I promised myself a while ago that I would never blog about blogging – I hate reading posts about how I should or shouldn’t blog and being told what I can and can’t say or do but when I saw the theme Kate has set for this week’s Listography, I couldn’t resist sharing my top 5 blogging tips with you….
1. Add your Blog to the Kindle Store – It’s really quick and easy to do and you earn 30% on any sales. Most blog subscriptions sell for about 99p a month so you will make around 30p a month from each subscription.
I added mine about a year ago and then forgot all about it until I got a nice little cheque through the post a few months ago. If you want to put a bit more effort into it than me, you could get fellow bloggers to rate your blog on the Amazon Kindle Store to tempt more people to try it and a small badge on your blog letting people know they can subscribe on their Kindle is bound to get more people signing up. Kindle’s are getting more popular all the time so it can only be a good thing to get your blog on there now.
2. Make it easy for your readers to subscribe to your blog feed- Now that Google Friend Connect is on it’s way out, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to subscribe to follow you. I have an icon for my RSS feed as well as one for my Twitter and Facebook pages and I think if you were looking to follow this blog, I’ve made it as clear as I can how to do it.
3. Install something like Google Analytics or Statcounter and then completely ignore it unless you absolutely have to look at it! I’m pretty sure all bloggers go though a bit of a stat obsessed phase and really, it’s completely natural for you to want to know if people are reading what you’re writing but it’s very easy to get a bit too obsessed with it all (speaking from experience). I’ve learnt now that the best measure of how much people are reading (and more importantly enjoying what they’re reading) is by the comments left on each post or by the tweets and e mails I get about it.
4. Make yourself a media kit to attach to your replies to e mails that any PR’s or companies send you about paid for posts and advertising. There’s a great guide for this over at Blogger.Ed. My media pack details things like my monthly unique visitors and page views, my page rank and also details of my Twitter and Facebook followers along with my charges for advertising. While you’re over at Blogger.Ed you should have a look at the other blog posts as there’s some really good ones with lots of ideas on how to grow your blog. There’s also a forum for bloggers and I’ve found that to be invaluable, I’ve had some great advice and some great opportunities from there.
5. Remember why you started to blog – I started to make sure that I had a record of the children growing up and decided to combine this with sharing frugal and moneysaving tips as this is a big focus for us as a family.
6. Bonus tip! Photos – I love blogs with photos! I use Picnik which is a free photo editing program that’s really simple to use for my photos and I also love Instagram on my iPhone. I do have an all singing, all dancing DSLR camera but to be honest the iPhone camera does the job most of the time.
So there you go my top 5 blogging tips 😉
What’s your top blogging tip?
