Journalists & Bloggers Toolbox Blog

It’s the start of the New Year and time to look at what we’ve been doing with blogging and make those plans on how to improve over the next year.  Now if you miss doing this at the beginning of the year, you can always step back and take a look at your blog at any time of the year. In fact, doing this more than once a year might be beneficial.

There are some things that I look at every year.  First I like to look at the appearance of the blog. A new year can be a great time to switch to a new theme to freshen things up.  Also, I look at any pages (as opposed to posts) that I have on the blog. Since pages aren’t updated as regularly as blog posts, it can be easy for them to become outdated.  Also, I look at the way I’m structuring the blog. Do I have a good presentation of content and images?  Over the years, I’ve made minor adjustments to the way I handle images in my posts that help make the posting go a lot faster.  After all, why get bogged down fiddling with embedding images if you don’t have to.

Of course this is also a good time to review your content strategy.  What have you done during the last year that was most effective as far as content?  What was least effective? But don’t stop there. Consider what took the most time and what took the least. Those things that are low in effectiveness but time consuming are the things you need to consider eliminating.

So, have you reviewed your blog for the new year?

I want to tell you about one blogging technique that works in two great ways. It helps you attract more readers to your blog while at the same time, giving you a chance to take a blogging break.  Now, for many of us a blog is a commitment. Many of the top blogs out there are known for posting at least once a day if not multiple times a day.  And readers come to expect that regularity.  But for a blogger, it can be tiring. So some bloggers have started grouping together to offer each other the chance to be a guest blogger.

The guest blogger concept can work many different ways and you’ll want to decide on the one that is best for you, but I’ll give you a quick look at the most common process.  Generally, when you’re invited to guest blog, you write a post or two for another blogger’s blog.  Those post go on his or her blog, not yours. But they always include information on who you are and a link back to your blog. This is great because it lets followers of the other blog find you and potentially become followers of your blog.  And it also helps you build a list of potential guest bloggers.

And why do you need guest bloggers?  Well, say you want to take a vacation or you just are facing a hectic schedule and can’t focus on the blog.  You could use some help, right?  Well, you invite some of your blogging friends to write guest blog posts.  Each person may only need to write a post or two, so it doesn’t throw off their own schedule.  Then you use those posts to cover for your vacation period or just to supplement your regular posts.  It’s a great way of expanding your reach and finding new readers. Because of course your guest bloggers are going to mention on their blog that they’re blogging over on your blog.  And that’s what you want.

This is the big question most bloggers face soon after they start blogging — how often should the blog be updated?  And the question that follows that is — how much time am I going to need to make this blog a success?  Now there’s no single right answer to the question because there’s no single type of blog or audience.

Now most readers are going to expect a blog to be updated at least on a weekly basis. This is frequent enough to give readers something to come back for on a regular basis.  And even a casual blogger should be able to make a weekly post to their blog.  And while it’s okay if you miss a week here and there, remember that you don’t want the blog to start looking stagnate or deserted by the owner.

But depending on the goal of your blog, one post a week may not be often enough.  If you want to blog to promote an affiliate marketing site or to gain enough of a reader base to make money off of a Google ads account, you’ll find that the challenge isn’t just in writing posts, it’s in keeping a good spot on the search engines.   Google and other search engines check to see if there has been recent activity on a blog or site when determining the rank.  So, if you’re blogging on a popular or common topic, you may find that you have to blog daily to keep the site ranking.

So, before you begin that blog, consider your goals. Are you just writing a casual blog that will be fine with a weekly update or are you chasing the affiliate marketing dream?  Because even in blogging, it takes work to make the money flow.

Today I’m going to introduce you to one of my favorite Twitter tools.  A little site called Friend or Follow.  Now, there is one thing that Friend or Follow does that you need.  It will tell you who isn’t following you back.  Well, it also tells you who follows you and who you aren’t following back. And gives you a list of friends where you both follow each other.  But the last two work in your favor. The first tells you want’s working against you.

Here’s what you need to know.  On twitter, your influence is calculated by the number of followers you have related to the number of people you follow.  If you have more followers than people you follow back, then you have a greater influence.  Now, I’m going to share a little secret — you can achieve this simply by checking to see when your followers last tweeted and unfollowing members who’ve stopped tweeting.  This will make your numbers go up but you won’t piss off active followers.

So, why do you need Friend or Follow?  Well, because other twitter people know that they need more followers than people they follow. Some have resorted to using the annoying tactic of going out and following new people on a regular basis.  They wait for some of those people to follow back. Then they unfollow them.  Which means your influence goes down and their influence goes up.

Which is where FriendorFollow comes in.  Use it to check to see who is playing twitter tricks on you.

So you’re thinking of blogging but you’re worried you don’t have the time to keep a blog going on a regular basis. You’re worried about coming up with topics and keeping readers engaged and coming back to your blog. Or maybe you just want to find a way to bring more people to your blog.

Plenty of people face these challenges when they consider blogging.  I’ve come across one solution that I find people often don’t think about pursuing — group blogging.  The idea of a blog as a personal space to write about our own thoughts or ideas is a compelling one. But it’s not always the right  models for all bloggers to follow.  Many blogging platforms, such as Blogger or WordPress, allow more than one writer to contribute to a blog. They can help make blogging a shared chore or perhaps a shared joy.

To set up a group blog, the first step is usually to establish a central theme or topic for the blog. Or to find an aspect that ties the bloggers together and provides a focus point that will draw in readers.  I see this happening a lot with everything from technology focused blogs to Romance authors who join together to promote each other and their books.  Once you have a theme or focus, you’ll have an idea of who to invite to join your blog.  You want members who can work within the blogs focus, but you want to allow for some variety in views and perspectives to engage the reader.  Then you’ll want to set up a schedule.  With a large enough group, you can ensure fresh posts on a daily basis on the blog. But you’ll also want to make sure those posts are spread out a bit and aren’t all posted on the same day.

Of course someone needs to coordinate the group blog and make sure people are able to post and enjoying the work.  If you don’t have time to do that, you can always look for existing group blogs and ask to join.  Of course, an existing blog might want to see some evidence of your writing and blogging skill.  But it is an option worth exploring.  Group blogs can help you connect to readers who might not normally find your blog.  It will give you better reach as a blogger.

This is an important question for writers, journalists and bloggers.  When readers read your work, your page — just how much do they read?  How much of this are you reading right now? Okay, I’m at the beginning sentences so you might not have started skimming yet.  Or you might have.  It’s like a secret spy cipher.  If I could figure out that readers skip most of the text and pick up on about every tenth word, they I could just hide my real message in about ten words apart.

Fortunately there are people out there who do studies on this sort of thing.  What may surprise many writers coming to the web from more traditional media is that readers react to onscreen content differently than they do print content.  We seem to be more impatient on the web.  I don’t know if it’s our reaction to the monitors or the way the text is positioned differently from print media or if it’s just a reaction we have to our expectations from reading online.

Now, did you skip about half of that second paragraph?  Bet you did. We read online content, we tend to actually read or see only about 20 percent of the content.  So, how to you conquer that?  Well, watch this:

• Do you write for the web?
• Do you know readers only read 20% of any page?
• Use bullet points to focus readers on key content.
• Avoid long paragraphs, which tend to be skipped.

There, did that help?

This is the big question most bloggers face soon after they start blogging — how often should the blog be updated?  And the question that follows that is — how much time am I going to need to make this blog a success?  Now there’s no single right answer to the question because there’s no single type of blog or audience.

Now most readers are going to expect a blog to be updated at least on a weekly basis. This is frequent enough to give readers something to come back for on a regular basis.  And even a casual blogger should be able to make a weekly post to their blog.  And while it’s okay if you miss a week here and there, remember that you don’t want the blog to start looking stagnate or deserted by the owner.

But depending on the goal of your blog, one post a week may not be often enough.  If you want to blog to promote an affiliate marketing site or to gain enough of a reader base to make money off of a Google ads account, you’ll find that the challenge isn’t just in writing posts, it’s in keeping a good spot on the search engines.   Google and other search engines check to see if there has been recent activity on a blog or site when determining the rank.  So, if you’re blogging on a popular or common topic, you may find that you have to blog daily to keep the site ranking.

So, before you begin that blog, consider your goals. Are you just writing a casual blog that will be fine with a weekly update or are you chasing the affiliate marketing dream?  Because even in blogging, it takes work to make the money flow.