subject: 5 Blogging Tips For Beginners - How to Start Your Blog and Get Visitors [print this page] 5 Blogging Tips For Beginners - How to Start Your Blog and Get Visitors
On the face of it. blogging is easy. You just tap away, the search engines crawl all over your website and surfers find your words of wisdom. Of course, things aren't always quite as easy so here are some blogging tips for beginners to make your new blogging career as successful as possible.
1. Get your blog looking nice
OK, I know you're itching to get started writing but if your site looks like a dogs dinner, no-one is going to be impressed when they reach it. Invest a little bit of time in choosing a theme that looks attractive but at the same time isn't cluttered. Not too many people enjoy reading red text on a green background for instance. If you're not sure, stick with a plain but stylish design rather than try to force too many design elements into a cramped space.
2. Check the setup is OK
By this I mean things like "permalinks" which dictate how the pages on your blog are named. They're not intuitive by default on WordPress, so change your permalink structure to a custom one that reads /%postname%/
Other settings should also be checked such as how often each post is pinged (once is preferable) and where it's pinged to - you can download lists of different ping services but don't go over the top on these as most of the main sites ping the minor ones anyway. Pinging is an easy way of telling the search engines you've written something new and you should see the spiders crawling all over your new content when you write it.
3. Submit your feed
Yes, I know, this still isn't writing content! You automatically have an RSS feed when you create a blog - it's usually just the main url followed by /feed/
Submit this to the main feed sites and they'll get the word out from your blog to other places in the blogosphere, helping you to publicise your blog and make it more popular.
4. Don't drone on
Keep your posts to a reasonable length. This will depend a bit on your personality and also the topic you're covering but it's better to keep things concise that drone on for what seems like War and Peace. Split long paragraphs up. Use bullet points. Use videos and images. Make your page interesting so that even if it is a long post, it doesn't seem that way because your readers have become engrossed in what you have to say.
5. Make your titles interesting
If your titles sound like something out of your school English lesson, chances are that they're boring. Remember that your titles are the first thing your readers will see, either on your blog or when they find you in the search engines. The more interesting your title, the more likely people are to click on it. Of course, your blog article then has to live up to the promise of the title but that should be easy enough as you've already given yourself a good starting point.
