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Hopefully you read my previous tips in Part 1, so here are my next set of 7 tips. Most of these ideas are based on what I’ve learnt myself or what I’ve learnt from reading other people’s blogs. The tips are not rocket science, but they go a long way to helping you run a successful blog in any niche.

1. Break up paragraphs of text

There’s nothing more annoying than trying to read great long paragraphs of text. If you’re reading something online, its hard enough to read from the screen as it is. If you have paragraphs that are 10, 20, 30 lines in length, you can leave your readers feeling breathless. Some readers might even skip a portion of your content because its too long.

A good tip is to keep paragraphs to between 5 and 7 lines in length, which usually equates to 2-4 sentences per paragraph. This allows the reader to take a small break between paragraphs. If you struggle to keep your paragraphs short, then you might be misusing punctuation or using a poor writing style. Nobody has a perfect writing style, and its worth learning how to improve your own.

2. If you use a free theme, customise it

If a blog uses the default wordpress theme, or it looks identical to another blog, then it tells me that the blog owner doesn’t know what they are doing.

You really need to choose an interesting theme for your blog that matches the subject matter. If you do use a free theme (PowerDosh does), then ensure that you customise it to make it stand out from all the other blogs. You want to make the blog easy to read, but also attractive enough that visitors are drawn to it.

3. Stick to a regular posting schedule

You want your readers to return to your blog don’t you? Then tell your readers when you are going to post an article each week, and stick to that schedule. Your readers will learn to expect articles on certain days, and come back on those days to read them. If your blog is good enough, you might even have readers who look forward to the latest articles that you publish!

If you spend 1 day a week researching and writing posts, then you can use the Wordpress scheduling facility to ensure posts appear on the site at the same time and day every week. If you regularly miss posting articles in scheduled slots, you’ll begin to lose visitors. Readers will stop visiting a site that is not regularly updated.

4. Take the time to write quality posts

So I just told you that you need to write posts regularly. You also need to ensure the posts are high quality and worth reading. So if you can only commit to writing 1 great quality post per week, then do that. You’ll do better to write 1 quality post a week, compared to 5 poor quality posts a week.

When you get an idea for a post, write it down somewhere. When you come to writing up the article, spend time researching it. Dish out a few links to other blogs (good blogging karma), and make the post a great read.

Make the article funny, or make the article insightful, or make the article useful. The key point is to ensure the reader gains value from reading your post. If they don’t, they have no incentive to read your post.

5. Don’t install too many plugins

Some blog owners go a little mad when it comes to plugins. The more plugins that you install, the longer it takes for the site to load. If the site takes too long to load, then you’ll lose readers because they lost interest.

If the page loading time is too long, then you may lose some of your regular visitors. For some interesting tips on improving page load times, die.net’s Optimizing Page Load Time article tackles the issue from a technical angle.

6. Proofred. Poofread. Proofread!

Check your articles for spelling and grammar mistakes. If your articles are riddled with errors, then you may irritate readers and cause them to stop reading your blog!

You can use a Firefox Dictionary to check your spelling as you type. However, the dictionary does not check your grammar. You can also use a word processor such as Microsoft Word and use the Spelling and Grammar tools built into the suite.

7. Manage your Comments and Spam

If you run an even moderately successful blog, you will get comment spam. Some of these comments are just senseless drivel generated by bots. Some of these comments are written by humans with a short comment like “I agree” and a few links to their site. You’ll also get pingbacks from other blogs, which are automated comments indicating that another blog has linked to yours.

Generally speaking, delete any comments that do not add value to the discussion of an article. You might have your own heuristics for deciding what to delete too.

Conclusion

So that’s it for another 7 tips. Keep your eyes peeled for part 3!


  • Filed under: Blogging