10 tips to buck up your Blog

There are zillions of resources for blogging on the net (why, there are pulp editions too!) – scripts, themes, ideas, links, hosts, dev-shops et al. But where to go for the contents? Ok, you can recycle what has been said before by someone, purely to give the content a bit more of eyeballs. Nothing wrong with it, so long as you link it back and the original writer (or, a recycler like you!) will get a pingback. Or, you can post about something that you saw, heard or read in another media, so as to wise up your viewers on what is happening around. It may be a personal journal where you merrily muse on anything under (and over) the sun – read it or GFY! 😛

Better still, you can have a niche blog, and dwell on a particular subject and have a regular clientele interested in that particular subject. Or, you may run a blog purely to spew ad-words, banners and other get-rich-quick links, in a rush to monetize your blog.

All this is ok. But you must have some visitors, in the first place!

Perhaps you simply don’t care since it is only for your mom to see or your sweetheart to say, Wow”! But there are scores of rookies who populate the blogosphere who blog and pray for recognition. For them, an answer to this million dollar question: “how to add a magnet to your blog”, will be of considerable interest!

This Washington Post article dwells on this subject based on real life experience of Washington DC-based bloggers. I have modified them with my own inputs, retaining the essence in tact and have listed them here. May be they’ll be useful to you:

1. Make each blog entry a compelling, relatable story, full in itself, rather than being full of mere links or photos.
2. Have an unique brand for your blog. It may be your peculiar writing style, one liners, quips, whatever. But it should permeate uniformly through your blog. Or, make a niche blog about a particular subject.
3. Make your blog easy on the viewers. Do not tax their eyes by adding too many bells and whistles. Have a good contrast, with readable fonts and pleasing colors – in short, keep the visual aesthetics simple. Attract the occasional visitor with your flagship content by flaunting it at the forefront. Put information about your blog on the home page and link to high-quality posts so that random viewers don’t have to search for the essence of your blog. Use such features as Top Posts, Most-commented etc., available in blog CMS’s like WordPress.
4. Leverage the blogroll facility by exchanging links with blogs of similar content or language. Link to those who belong to same locality, country etc.
5. Join blog networking sites like MyBlogLog, BlogRush, Technorati, BlogCatalog etc., and embed their widgets on your blog’s sidebar. This will help increase traffic.
6. “Spend twice as much time in posting comments on others’ blogs as you do writing on your own” – very practical advice indeed! By skillfully exploiting this trick, it seems one blogger has increased 5 daily visitors to 500! Try this proven strategy!
7. Kowtow and pray before big boys to make a mention about or give a link to your blog, so that it can achieve a spike in page views. This may not work for all.
8. Nominate yourself for awards. There are many such sites that conduct competitions amongst blogs and declare awards. You post a link to them so that your viewers can nominate blog.
9. Post with verve and consistency by being passionate about what you write. Take your blog seriously. Post almost daily and regularly. Give fresh content to viewers.
10. Socialize and join the crowd. Join blogging community sites. It helps in reciprocal visits.

May be I’ll soon add my own tips based on my thousands of hours’ of web browsing, mostly burning midnight oil!

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