Silly Old Twit

Blog Format

When you first set up your blog keep it simple. This is a good rule of thumb when starting a blog or trying to improve one you already have. Forget all the bells and whistles that you may see on other’s blogs. You might for instance fancy having a music soundtrack to your blog and feel that it will create a certain ambiance but the reality is that if someone wants music they will put on a cd or listen to their Ipod. Quite apart from that the music you play may just be the thing that turns potential readers away in droves. Don’t add lots of buttons or badges to your sidebar unless they are relevant. Use them sparingly. Apart from just giving your blog a cluttered look they will very often just confuse a search engine. Later on as you learn more about blogging you can add all these extras if you still want them but if you are not an expert than steer clear of them

Content

You will no doubt have read somewhere that content is everything. This is true. Once you have actually set up your blog content should be your first concern. If your content is bad then all the advertising or promotion you do for your site is not only a waste of time but counter productive. You would not for instance stand in the street handing out fliers which said your blog was rubbish but if you promote a bad blog then that is exactly what you are doing. Write about something interesting. No one want’s to know what you had for dinner or about your wonderful child , unless that is you have some strange eating habits and your children are a bit odd. Don’t try to be a Stephen King or someone like that just write in your own voice. Don’t try to be ‘intelligent’ just be natural. Remember that every day of the week you chat to people at work and in the street or wherever else you talk to your friends and they, to a greater or lesser degree enjoy your conversation so do the same when you write your blog. Make sure to use your spell check. There is nothing so off putting as bad spelling. Try to post something every day that way the search engines and blog directories will know you are a serious blogger and provided your content is at least reasonable you will get noticed by them. Use simple basic key words. Don’t rush out spending money or time on SEO (search engine optimiser) software. It’s quite difficult to master and will only serve to confuse you at first and you don’t need them in the beginning anyway. If you follow the simple steps I have suggested so far then you will find that you will start getting some traffic without any of these programmes. These software programmes and techniques have their place and can be useful but they are not quite as necessary as some make out and they take quite a bit of time and energy to master and your far better off just using that time and energy improving your content.

Search Engines and Directories

Submit your blog to search engines and blog directories. Google and Technorati should be your first call. Sit down once a week and get a list of search engines and blog directories on the Internet and make a list and then submit your blog to all of them. You can get software that will do it for you and there are a lot of sites that say they will do it for you but do it yourself. It will take longer but will pay in the long run. Ignore all those sites that tell you they can get you traffic. They are all a con , they don’t work and if they did you might just find yourself being blacklisted by search engines.
As a very wise man once said “The trick is that there is no trick”. This is the single most important thing to remember. The advice I have given here is good advice. It’s not ‘sexy’ and it’s not designed to make you feel that you have just been told some some really cool techniques. There are some famous and well known sites out there which will claim that they are giving you good advice but what they are really doing is making you feel good and that’s all they are doing. Have a look at my previous posts on blogging and you will understand what I mean. Don’t be too quick to believe everything that fellow bloggers tell you. People will be quick to tell you of their successes (even if they have none) and slow to tell you about their failures.