Scraps Of Mind

Blogging 101

Welcome to Scraps of Mind. I'm delighted to see you. Why not check out the site, and if you like what you see, subscribe to my RSS feed and get daily updates delivered to you. If you're not sure what the RSS thing is, then check out this 'RSS made easy' post. Thanks for visiting and I look forward to seeing more of you.

I received quite a bit of response to my recent post on backing up your blog and I thought it might be handy for readers if I ran a series of blogging tips and related bits and pieces. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t claim to be a blogging guru by any stretch of the imagination. But I am fortunate to have my good friend Thatch and my daughter Seona who are my techie life support system. And I’ve been reading up on blogs like Yaro Starak’s and Darren Rouwse‘ who blog for a living and run blogs on the subject.

I figure most of my readers blog for different reasons; some like me do it because they enjoy the thought that people want to read their stuff, some want to provide newsletter happenings to family and friends, some use it to express their thoughts and feelings in a free and relatively unconstrained environment, some are building a place in the scrapbooking community and hope to be recognised on design teams or eventually sell their designs. Whatever the reasons, most of us have put a bit of time and effort into our blogs and, I am assuming, would have an interest in their development and in building up traffic. I have certainly found that since I started paying attention to some of these things, the hits on my blog have increased significantly.

So if you think this would be useful to you (working on the principle that no matter how much we know, there’s always something we don’t know) or if you have some blogging tips of your own that you’d like to contribute to the body of knowledge let me know or leave a comment here and we’ll see how this goes.

OK so the frst tip (well second if you count the backing-up one) is to have a look at your categories/labels or whatever you call them in your side bar.

This is the Index and Table of Contents to your blog. It is worth paying a bit of attention to.

They are one of the pieces of data that search engines look for so it is probably a good idea to ensure they clearly and concisely describe what content you have allocated to them. Besides which it gives any new readers to your blog an indication of some of the other things you blog about as well as the post that drew them to your blog in the first place.

Also it makes it easy for you to find your own way around your blog content, especially as the numbers of your posts increase. And don’t forget, you can allocate more than one category to your post. The content of the post may well apply to a number of categories, for example The Ballet - Don Quixote is allocated to four categories (ballet, scrapbook layouts, life and music) as the content of the post has relevance to them all.

So as you can see, I’m not proposing to make this an exercise in rocket science. Usually the best tips are the simplest things but often are things we hadn’t thought of. So let me know what you think of the idea and if you have any tips of your own write up a post and send it to me. I’ll post it on my blog and link it back to yours. Or even send me the tip and I’ll try to write it up myself, giving you the credit for the idea.

Other related posts:
Have you Backed-up Your Blog?
One month later…