10 Blogging Tips for Beginner’s

1. Just say NO to AutoPlay

We know that you like to listen to music when you’re playing games/reading blogs/doing whatever you’re doing online… but we don’t. If you have to have a music gadget on your blog, PLEASE turn off the auto play feature. Then, if we feel like jamming to your suggested tunes, we will turn them on ourselves. But nothing, I repeat NOTHING, will get me to close a window and jump off a site faster than auto-play.

2. Clean up your sidebars

When you have a jumbled mess on the side of your blog, I can’t enjoy what I came for… YOU. I know you’re trying to make money, and I know you want ads. I know that you like cute buttons, and that you want to have a blog list of all the sites you read. But please, clean it up, and make it neat. And for the love of all that is holy, please don’t make your sidebars larger than 30% of the width of the content area of your site.

3. Give Proper Credit

Check out the attribution rights on the posts and images you’re sharing, and give credit where credit is due. NEVER steal someone’s words. Ask for permission, and link back. (with a perma-link… don’t know what that is? We’ll discuss later.)

4. Respect the Blogger

Bloggers are real people, who are sharing their real lives with you. You wouldn’t go into a strangers house, tell them that they were stupid, and then tell everyone you met for the next two weeks how stupid someone was. You would think those things in your head, and keep them to yourself.  That being said, WHAT you say is entirely subjective depending on the blog you’re reading. A statement of “Oh my gosh, that’s SO DUMB!” on one blog would lead some bloggers to think you were calling THEM dumb, while on another blog, the blogger would say, I’ll show you something even stupider. (It’s all about the give and take people.) 

5. Spit it Out

BLOGGING is not the same thing as say, writing a novel. You cannot write 5000 words with the expecation that all of those words will be read. Break it up. If you HAVE something that can’t be said in 800 words or less, try making that post into a series.

6. Blog for Yourself

You don’t have to make anyone but yourself happy. You don’t have to have a niche. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Furthermore, if you’re not enjoying the blogging process, take a step back and re-evaluate. 

7. Don’t Overpost

Look… You are not Perez Hilton. You don’t have breaking “news” to report. (unless you’re a reporter) Instead of posting multiple updates throughout the day, try merging those mini-posts into one post. Or flesh out each of those thoughts into posts. We want QUALITY, not quantity. If you want to spit out information, join twitter. (follow us! @casualblogger)

8. Forget about the Numbers

Numbers. Don’t. Matter. Your self worth should not be dependent on the amount of blog comments you did or did no receive. It doesn’t matter how many hits you got yesterday. You should blog for the love of the blog. Share your work with us, make it easy for us to share, but don’t get caught up in the game. It’s better to have an obscure blog that is quirky and cool than to have a heavily trafficked blog that is full of crap. Connection beats transaction, ALWAYS.

9. Link. Link. Link.

Linking is a great way to build up a readership. DO use Permalinks (Permalink: a link to a specific blog post or entry) DO NOT hotlink. (Hotlink: most often used for images – links to that images location using bandwidth) If you are going to use an image from another site, download it to your own computer or photo hosting site, and give credit beneath the picture. When you hotlink, you are using another sites bandwidth. This is a big no-no.
Likewise, if you love a blog, link to it! But if you’re only linking to a blog so that that blogger will link back to you, well, get over yourself. There are many dedicated sites that will let you do just that, but you should never demand to be placed on another blogger’s blogroll.

10. Respect the privacy of other bloggers

A lot of blogger use pseudo names, or keep their last names private. They don’t publicly announce where they live and what schools their kids attend. Believe it or not, there are even people who blog, JUST FOR THEMSELVES, and they don’t WANT new readers. (I know, right?)
Also: don’t collect the email addresses of bloggers so you can spam them later, and sign them up for your newsletter and stuff. That’s really bad form.

Do you have a blogging tip? Leave it in the comments below!

Tweet