Tips for Fellow Bloggers, And for Non-Bloggers

A while back I asked for your input on topics for me to blog on, and Capo suggested that I write about

“… how about successful blogging from the ground up? From personal experience, and interviews with other successful bloggers. What works, what doesn’t, software, hosts, ads, revenue, traffic, logs, etc.”

I addressed some of his suggestions in my behind the scenes post, but there are several blogging-related tips I did not cover. Since a lot of you are fellow bloggers, I thought I would share some of my “hard-learned” tips with you. I suspect most of you know much more than me about this stuff, so hopefully you will chime in with your advice in the comments. By the way, when I talk herein about actual coding changes you can make, I am speaking only about WordPress … if you use a different blogging platform, some of the principles may apply but the exact coding may not (probably won’t).

I am also trying to write this post so that it has some advice that non-bloggers (that is, anyone) can use.

Note that I do not claim to be a blogging expert, by any means. Just a guy who has learned some stuff and is pleased to be able to share it. For real expertise, please consult blogs like Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger, Sarah Lewis’ Blogging Expertise, and search engine optimization (SEO) sites such as SEOmoz.

Now, to the tips:

Design Tips

The first tip I have is one that may cause some of you to chuckle, because you have seen me learn it the hard way: choose a good, clean site design and stick with it for a long while. Don’t constantly try out new themes (designs) and don’t waste your time trying to tweak a design to death. A long while back I used the same theme that Matt Cutts uses on his very popular site:

The theme is one that won a WordPress design contest a few years back, and, while it is not especially attractive, it is very functional. Matt made a few tweaks to it to give it a larger content area, so he could add in pictures up to 640 pixels in width, but he did not make many other changes to it. And he has stayed with it.

I, on the other hand, would look at my site statistics and see that my traffic is not increasing and that people weren’t spending a lot of time on my site and I would conclude I needed a better design. Wrong. I needed something compelling to pull people to the site and to keep them on it longer. The only way to really do that is with consistently good content.

The key to Matts’ high traffic is that (1) he is a recognized authority on search engine optimization, (2) he writes really well, and (3) he always delivers useful content. I personally also like the fact that he throws in a lot of neat technical tricks that have nothing to do with search technology, such as all of his neat Ubuntu tips, his recent Gmail tips, and so on.

So, what’s in this for non-bloggers? Simply this: don’t let yourself get sidetracked on things that don’t have real payoff value for you. Every project has some facet that can distract you from what most drives the success of a project. Giuliani’s failed bid for the Republican Presidential nomination exemplifies this awfully well: Rudi thought that strategy would be the key to success. Well, as we all know, it turned out that interaction in every state is far more important. He spent his time and effort in a way that distracted him from giving proper attention to people in New Hampshire and South Carolina and so on. There may be many other reasons why he failed, but you get the point.

Back to my design(s): I wish, very much, I had just stayed with the design Matt Cutts uses. That way I would not have spent countless hours working on something that really doesn’t matter that much and I could have added better content to the site.

Content Is King

You already know this. But, do you really know it?

I could sorta paraphrase Warren Buffett and come up with the two rules of successful blogging:

1. Always give people something useful.
2. Don’t forget Rule #1.

I chuckle every time I read the following quote of Richard Feynman in his What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character

I always thought I would be a specially good father because I wouldn’t try to push my kids into any particular direction. I wouldn’t try to turn them into scientists or intellectuals if they didn’t want it. I would be just as happy with them if they decided to be truck drivers or guitar players. In fact, I would even like it better if they went out in the world and did something real instead of being professors like me.

But they always find a way to hit back at you. My boy Carl, for instance. There he is in his second year at MIT, and all he wants to do with his life is to become a goddamn philosopher.

I chuckle because it sounds like something I would have said 10 years ago. I have more respect for philosophers now than I did 10 years ago, although I still think they too often turn simple problems into complex ones. (My own talents and preferences are to turn complex problems into simple ones.) But, as I age, I have to fight a desire to become an “armchair philosopher.” There is an enormous temptation on my part to want to share with you a philosophy on life that I hold or that I have read about.

But, by and large, people don’t care about that sort of thing. We want something we can use. So, I have to keep reminding myself of that and have to work at minimizing my tendency to post on matters that are really not useful to you.

The trap that many bloggers fall into is feeling like we have to write something, because we have to keep content in front of our readers to keep them.

I fell for it 2 times just this week, posting such completely useless articles as one on my opinion on the Microsoft buyout of Yahoo! and one on the Super Bowl. I probably got a little boost in traffic from those two articles, but they are useless. I should never have posted them. The only positive thing I can say about the posts is that I am at least smart enough to know how stupid it was to post them.

For non-bloggers, this principle clearly applies to you, too: be someone who delivers instead of someone who spouts philosophy.

Pay Attention to Your Customers and Adjust as Needed

While this one is obvious, I will give you an example that is not so obvious, and maybe you can benefit from it.

I pay a good bit of attention to my Google Analytics software to see what pages are most viewed along with the average amount of time spent on those pages. A couple of months ago I noticed that my most popular page was one on syncing a Mac, Outlook, iCal, and Pocket PCs. I also noted that people were not spending a lot of time on it, although the article was pretty in-depth. It ranked well in the search engines, and people were being drawn to it, but I had the sense I was not delivering what they were looking for.

So, I took a hard, critical look at the article and saw that it really wasn’t delivering everything it should. It explained what I knew about six months ago, but I had learned a lot since and it really needed an update. And, it needed to be better organized. It had no subheadings, although it was a long article, and I was going to make it even longer by adding in more information, so subheadings would be important.

As a result of me paying attention to this and making some adjustments, that page has had 1,143 views over the past 30 days with an average stay time of 3 minutes. Contrast that with 199 views in October, with an average stay time of 2 minutes.

I have done the same thing for a few other of my more popular pages, and it seems to have had similar payoffs. What makes me feel good about this is that I know customers are more satisfied now than they were before.

Make Key Points Stand Out

It is important to decide what key words you want to target in your blog, and then make them stand out whenever you can.

This is an area where I have not done as good a job as I should. I have written many an article that dealt with the subject of Getting Things Done without bolding that term in the text or using it in the article title. If I want to draw a Getting-Things-done audience to my site, I have to make that phrase stand out. (And, I have to deliver with useful GTD content, of course.)

So, key words should be bolded within an article and should be placed in the article title, when possible and reasonable. Of course, one could carried away with the bolding, too. But, if you never use it, the search engines are not going to assign any weight to the phrase. The popularity of a phrase means nothing: the weight you assign to it does.

It also really pays to do some keyword research. I have been noticing that my ebook page is just not getting the traffic I would expect. So yesterday I did some keyword research (using this site) on ebooks, and noticed that the phrase “free ebook download” would probably be good for drawing attention to my ebook.

So, yesterday I changed the “post slug” of my ebook page from “my-ebooks” to “free-ebook-download” and did a 301 redirect in my htaccess file (because of all the links that point to the my-ebooks page) and today, just one day after doing the change, I have had a few dozen more hits on that page than normal. I doubt that this is coincidence.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is an area in which I could improve considerably. I am more inclined to just set down and write an article without doing any keyword research or without giving proper attention to bolding keywords within my articles. I am trying to change this, and thought mentioning an example or two might be helpful to fellow bloggers.

Also, there are some coding changes you can make that will also generally help you get more noticed by the search engines, and therefore by potential readers. The first of these is to change your header.php file so that it puts the name of your blog after the title of the page that is being viewed. Most WordPress themes put your blog’s name first and then the title of the page being viewed, so the title of this page would look like


Keener Living | Tips for Fellow Bloggers, And for Non-Bloggers


If your blog, like mine, is not yet well-known, having the name first is going to get less traffic for you. The following would do better:


Tips for Fellow Bloggers, And for Non-Bloggers | Keener Living


If you use a theme like Chris Pearson’s Copyblogger design, you don’t have to worry about this: Chris has done the coding for you. But, if you have to make the code changes yourself, here is the code I use:


    <title><?php if ( is_404() ) : ?><?php _e('Page not found on Keener Living') ?>
    <?php elseif ( is_home() ) : ?><?php bloginfo(’name’) ?> | <?php bloginfo(’description’) ?>
    <?php elseif ( is_category() ) : ?><?php echo single_cat_title(); ?>
    <?php elseif ( is_date() ) : ?><?php _e(’Blog archives’) ?> | <?php bloginfo(’name’) ?>
    <?php elseif ( is_search() ) : ?><?php _e(’Search results’) ?> | <?php bloginfo(’name’) ?>
    <?php else : ?><?php the_title() ?> | <?php bloginfo(’name’) ?><?php endif ?></title>


Mine is a bit more complicated than most … I think I ripped the idea off of the Blog.txt design (if I remember right), and then probably made a few little changes to it. But the idea is: you want the eye-catching wording to show first.

One final point on making the important stuff stand out: use an H1 header tag for single-post pages. Most WordPress themes use H2 for these headings (code is from a single.php file):


<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
            <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>


But, it is best to use an H1 in the above code instead of an H2, because it tells the search engines that the title is important. If you leave it as an H2, it gets no more weight than all of the H2’s that are used in your sidebar coding. One qualifier, though: you have to make sure your stylesheet handles this change nicely for you. It could be that the theme designer only has H1 coding set up for the blog title at the top of the page and that it is enormous … that is not what you want for the title of your posts. So, be sure to test this out. If you are pretty good with css, you can fix it yourself. If you need help, there are plenty of folks who can do that sort of thing for you. I probably could myself, but I ain’t cheap. (I can be had, though. )

Again, if you use Chris Pearson’s Copyblogger or Neoclassical designs, you don’t have to worry about this.

As for non-bloggers, there is clearly a message here for you as well: be sure to emphasize the key points you want to make so they don’t get lost in all of the other points. Really obvious stuff, I know, but are you consistent at doing it? Perhaps a reminder about this, from time to time, is useful … there are so many things for us to remember, aren’t there?

Miscellaneous Points

A few other things that come to mind are:

• Make subscribing to your blog easy. When I added a separate page for it, and made a menu item for it, that helped my subscriptions a good bit. I also put a little “subscribe” link at the bottom of each post, which probably helps a bit.
• Don’t fill the sidebar with clutter. It is fine to put relevant material there, but too much seems to turn people off. I think a lot has to do with how well it is organized, though. If it is organized well, you can probably get away with showing more than I do (I am pretty conservative on what I show on the sidebar), but there is still a limit.
• Use pictures for at least some posts, to sort of break the monotony of pure text. I personally get pictures from Dreamstime, but there are plenty resources you could use (including your own photos, perhaps).
• Don’t get carried away with using blockquotes. I used two in this article, which is perhaps a bit much, but their content is very small relative to the total content of the page. The thing to watch for is that you not use them so much that your content begins to not look original. Readers and search engines look for original content. While it is appropriate to use blockquotes on occasion, overuse could become a problem.
• Use a Related-Posts plugin. While the technology for such plugins is not perfect, and will often result in links that are not really related, such plugins generally give your readers links to additional articles that may be of interest to them. The snapshot below shows this being done for one of my recent articles:

(By the way, in this example, the plugin does not do a very good job of giving truly relevant links.)

Wrap-up

Well, that gives you a sampling of what I have learned along the way. I hope it is useful to fellow bloggers, and that it is not useless to non-bloggers … hopefully, there is at least one or two gems in here for everyone.

Note that I pretty well stayed away from some SEO-type suggestions. Frankly, I think some of them are a bit overrated. WordPress handles a lot of the SEO stuff for you. If you really need to do some tweaks, I suggest you pay real close attention to what Matt Cutts says, to what is said on SEOmoz, and to other credible resources. But, when all is said and done, I am still convinced, after learning the hard way, that the most important thing you do for your blog is to feed it with good, useful content on a regular basis.

As I mentioned earlier, I’d very much like to hear from you on what you have learned in this area.

Finally, I am probably going to take a few days off. Why? Because I can. What’s the point of being retired if you don’t take time off, huh? Besides, I want to start forcing myself into a pattern of posting about three times a week. I think that is about the right pace for me, and I have been slipping back into more of a pattern of daily posting, sometimes a couple of times a day. I’d rather pace myself so I do a better job with content.