Blogger’s Tips

Patience is virtue. To be a successful blogger you have to be patient. If nobody notices your blog, ask your friends and family to visit it (you can even bribe them if you want ). It is a nice start. Remember that your main purpose (aside from monetizing your blog ) is to share your thoughts.

Do you know what experts says? Blogging relaxes your mind and helps a person to have a good night sleep. Isn’t that a good reason enough to keep on blogging? Personally, I believe the success of a blog can not be measured by its number of visitors nor by the number of decimals in your paypal account alone, but by the gratifying effect it gives to the blogger.

Never give up!

I believe, when a person starts blogging, his ultimate wish is to make his blog “famous”. Well, I am guilty …who is not, anyway!

But of course, we have to accept the truth - not all blogs can reach stardom, regardless of all the hard work and the effort to make your blog a nice one. Some are just born lucky! I think some will disagree with me. I am just being brutally realistic.

Okey, if you really want to be popular, follow all the blogging tips, write relevant and well written post, SEO your blog, etc. And, don’t forget to advertise your blog.

Well, the truth is my only intention in giving the tip “advertise your blog to social networks” is to gather a fair share of audience. Anyway, isn’t it the main reason why you are blogging, to have someone who will read your posts. If it can help your blog be popular, better!

How are you going to do that?

Think of a nice topic, (eg. Blog about your recent trip to Alaminos). Think of things about Alaminos that will interest your readers, like tourist spots, accommodation details, foods and others. Organize your topic, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to write every details of your trip. Just pick out topics that are interesting and it will also help if you will take time to gather relevant information and make your post more informative, like rooms rates if you stayed in a hotel.

Write it well. English is the common language understood by many. Use it if you are comfortable with the language if you want to draw a large number of readers. If not, how about hiring or asking someone to write it for you? But of course you can always use your native language. Personally, I suggest keeping away from writing post with mixed languages, it is just a little bit confusing.

I guess returning the favor is the key phrase. If you love reading comments on your blog, then surely the blogs you have visited are also eager to hear from you. It takes only a few minutes to post a comment. Just be sure that what you are commenting is relevant to the topic or else your comment will just annoy the blogger and end up being deleted.

And lastly, don’t forget to post a comment on the blogs of readers who commented on you blog, too. It is the best way of returning the favor. Just be sure that the blogs are legitimate and relevant, may I say just skip the spammer?

Reading comments is always gratifying for me. I love reading “relevant” comments on my blog. I remember during my first few days of blogging, it always disappoints me to see that my posts have no comments yet and so when I received my first comment – I was practically ecstatic. I immediately answered the comment of my reader.

Commenting back is a nice way of saying you appreciate their visit to your blog. Also, I think answering questions of your readers is a good way of making them a follower of your blog, not only that you even have the opportunity to meet new friends.

So don’t forget to reply back to comments, okey…

One thing is for sure - personal blogs should reflect the blogger’s personality.  But, since you are sharing it with others, at least be considerate in choosing designs and plugins. Be friendly, choose designs and colors that are not offensive.

Organize your blog! Categorize your topics accordingly. And so if visitors want to read further on certain topics they can easily check out your categories. Use of plugins like recent post and related post is also helpful. If creating links to other site or topic, be sure that your links will open the correct page and are not broken.

For me, I have this notion that blogs are more on a personal matter.
Upon searching the acceptable meaning of blog, it says that - Blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.

Although there are several types of blog like Corporate blogs, Blogs by Genre (travel blogs, fashion blogs, etc.), by media type and by device type, Personal blog is still in number one.

So, I guess it follows that post on blogs would be nice if they are from first hand experience of the blogger. In ordinary conversation, frequent use of “I” is a turn –off, it makes you appear too self-centered but in blogging using “I” is ok, it makes your post have a more personal approach (e.g. I went to a paradise place called Bolinao last weekend…)  . I guess that is the essence of blogging, sharing your own experiences in life to the netizens of the blogosphere.

Using plugins is advisable, but please don’t clutter your blog with too much plugins. Choose carefully the Plugins that will be useful and relevant to your site like the Akismet which filters spam. Plugins like gravatars and  CG – Flashy titles enhances the visual appearance of your blogs.

Other useful Plugins are the recent posts and popular posts. Recent Comments helps encourage topic discussion. But what I think is one of the most powerful plugin is the related posts. Why? Because when a reader searched for a topic and found your post, surely that reader would be looking for more information and when your related post is easily visible, it encourages them to read around longer.

On my first tip, I said something like writing with hanging questions for your readers., so now that you have caught the attention of your readers, hopefully some of them would be coming back to check out your blog again. That it why it is would nice to update your blog with new post regularly. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should post everyday if you are busy with other things in life, but at least schedule it regularly, let say at least once a week?

Tip: Personally, when things really get too busy, what I do is to use the post timestamp. I write at least two posts at one time and just edit the timestamp to schedule my post.

I believe plugins are very important in all blogs. What blog doesn’t have, anyway? So to help keep your blog organize and user-friendly why not check out the plugins you are using and see if all of them are useful to you.
According to my own perception here are my top most important plugins:
Akismet – spam is good for marketing , I don’t mind receiving one or two, but to flood my blog with spam comments that is too much. So to prevent robot spammers from attacking my blog, I use akismet to filter spam comments.
Google Sitemaps – use this if you want a Google compliant sitemap for your WordPress blog,  use this.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.
Recent Comments – Displaying the most recent comments on my blog helps attracts readers to comment their own thought. I love reading comments.
Related Posts – if you want readers to stay longer reading on your blog, present them with related topics that would interest them, it really helps.