Little blogging tips part 4

Little blogging tips part 4

• 8.29.2012

I'm no expert, but every once in a while I've been posting my fave little blogging tips on here for any of you who are newer to blogging. There are tons of great resources out there (at the very least, how awesome are those Alt classes?!) but here are some of my tips for you--and they're sometimes sort of tailored to DIY/crafty/sewing blogs like you may have!

So today, I wanted to share something a little different. I'm thinking now about the blogging process, rather than about blog content or design.

Suzannah's blogging tip #10: Post frequently (at least a few times a week). If you can't do that, tweet frequently. If you can't do that, at least comment on other blogs frequently!  Do something that reminds people you exist.

When I look through blogs, I don't look at the date each entry was posted, and I don't judge how often someone posts.  But I do enjoy seeing quality, varied content on the blog homepage (showing your last 4-10 posts, generally), and of course in order to find your blog at all I have to either follow it (works much better when you post a lot), follow you or see you retweeted or mentioned on Twitter, or hear about you in a comment somewhere.

Suzannah's blogging tip #11: Make your blog easy to navigate.

However you choose to do it. That could mean using tags really well (not over-using, using for simple words like holidays, photography, recipes, personal style, whatever it is), it could mean a few links on your linkbar (I loooooove my linkbar!), it could mean some great buttons with photos or descriptions on your sidebar (home tour, our wedding, tutorials, style posts, whatever).  Blogs are great as lists of articles, but they become even better resources when people can stay on the blog looking for specific posts, learning what they want to learn that day, checking out what interests them.

Of course, tip #4 was have a search feature on your blog, so that will help it be more navigable, too!

Suzannah's blogging tip #12: Make your blog easy to FIND.

cuteblogtitle.blogspot.com is fine when you first start out, but what if you shift your focus a little after you've been blogging a while?  What if you find your title is just too long?  What if you started with yourname.blogspot.com and now want your blog's name?  Consider this...

You can buy your own domain name for pretty cheap hosted through Google/Blogger/whatever, so you don't have to do any of the fancy work of switching it over.  And, with my domain for example, adventuresindressmaking.blogspot.com redirects automatically to adventuresindressmaking.com, so anyone that had the old URL in their bookmarks or whatever can still get to it, no problem.  Having an easy-to-remember blog URL will make your blog easy for people to go to directly, tell their friends about, share in other ways, etc.  It's a win-win-win situation! ;)

So that's it for now! Hope you don't mind my friendly bits of advice, and best of luck blogging!