Often times, I find that bloggers may think they are doing all the right things to encourage traffic to their sites like blogging regularly and covering a variety of topics that may interest their ideal audience, however, when it comes to building traffic to a site, you need more than a “if you build it, they will come” mentality. If your site isn’t getting the traffic you would expect or building momentum towards a growing readership, there are a few things you need to work on to make it happen.
Understand your audience & niche
If you want to build significant traffic to your site, you really have to understand your audience and niche! You may have a general idea of who you’re writing for and the people who visit your site, but sometimes, those two groups aren’t the same thing. When it comes to attracting a readership, you need to really understand who is coming to your site right now and why, OR if you aren’t getting much traffic, you need to get very specific with yourself on who you are trying to attract, and what sort of niche content you are able to create that would keep their attention. It’s not enough to write posts you think your ideal audience wants to read, you really need to go out there an make an effort to understand them by finding those individuals and talking to them on a deep and meaningful level about the things they are looking for online. You may think you know, but if you are creating content that isn’t gaining traction, you don’t know. Digging deep with market research will give you insight to help you create niche content that truly attracts your ideal audience.
Write interesting long form blog posts with images and graphics
Trends in blogging have been shifting for some time now and it’s now become evident that longer form blog posts are what readers are looking for. Statistics show 1,500 word posts are a sweet spot, but of course, the gist of this is that you need to be producing highly valuable content which tends to be longer in nature. Writing a 1,500 word journal entry most likely won’t do the trick, instead, you will want to focus on creating content that answers your audiences frequently asked questions, teaches them skills they desire to have or shares insights on topics that they are looking to engage with online. It’s probably not the word count that is keeping people hooked, instead, its the fact that a longer blog post has more information on the topic they are interested in, and a greater chance of keep their attention and turning them into repeat readers who share the helpful content they find. Don’t forget that words alone aren’t the key to engagement, and that if you want to get people’s attention with your posts, you will need to make sure to include illustrative images in the form of blog post headers that help add content to a post topic or informative graphics that add to the quality of the post.
Share your posts on other platforms
If you are looking to build traffic to your site via your content, it’s not enough to write a great post and let it sit their on your site. Without even a small, engaged audience, the likelihood of your great content being seen is slim. Although great SEO practices can help your post turn up in search results, why wait for your audience to come to you when you have the opportunity to bring the content directly to them? That’s why it’s up to you to share that content everywhere you can. Link your posts to Pinterest with one of your great images, tweet about your content using relevant hashtags that will help it get discovered, and of course, link your posts in Facebook where it can be liked, shared and hopefully lead to more traffic.
Find other creators with similar audiences and guest post
When your content alone isn’t helping your traffic grow, a quick fix for instant traffic can be getting yourself in front of the audiences of other creators. This can be especially helpful if you are just getting started because finding a ready-made audience that fits your ideal readership can be a quick way to gain fans and page views. In this situation, you will want to identify other established creators who have relevant followings slightly larger than yours, engage with them, and negotiate a guest posting opportunity. You will need to do most of the work by contacting and pitching a great piece of content to the established creator, but if you can get them to agree to it, you will be able to spread the influence of your content to other corners of the internet.
Locate where your audience interacts online and become an influencer there
There are forums and Facebook groups for a multitude of different communities online, and these established sites are a great place to go to find your ideal audience and direct them back to your site and your content if you take the time to establish yourself as an influencer there. It’s not enough to find a Facebook page and start leaving links to your content. In most cases, actions like that can get you banned or marked as spam, however, if you take the time to get engaged as a true audience member and then interact with as many relevant people as possible on the platform, you will gain the trust of that community and can start directing traffic to your own site. Becoming an influencer on other online communities isn’t really that difficult I find. If you really take a hard look, you will see that with every forum or Facebook group, individuals rise to the top by frequently engaging with the community by being helpful and engaging others. You will need to dedicate time to this effort, but when most people are engaging minimally, you can stand out by engaging often. It wouldn’t be out of the question to go from a complete unknown to a leader of a community online in just a few short weeks or months of dedicated service to that community.
I hope this post gives you some new insights or strategies to help you grow traffic to your blog or site. Remember, if you are putting in the effort and not seeing results after a consistent period of time, you most likely need to adjust something you are doing. I never recommend making major changes to your presence online unless you see you’re making major mistakes, but sometimes little tweaks can yield big results! I also want to make sure you understand that growing a large following of traffic to a site is something that takes time and setting reasonable goals is important to keeping your expectations balanced, but if you find that you are making no traction, something needs to change! Don’t keep doing the same things over and over and expect different results. Online, the best strategy for growth is it keep at it and to approach a problem from different directions until a solution is reached!
For those of us on the internet who manage a blog, either as a marketing tool or a creative outlet, we know that creating great content week after week is hard! Even for the most talented among us, writing blog posts can be tricky, and let’s be honest, most of us could use some help improving our writing process as well as writing skills. So today I want to share with you three tools that have helped me to become a better blogger and a better writer of blog posts.
Scrivener
Scrivener is a software application that I use on my computer to write, edit and organize my blog posts. I’ve been using the program for years to keep my content in order and to organize my ideas. Although you may not be thinking of a word processing program as a tool that can help with writing better blog posts, it can really streamline the process of creating content. Ask yourself, where do you write your blog posts? Do you use a dedicated word processing program or do you write your posts inside the text editor of your blogging platform? Unfortunately, if you aren’t using a word processing program to organize your writing, you are missing out on a lot of great word processing features like word count, spelling and grammar check, and a built in dictionary/thesaurus! But Scrivener is also more powerful than your standard word processor because it also has great tools for outlining and organizing content ideas within the application. I also love that I have all my blog posts organized in one place, so I can refer back to old posts and I have a record of my content in case something happens to my blog or my website crashes while I’m adding a new post. So, if you aren’t using a dedicated system for writing, editing and organizing your blog posts, I would highly recommend checking out Scrivener. You can read more about how I use Scrivener here or visit their website for more details!
I’m often asked by other bloggers if there are any courses or books I recommend that can teach you how to write better blog posts. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with any on the specific topic of writing blog posts, however, I do highly recommend a book called On Writing Well to those who wish to improve their writing style! On Writing Wellis a classic book that teaches how to improve nonfiction writing, which is what blogging is most of the time. What I love about this book is that it’s an easy read but filled with practical tips for improving your writing, and it even dispels the notion of some long-held “rules” of writing that just aren’t applicable anymore (i.e. ending a sentence with a preposition- you can if you want to!) It’s a very practical guide to writing that has been revised and expanded to include more modern examples of writing, and I think it’s a great place to start if you are someone who’s interested in become a better writer.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Score
As I was researching ways to improve your writing, I came across the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test that actually scores a piece of writing for how easy it is to understand. This sort of test is frequently used in teaching settings to understand the reading level of a specific written work (think grade school reading levels and such) but I noticed that the SEO Plugin that I use for WordPress, called Yoast SEO, included this score as part of the SEO grading of my post. Now, the idea behind using this test to determine the readability of your post is that your blog posts should be fairly easy for people to read. Blog posts with long sentences and complicated grammar may be harder for most people to understand, so you want to use this score to help you simplify your writing so that more people are able to understand and enjoy your content. As I already mentioned, my blog has a plugin that generates this score for me when I’m formatting my posts for publication, however, if you don’t use WordPress and have access to this Plugin, don’t worry because I found a free web-tool that you can use to check the readability of your blog posts. All you need to do is click here to visit the website and paste your blog post into the text editor on the page and it will generate your readability score! Definitely check it out and see what level your content scores at in terms of readability and perhaps use what you learn while reading On Writing Well to help you simplify and clarify your writing style!
So those are three tools that you can use right now to help you improve your blog posts! I’d love to know if you have any other suggestions if you have experience with any other interesting books or tools that you would like to recommend to the community. If you give any of these tools a try, I’d love to know about it, so please feel free to message me or leave me a comment below to tell me about your progress!
One of the hardest parts of being a blogger is coming up with great new content every week. As a blogger, I need a constant stream of inspiration in order to come up with ideas for my posts, images and my blog’s design. Although as they say, inspiration is everywhere, being a constant learner is an important part of locating inspiration in your life. If you are having trouble finding inspiration, here are a few things I like to do to find inspiration when I need it most!
1. Listen to music: I suggest listening to all types of music, even genre’s your not that familiar with or don’t even like. Variety is so important when opening up your mind to inspiration and you need to listen to everything that’s out there if you want to discover something new that will inspire you to think differently.
2. Read about something new: Scientific articles tend to be the most powerful for me, but learning about any new subject can open a door of possibilities and inspiration. It doesn’t really matter what your blog topic is or what you normally write about, just learning a bit about a new discipline or subject can really help open the channels of creativity in your mind!
3. Write stream of consciousness style: Sometimes you never know where your own mind will lead you until you follow it. One great exercise I suggest for writers is to do a bit of stream of consciousness writing. This means you just start typing and listen to that voice inside your head about what to write. Start with things on your mind and your own thoughts and just follow them through and see where they lead you.
4. Go to a new place you have never been: New experiences generate inspiration like none other! I find that just driving or wandering to a new part of town I have never been to really helps open my brain up to possibilities. Seeing new sights, smelling new smells and living through new experiences can be very inspiring and something of an adventure!
5. Get to know someone new: Meeting new people and getting to know them is a very powerful one on one experience. There are so many wonderful people out there in the world with so many interesting points of view that hopefully by getting to know one of them, their views may rub off on you a bit and cause you to look at the world differently!
6. Watch a movie that you don’t think you’re interested in: Often times its important to challenge our perceptions of our own likes and desires. Breaking established patterns like watching movies in genre’s your not used to watching is a really simple way to sample and test out new things without making a major commitment. Hopefully, that movie you weren’t interested actually entertains you and brings you to see that you shouldn’t discount things based on what you think you already like!
7. Do something physically challenging to you: This doesn’t have to mean you should go out and run a marathon if you don’t normally run, it just means to push yourself physically. While I’m at the gym I find so much inspiration just hiding out in my own mind while I’m on a machine. I think that when you’re focusing your physical energy on working out, your mind starts to open up and relax allowing new inspiration and ideas to just hit you. Give it a try and you’ll be killing two birds with one stone!
What sorts of things do you do to find inspiration? Have you ever tried or plan to try any of the items on this list? How did it work for you? Let me know in the comments below!
xoxo,
This article was first published on Strange & Charmed on March 20th, 2014 and is being reposted as part of my Holiday Prep Hiatus! For the months of November & December I will be recycling some vintage S&C content that you may have missed in order to give myself some extra time to finalize projects and spend time with my family during the holiday season. All reposted content will be marked as such. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past blog post!
I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what goes into making a great blog. I honestly believe that it’s not just great writing alone that makes a blog great. Perhaps a few years ago this would have been the case, but blogs now are so much more of an experience beyond words and because of this, it takes a combination of a lot of different factors like great writing, inspiring pictures and a well-organized layout. In an effort to help improve my own blog, I have been making a study of this topic recently and you may notice new things popping up here and there on my site over the next few days and weeks! So, back to the title of this post, the essential parts of a great blog. I read a lot of blogs and I’m always surprised when I come across one that is lacking some of the most essential elements that make up a great reader experience. What are these essential elements? Let’s discuss them one at a time!
An About Page
No matter what the topic of your blog, I think its very important to have an About Page so that interested readers can learn more about the history of the site, who writes it and why they should bother reading it. In an About Page, it’s always good to have some important pieces of information to share with your readers.
A picture of the blogger(s), so that readers can make that human connection from one computer screen to another.
A description of the types of posts they can expect.
A brief history as to why the blog was created and its point of view that makes it unique.
A FAQ Page
After a blog has been established for some time, it becomes common for the blogger behind the site to receive the occasional question. It’s inevitable, however, that after some time, readers will have the same questions. So, to save yourself time and some effort, its always nice to put together a FAQ page. I think it gives readers a sense that the blogger cares about making sure their questions are answered. So, if you get a lot of questions and specifically a lot of similar questions, you may want to add a FAQ page.
Contacts
Although while you are writing, blogging may sometimes feel like a one way street, the truth is that when your posts will often inspire conversations and connections with your readers in ways you may not ever have expected. While comments are a nice way to connect, they are not always the be all and end all. Make sure to leave some form of contact for your readers to get in touch with you, either by means of a contact form or better yet, an email link.
Social Media Links
If you are a blogger, you will no doubt also use a few forms of social media, and readers that enjoy your posts and read your blog regularly will no doubt want to follow you elsewhere on the internet. Make sure to display your social media links in a prominent spot on your blog so they are easy to spot. You would be surprised how often readers feel compelled to send you a Tweet or check out your Instagram feed when they are enjoying your blog!
A Guided Tour or Best Of for New Readers
Now, I will admit, this one is a little more rare in my opinion, but I still think it’s an awesome feature to have on your blog and one that I am in the process of putting together. What is it exactly? Basically, it’s a post or page on you blog that is filled with some of your best work! It’s like an introduction to your blog through your posts themselves. Arrange posts by topic and pick out some of your favorites to showcase for your readers. It’s a really great way to help new readers get a good footing on your best and most popular work, as well as give them a general overview of what you tend to write about. If you’re stuck on how to put together this type of post, I suggest asking yourself which of your posts best describe you and your blog. Think about which posts have the most comments and don’t forget to link to any series’ you may write on a regular basis so new readers can catch up on the fun!
Are there any other parts of a blog that you think as essentials for a great blog? Let me know what you think makes a great blog by sending me a tweet or leaving me a comment below!
This article was first published on Strange & Charmed on August 14th, 2014 and is being reposted as part of my Holiday Prep Hiatus! For the months of November & December I will be recycling some vintage S&C content that you may have missed in order to give myself some extra time to finalize projects and spend time with my family during the holiday season. All reposted content will be marked as such. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past blog post!
Blogging 101 is a 10 part series where I share my tips and tricks for creating and growing a blog from scratch. This is the fourth installment in the series, and you can find more information on the topics of this series here.
Blogging 101: Organization Tips for Bloggers
Being a blogger is like having another job. If you already work one full-time, you need to be very organized when it comes to your focus for your blog, your posting schedule and the time you allot to managing and responding to emails, comments and social media outlets. Now, I don’t work off a strict schedule for every hour of my day. Generally, I do what I can when I can, but I have a few organizational tools that help me stay on track, and make it easy for me to maximize my time.
First and foremost, I use an editorial calendar to plan out my posts. Now, what an editorial calendar looks like to me and what it looks like to you can be two very different things. My first editorial calendar was a printed one page monthly calendar where I planned out which blog posts would be scheduled for which days. Now, I use a monthly calendar in my Filofax. You could use a paper calendar, a list in a notebook, or even a digital calendar to map out your posts, but whichever way you choose needs to be convenient for you so that you can plan your posts and refer back to the calendar when you need to write them.
The next thing I use to help plan out my posts is a list for brainstorming blog posts. Whenever I think of a post idea, I write it down in my list that I keep in one of my Filofax’s. When I am on the go or don’t have easy access to my planner, I use an app on my iPhone called Clear. I will periodically move the blog post ideas from my iPhone app to my master list, which I then refer to when planning out my blog posts on my editorial calendar for the next month. I normally plan out a month at a time, but I have planned up to three at a time in the past. You could plan as much or as little as you want, as this system is extremely flexible.
As for managing my social media presence, there are a variety of apps I use to help me connect with my current readers and potential readers! I use a service called Twitter Feed that automatically posts links to my blog posts to my Twitter feed. That way, I don’t have to worry about forgetting to tweet out my posts. But Twitter Feed alone is not the best way to get my blog posts out on Twitter, so I also use a wonderful app called HootSuite that is one of the few apps that I have found that will allow me to schedule Tweets and even Facebook posts from my iPhone! I cannot even explain to you how convenient it is to plan out the Tweets you want to publish and set it to publish on its own without me having to babysit my Twitter! I will normally go ahead and plan out a weeks worth of posts and schedule them so I don’t have to remember to stop and Tweet during my busy day!
The final organizational tip I have for bloggers is not related to apps or planning tools. This has to do with photography and finding images for your blog posts. Now, I will be going into the topic of photography in a later post, but for now I want to talk about photo shoots and talking your own blog photos. If you’ve noticed, for some time now I have been relying on my own photographs to supplement my blog posts. It is very rare for me to use someone else’s images because I don’t own them. When I do use other peoples images, I make sure to source them from creative commons websites. Specifically, I like to use the Flickr Creative Commons Image Database. Like I said, I try to use my own images whenever possible, so to accomplish this, I plan frequent photo shoots where I take a look at my blog post topic list and get ideas for photo’s that I could use to accompany those posts. I set up vignettes, make sure my lighting looks nice and take an hour or two to just shoot as many pictures as I can. I would say I do these sorts of photo shoots once or twice a month and they give me plenty of images to work with that may pertain to specific posts I already have planned out and sometimes even posts that I may write in the future. I organize these photo’s on my computer by the date they were taken and the general theme for the photos so that I can always find what I am looking for in the future! If you are interested in learning more about how to take great pictures for your blog posts and social media, check out this video training on 7 Strategies for Using Photography to Elevate your Brand Online or if you want a more in depth training, sign up for my Digital Styling Lightroom video course today!
So, do you already implement any of these organizational tips in your current blogging process? Do you have any other tips and tricks that help to keep you organized that you can share with us? Drop us a line in the comments below!
xoxo,
This article was first published on Strange & Charmed on March 24th, 2014 and is being reposted as part of my Holiday Prep Hiatus! For the months of November & December I will be recycling some vintage S&C content that you may have missed in order to give myself some extra time to finalize projects and spend time with my family during the holiday season. All reposted content will be marked as such. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past blog post!
