5 Steps To A Better Blog

What do you do on your blog on a public holiday? On holidays (like 4th of July), there’s a drop-off in traffic on most websites (depending on the demographics of your audience). For most bloggers it’s an excuse to take it easy, but we’re not ‘like’ most bloggers, are we?

Holidays (and weekends) are an excellent time to gain an edge on your competition and work on improving your blog (and blogging).

So here are 5 things you can do today to be a better blogger:

1. Build momentum and keep it going

Managing Blog Momentum – from a comment on ProBlogger, about how to use a points system (different weight given to different tasks based on their value) to keep momentum going on your blog. It’s an interesting system and you can easily adapt it to your needs and match it with your blogging rhythm.

2. Leverage Feedburner’s Free Services

Feedburner have made their paid services Feedburner Stats PRO and MyBrand free for all Feedburner users.

While a lot of people will like the extra analytical features Stats PRO provides, personally I’m a fan of the MyBrand service and the ability it provides to brand your feed as originating from your domain and not feedburner.com (for e.g. http://feeds.mydomain.com/mydomain instead of the feedburner URL).

Setting MyBrand up requires some DNS hacking and technical expertise (Nick wrote about this a long time back, take a look) but getting Stats PRO to work is as simple as adding stats tracking code to your blog template.

The differences between professional blogs and ‘cheap looking blogs’ are sometimes subtle, but it’s the details that count here.

And tracking feed behavior can give you a lot of insight on what your feed readers like and don’t like, and will help you write better in the future.

3. Make Your Posts Scannable

There are a LOT of talented writers and bloggers online who fall short when it comes to making their blogs and blog posts readable and accessible. Reading a quality blog like blue hat SEO is great and annoying at the same time – you’re learning but at the same time cursing Eli for not formatting his posts right.

Darren’s golden blog post ‘Scannable Content‘ is right up there with ‘The Art of Linkbaiting’ for me – I refer to these posts regularly and have sent plenty of bloggers to them as well.

Are you posts scannable? If not, it takes a few minutes of template tweaking and a conscious effort to format your blog posts in the future. It’s definitely worth the time spent.

4. Go Big or Go Home

Taking a leaf out of Hugh McLeod’s blue monster advert, Leo Babuta writes at the CopyBlogger about the importance of being BOLD in a blogger’s quest for getting noticed. Takeaway lesson – it pays to go the extra mile to add value to your posts, and it definitely pays to speak your mind, be extremely specific and to toot your own horn (within acceptable limits 🙂 ) when you’re blogging.

Read ‘Go Big or Go Home‘.

Test your next 10 blog posts against the ideas mentioned in the post above – are you making the right effort? Is your blog post bold enough?

5. DIY Blog Optimization

Planning to launch a blog? Make sure you read the blog launch section on our ‘Best of Performancing’ page, and then read these ten rules for profitable blog startups by Darren. A lot of what we say here (stay niche, quality over quantity, write as you would speak, pick a topic you’re passionate about, maximizing revenue, etc) is encapsulated in this list.

I’d say that these tips apply equally to established blogs, new blogs and blogs that are about to be launched. It’s a good idea to periodically test your blog against these rules and see where it might need tweaking.

So…what have you done today to make your blog better?