"Blogging Tips" Posts
We offer you these tips to keep your blog well-designed, well-written, and well-promoted.
Microsoft Word Becomes Less Evil When Authoring Blogs with WordPress 2.1
Late last year, ContentRobot lamented that using Microsoft Word to craft blog posts was asking for trouble.
One of the bigger issues we had was wacky formatting of certain characters (including curly quotes that display as typos or mistakes in many RSS readers).
To combat some of this silliness for our WordPress clients, we installed Unfancy Quote by Semiologic. In a nutshell, it would remove any styling to the following:
5 Things You Can Do to Get People to Link to Your Blog
Linkbait: verb: describe a variety of practices that have the purpose of generating links to your site.
Want to get people to link to your site? Here are five linkbaiting techniques to consider:
- Tools – offer useful, fun or cool tools that webmasters can use on their blog. Don’t forget to point them back to your own.
- Quizzes – quizzes, surveys and tests are popular with web users and can be quite viral. Make them fun and humorous!
- Contests and Giveaways – create something for people to participate in. Ask interesting questions related to your topics.
Tips for Commenting on Other Blogs
Are you commenting on other blogs? It can be a great way to bring traffic to your own blog, but you shouldn’t comment for commenting sake. Know that what you say reflects positively or negatively on your own blogs.
Here are 3 tips to follow when adding your two cents:
- Write or ask something intelligent that extends the conversation.
- Teach something new.
- Make a provactive statement that makes others react. And, no, that doesn’t mean being nasty if you want to be controversial.
Finally, while its nice if others respond to the comments you’ve made, don’t take it personally if you don’t get a reaction.
Does Your Blog Earn the “Nod?”
You know those products that inspire the “Nod” … like seeing someone working on a Mac Powerbook in a local cafe or the look from fellow MINI Cooper drivers at an intersection.
The Nod recognizes a person who is part of the club or someone who “gets it.” And it goes beyond having something in common.
Does Your Blog Get a Nod?
When we go to your blog, can we inherently assume your readers possess something more and that it inspires others to want to become part of it?
Keeping Blogging and Maintain Momentum
Problogger has written a great post on why blog projects might lose steam after running for a while. Don’t let this happen to you!
You bit off more than they can chew
Did you start multiple blogs that the same time and find you can’t maintain them? Or did you pick a topic that is just too wide and, therefore, overwhelming?
Tip: Focus on what you enjoy most and put your heart and writing into it – it may mean dropping a blog or two, but remember that better written blogs get better results.
You ran out of things to say
Did you pick a topic that is too narrow and now you can’t find much to write about?
Tip: Find a new twist on what you’ve been talking about and see if that can revitalize your creativity and perhaps expand into new territory.
