31DBBB Day 5: Must-Read Tips and Tutorials for Bloggers
This is Day 5 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project we are doing together in an attempt to improve our blogs and help each other become better bloggers. You can read more about it and still sign-up to participate here. Please subscribe to our RSS Feed to stay updated on the project.
Today we are going to spend some time reading a few articles that should give you some tips to become a better blogger. Thank you to all of you who participated on the first three days, we are finally getting some good discussion back and forth as I initially hoped. Let’s keep up the effort and I hope everyone is having a good time while taking steps to improve their blogging.
- Day 1 (Monday): Write an Elevator Pitch For Your Blog
- Day 2 (Tuesday): Write a List Post on your blog
- Day 3 (Wednesday): Promote a Blog Post
- Day 4 (Thursday): Analyze a Top Blog in your Niche
- Day 5 (Friday): Must-Read Tips and Tutorials for Bloggers
Darren Rowse gives 27 articles to read but I cut it down to 6 because let’s face it, most of us don’t have time to read and digest that many articles. You can decide to read a couple or all of them if you’d like but those 6 are quite comprehensive to begin with.
- How to get traffic to your blog (Seth Godin)
- 25 Paths to an Insanely Popular Blog (Skelliewag)
- How to Create Great Blog Content (Entrepreneur-Journey)
- Rethinking Blog Comments: Much more than a quick way to get web traffic (Dosh Dosh)
- 10 Reasons Readers don’t leave comments (Liz Strauss)
- 27 Blogging Secrets to Power your Community (Chris Brogan)
You know the drill by now! Don’t forget to come back and discuss what you learned today.
Discussion
- Which article was the most helpful to you?
- What tips have proven to be most effective in improving your own blog?
- What tips stand out as things you want to implement or get better at?
- Reply and give other bloggers feedback!
26 Comments
I thought 10 Reasons Readers Don’t Leave Comments was good. Some of the points, I perhaps do… like “Your blog has geeky attitude and I’m not geeky enough to keep up.” I don’t know if I’m too geeky when posting, but I could see myself being guilty of that one.
I certainly try to reply to most of the comments, except when people just type to thank… or when people think I’m such-celebrity. One day I got bombarded with emails because some guy thought I was Emma Caufield (Anya on Buffy) just because I posted a photo of her. Crazy.
Though, I don’t think this “8. You end your posts with a giant general question like “What do you think of the Big Bang Theory?” ” is such a big no-no. It just invites you to give your opinion.
I’m with Amy. I found that to be most incitement, especially since at the end of the day I think most of us desire feedback over notoriety or numbers.
All the hits in the world can’t make up for no comments.
I really enjoyed those articles. I particularly liked the How to get traffic to your blog article, it’s a funny list that is not too serious about blogging. We all do that on our own time after all and it is supposed to be a pleasant activity.
I am very concerned with the “reasons why readers don’t leave comments” because I write a lot about unknown or very old movies and sometimes I get comments on one post per five published… But, I tend to think that when I blog about something I love I am more inspired and it should be reflected in my writing too: I think my posts are more personnal that way.
I think that we have to bring something original and unique with each post we write.
I think I’ll go write my blog advice post today because of this. It’s been sitting in my drafts folder for months, but it seems like now is a good time to finally get it started.
This is great stuff, Castor, thanks! I’ll peruse those links sometime this weekend. Obviously you won’t ever need to read about this one: 10 Reasons Readers don’t leave comments (Liz Strauss)
Ahaha there is always room for improvement. I am still looking for that 1000 comment post
Maybe I’m crazy but I went with rethinking blog comments. It made me think and analyze comments like I haven’t done before. And it’s not a long article, gets right to the point and helps you emphasize and better your comments and the power that they hold.
The 10 reason people don’t comment one was good but kinda scared me. I’m paranoid about my comments as it is.
But I need to focus more on making my site a community and not just me, me, me. Although claiming my blog on Technorati was a really good idea. I made sure to do that.
Yes, I notice that there is a lot of traffic on my site (or at least a good modest amount for my humble little blog), but the same usual suspects are the ones that make the comments. I love these usual suspects, but would very much like to hear from others…so the piece on why people don’t comment here is very interesting.
I also wonder — do people leave comments without reading my fantabulous writing at all??? Sometimes you can tell he/she hasn’t read my piece just based on what is being said, which is sad to see. Skimming is ok, but don’t say you agree with my thoughts on a film, when clearly me having opposing viewpoints.
I completely agree with you, Peter, about the incredible amount of manipulation in the stock market. Transparent capital markets is just a myth and it’s obvious that things will ultimately go very, very wrong when the world decides it doesn’t want to play by our rules anymore.
The reasons people don’t comment was helpful.
I overanalyze my comments anyway.
I agree I really liked the comment blog. I think I will work on gearing those posts that require discussion in a better fashion.
I read the articles of Seth godin n Yaro starak, both are good and easy to follow. As we did, list posts are always attract readers. I try to implement ‘Write short post’ as well as ‘Writing Pillar articles. What about others.
Castor I have a question for you. How many of us in this training are Full time movie Bloggers. I just think on this, because I am working in another domain, due to my passion on Movies, i started my blog. If suppose, few of us in the training are full time blogger, how they can make money from their blog. I just think about this on yesterday while I sleep…
Any comments
Well, I would say none of us are full time movie bloggers lol. It just doesn’t put food on the table and I think most of us only have a few hours a day to dedicate to this. It is possible to make enough money to be a full time blogger but let’s face it, you need to have millions of hits every day
Actually I do consider myself a full time blogger. I tell people that TME is my job, have made cards for it and am going to press events because of TME. I mean do I make a lot of money? Not really. But money isn’t important to me. Doing what I love full time and never looking back is important. Eventually I want to be big but you can’t get anywhere without working at it.
Yep. I agreed with you. Spending few hours daily in our movie blog is worth if we have a genuine readers. I don’t mind whether my blog is making huge money. I just love to share about movies to this world. But at least getting few bucks will make you more comfort for online hosting and other things. Cheers
Yeah it helps so that we can be secure financially secure but I do it for the love and the experiences I have.
This is so cool, can I come and read even if I didn’t sign up from the start?
Absolutely, you can also join us whenever you’d like!
From what little of the surface I’ve been able to scratch so far, I really like this Skelliewag guy. His stuff in insightful and actually helpful, as opposed to many of the “hlep you to blog” blogs out there. I especially like that his site is deep with connections, much in the same way that I want mine to be… not that that’s the point of this exercize. What I really liked is that he confirmed for me that giving up on trying to cover “newsy” stuff was pointless. If you can’t break the news, re-breaking is a pointless endeavour.
What I also felt was valuable was actually exhaustively stating the different approaches to blogging to help me figure out what mine was or should be. Asking what kind of blogger I want to be has always been tricky without knowing what kind of bloggers there are. You can check that page out here: http://www.skelliewag.org/25-paths-to-an-insanely-popular-blog-261.htm
Castor, I can’t thank you enough for pairing these down for me. After working all week, there’s no way I could have gotten through all of the ones Darren suggested. I will eventually, but it might take awhile. I’m half way through these ones and then I’ll come back.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/how_to_get_traf.html
http://www.successful-blog.com/1/10-reasons-readers-dont-leave-comments/
Which article was the most helpful to you?
⁃ How to get traffic to your blog
⁃ 10 Reasons Readers don’t leave comments
What tips have proven to be most effective in improving your own blog?
⁃ Actually a few of the things listed I was already doing .. regarding the first blog as for the comments’ blog, it really helped me gain some perspective and take a slightly altered approach to my posts where I illicit feedback.
What tips stand out as things you want to implement or get better at?
⁃ See above; I plan on getting better at the crafting of my posts in such a manner that makes the reader WANT to post feedback.
I’m certainly guilty of being too geeky at times. The majority of my posts for the past month have been about Inception/Scott Pilgrim and other comic book properties.
Luckily I can always throw up a post about my favorite scenes, films they might have missed, or other pieces as well.
On the first article, rule #1 was do lists… CHECK!
But he also says don’t write about your wife, boyfriend or kids. Then he follows that up with write about your kids. ??? WTF ???
I think he was messing around and trying to say that anything goes. People will try to lay all these rules on ya, but then you’re always going to find these fantastically popular blogs that break the rules. Dooce writes all about her husband and kids.
I don’t know if its suitable to post this here but I think so. I recently finished a teaser trailer for an upcoming feature project and I have there fore started a production blog about it: http://mekb19.wordpress.com what was great that within hours a couple of horror blogs had posted articles on it that have spread on both twitter and film blogs. Its really amazing that it all happened even though I hardly promoted the blog for the first 24 hours. Now I have just gone with it and try to keep the wave that is going up.
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