Let’s face it, sometimes you just don’t have anything to say. When you blog regularly, there will be times where you may have blog burnout. Here are some ideas to get that fire going again.

• Change the look(theme) of your blog to get inspired
• De-clutter your blog, examine those crowded sidebars
• Add a new category that you haven’t written about before
• Get inspired by what others are saying, write a post responding to another post
• Sometimes just taking a small break is enough
• Write a post highlighting your favorite posts of the month or year
• Write a post that highlights other blogs in your category you love, and what you like about them

Sometimes just taking a look from a different angle will give exactly what you needed to get back on track!

Happy Blogging, Deb

blog, blogging, blogger, burnout

If you are looking for ways to draw traffic to your website or blog, you might want to consider holding a contest or giveaway. While these can draw a lot of “freebie seekers” who are only interested in the prize, you can generate a lot of buzz that will bring long time readers to you as well. Another thing you are going to do is build links without even trying to. By nature we bloggers like to blog about what other people are doing, and if we see something cool on someone else’s blog we write about it and give them a link. That is twice as likely when that something is a contest with nice free prize to win!

If your blog is devoted to parenting issues, you could hold a contest where entrants describe their funniest parenting mishap or the most embarrassing thing their children said in public, or ask them to tell you about their favorite must have toy for their kids etc.

When it comes to finding prizes for your contests, you can offer up your own products or services, or you can solicit prizes from other website owners. The latter can be a win-win situation, as the prizes will not cost you anything and the person donating the prize will also get exposure (just be sure to mention on the contest page who donated the prize).

If you are not the creative type, or you just want to keep things as simple as possible then you can simply hold a giveaway. Your visitors can enter their information into a form or your comments section and you can randomly pick a winner. Again, you can offer one of your products or services as the prize or you can seek out prizes from other business owners.

A giveaway can also be used to increase your customer retention. If you have a service- based business, such as virtual assistance or graphic design, you could hold a monthly drawing and each time one of your customers paid for a service that month, they receive an entry form. For example, if a client paid for three graphics that month, they would be entered three times. Your customers may want to win a prize so bad, that they keep buying your services each month just to have a chance at winning.

To be successful, you’ll want to promote your contest as much as possible. You’ll want to send a notice to your mailing list as well as putting information about the contest on the main page of your website and blog. If you offer a podcast, make sure you mention it to your listeners.

There are many sites that allow you to enter your contest information, and this info can get picked up and publicized by other website owners. To find these sites, do a Google search on a keyword such as “contest submission sites.” You may also want to send out a few press releases. And never ever underestimate the power of other bloggers to build buzz.

So let’s see…for lunch today, I had vegetable soup and…oh, you really don’t care do you?

You’re just learned a valuable lesson in that last sentence. Nobody cares what you had for lunch today, unless it was awesome and you’ve included the recipe. Maybe it was a great new restaurant you’re reviewing, and in that case you just may want to talk about those belly dancing waitresses. If you were just sitting at your desk eating some soup, it doesn’t really hold much interest to others. Bringing personality, having fun, or bringing useful information to people, will make them want to return.

Does your blog have snap? Or does your blog have too much bounce? What exactly is bounce? It’s a measure of how long people stay on your site and keep reading. If you have a high bounce rate, that means people are opening your page and moving on way too quickly.

It’s not just what brings somebody to your site, it’s what keeps them there. Do they keep reading, or do they jump ship too quickly?

A quick way to check your bounce rate is to look at your stats. If you have Google Analytics, you can see your bounce rate easily. In this instance, the lower a number is, the better it is. (Ex: a 40% bounce rate is better than a 90% bounce rate)

bounce rate, bounce, google analytics

Remember we talked about Twitter before? Well, there are a number of websites that allow you to use your Twitter account to garner traffic for your blog.

Twitterfeed allows you to send automatic updates from your blog to your Twitter friends. You can set the posts from Twitterfeed to only post at intervals. This is great for those of us who update our blogs every day and would like for people to continue to come back. Eventually those people become regular readers and will likely comment more on your blog. Continually reminding people that you are updating your blog is a surefire way to keep traffic coming in.

You can also automatically blog your Tweets for the day automatically with LoudTwitter. The bonus in this is if you can’t blog from your cell phone but you can use Twitter from it, you are able to blog about the day with your tweets. These tweets are posted in your blog as a post. If you have your Twitterfeed account going, the resulting blog post will end up in your feed with all your tweets posted for easy reading.

These are only two of the ways you can use Twitter to keep a continuous flow of ideas and readers rolling through. Can you think of more?

Tags: twitter, twitterfeed, loudtwitter

Happy New Year! What does 2008 hold for your blog?

Many people think of the new year as a chance to have new beginnings. I’m certain many new blogs will be started as people vow to write to them on a regular basis. I’m also certain at least 70% of those blogs will end up being forgotten about at some point.

Rather than take on a new blog, let’s look at the blog you have in front of you. What direction do you want your blog to go in 2008? What worked well for you in 2007? Was there a series of articles or a topic that seemed to do well? Did people respond to one type of post over another? Did the posts with pictures gain more traffic?

When you have a clear picture of what worked for you in 2007 and what didn’t, you can weed through and tighten what you’re doing this year.

I’ve been looking at one of my blogs, and I’ve found it doesn’t have enough focus. My goal for 2008 is to give it better focus. On another blog, while it’s a niche blog, I found that by changing the particular angle, I was able to zone in on what I wanted my blog to represent. Another blog I found was too boxed in by being a targeted topic, and I’ve decided to open the topic up a little wider to include more categories.

I’m also trying to add clipart and pictures to more of my posts, as well as get better at tagging. Tagging is one of those things that just seems to slip my mind, and that’s not good! I’ve taken an inventory of my own blogs, analyzed my stats, and I’ll be making some changes.

What will you be doing to change your blog in 2008? Will you add another category, writer shorter or longer posts? Maybe you’ll work on social networking, and building traffic.

With a fresh year before you, it’s now the perfect time for you to go take inventory!

Happy Blogging! Deb

blog, blogging, social networking, blogs, build traffic

People are looking for answers. It’s a basic formula that can help you while writing your next article or post on your blog. People are generally looking to be entertained, or they are looking for information. You can be the source of information that they find. When it comes to solving problems, helpful hints and tips are always winners.

What topic do you know a lot about? Write a post outlining 101 ways to do something better, or maybe write a piece that offers 25 tips to do something easier. Maybe you have a lot of great resources, why not offer a post full of useful resources and links?

When you help people solve a problem, find an answer, or offer something useful, people will return looking for more of your helpful tips.

What useful information can you offer people?

blog, blogging, tips, blogger, helpful

If you are an avid blogger, you probably are always looking for ways to be more productive.  Doing the mundane tasks of moderating comments, managing post entries, etc.  While wordpress works just fine on it’s own, there are several plugins that can help you get more done in less time.  I will start with 5 today.

1. WP-Chunk - This nifty plugin will take all those long url’s that your readers love to post in their comments, and gracefully shorten them
2. Subscribe to Comments - A plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. This is especially useful when readers wish to be notified of any answers to questions they’ve posed within your blog’s comments.
3. Create N Place - With this plugin, you can write new blog posts right on the front page of your blog — there is no need to log into the admin system to write a new post.
4. Edit N Place - A free Ajax powered plugin for WordPress, that lets you edit your post right on the front page of your blog. The plugin now includes quicktag buttons like bold, italics, link, img, and more.
5. Better Comments Manager- A plugin which allows you to reply to comment from within the admin panel. It uses Ajax to respond to comments so you do not have to leave the comments page while commenting. This will prove useful to bloggers who simply can’t keep up with the number of comments they face. Luckily, this plugin is also compatible with Brian’s Threaded Comments.

Feel free to add your favorite productivity plugins in the comments, my next post will be based on reader submissions and will include a link to your site as well as to the plugin you recommend.

Out of the thousands of themes available for Wordpress you are bound to find one you love. While my next article will help you learn how to change a theme if you have never done so and want to, this article will focus on what to remember once you do pick and apply a new theme for your blog.

Once you pick a new theme, there are a few very important steps to take to make a seamless transition. Many of us overlook an item or two and end up missing a few days of stats and advertising dollars.

1. The sidebar is gone. Most of us add things to our sidebar, be it advertising, widgets, text, links, etc. Once you get a new theme, the old sidebar you customized will be replaced. Unless you are using pure widgets for your sidebar you will have to manually edit your new sidebar file. This is usually a great time to do some blog clean up and get rid of unneeded items and clutter.
2. Your Stats and Feed Flares. If you use Google Analytics, feedburner, etc. Any website stats sites or programs there is usually a piece of code you had to add to your files, usually in the header or footer. When you pick a new theme these files are not used so you will have to transfer your codes to the new theme files in order for your stats program to continue tracking your visitors. This also applies to Google Webmasters Tools. If you are a user of this you will need to reapply the tracking code or uploading the file to your new theme to make sure the site stays verified.
3. Plugins Cleanup. Now is the time to check your plugins, add in the code to the new theme to make some work, and also go through and see if you still need or use the plugin. Some you will not need because of features of the new theme, and most you will have to transfer the code- for instance- any comment plugins that you need to add lines to the comments.php file of the new theme to make the plugin work.
4. Advertising Update. If you are running ads, be it single ads or google adsense you will need to not only apply them to the new theme, but manage the colors and layout to fit the new design. This is also a good time to re-evaluate if the ads are working on your site and try new ad placements.
5. RSS Feeds and Subscription. Once you have the new design up you will want to check the rss subscriptions, try subscribing to your site and make sure you replace the rss links with feedburner links if you use them. Also, if you use feedburner, make sure to update the rss addresses in the header.php file to be your feedburner address.
6. Test, test, test! When you get your new theme up and running you will want to test the actions, like searching, see if the results come up the way you want them, click on a category and test the formatting, try out commenting and other plugins to be sure they blend and display the way you want them to.
7. Browser Check. Check in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, ask friends to check using other browsers and operating systems. Do your best to get it to look uniform on all browsers. This could make or break a new theme you like.
8. Take your time. Test, test, test, before you spend 3 hours changing plugins and options, change a little and test, then change a little more, nothings worse than spending hours on a theme that refuses to work in most browsers or that does not take changes well. This is your blog, make sure the new theme works for you and your topic.
9. Tell People. Once the theme is up and running, post about the change, listing new features and asking for feedback and bug reports. Your readers are the best source of information and their opinion and advice can help your readership if you listen and reply.

They say you shouldn’t mix business with pleasure. And I disagree. It can be done, and done well. SugarRae is a perfect example of it being done well.

This is the blog of Rae Hoffman, affectionately known in the blogging and SEO world as SugarRae. Or maybe you know her better as the queen of SEO. She has proven herself in a mostly male industry and she kicked all their a$$es at what she does.

I first met Rae way back in 2001 when I started working from home. Yes, we met at WAHM.com ~ crazy, right? We used to hang out in the chat room with a few other work at home regulars and we would all bounce ideas off of each other every Wednesday night. I miss those Wednesday night chats, but we’ve all come so far since then and I think we all manage to stay pretty busy. Rae has definitely gone far, and learned a lot and most of it self taught. She’s my internet hero!

So, what are you going to find at SugarRae? Well you’ll hear tidbits about SEO and on the very same blog you’ll hear endless rants about things like the online poker ban and Rae’s extreme dislike, okay hatred, for Bob Saget.

And that’s just the tip of the blog-berg. (Coined a new blogosphere phrase there maybe? -lol-) Anyhow, if you’re interested in what goes on inside a serious SEO expert’s mind then check out SugarRae. I am convinced she is one of the few sane SEO experts out there, and I know she is not going to try to sell you a ton of useless crap. I’d trust her with my very tiny marketing budget any day.

Every time you put an image into a blog post, you might not think that it is doing much, other than making your post pretty. Actually, the pictures attract people’s attention. They are more likely to see a picture before they read words.

Deb says that every time she puts a piece of clipart into her posts, traffic increases to that post. Something to think about, no? There are a number of places online you can go to get clipart, real art, photographs and such for small fees and sometimes even free.

I use more free resources than anything, myself. I usually do a search for free clipart images in my favorite search engine and go from there. Then, there is iStockPhoto where you can buy pictures or just use a sample pic. The sample pictures are free to use anywhere, but they have the iStockPhoto logo across the face of it. These are available for use as is. If you buy the pictures, then there is no logo BUT there are stipulations, depending on what you buy.

Next time you want to post something on your blog, try and find a good picture that goes with the post content. It might just give you that extra boost of traffic and a few more regular readers.

Also, don’t forget about those little tags inside the image code that tell people what the picture is. Those tags are picked up by search engines. Whenever someone looks up a photo of something with those image searches, your photo would then be available to come up under the tag you gave it. For example, I am going to post this photo:

The code would look something like this:

<img src=”http://whereiputthe.com/picture.gif” alt=”Digital Camera”>

See where I added the alt=”Digital Camera” ? That is crawled by search engines so when people look for pictures of digital cameras, this picture will be seen by the searches.

You can do the same thing with the title tag in the link for the picture. For instance you can do this:

<a title=”Digital Camera” href=”http://thissite.com”><img src=”http://whereiputthe.com/picture.gif” alt=”Digital Camera”></a>

Yet another way for your pictures (and links) to pick up traffic. Let me know if you find that this works for your site.

Tags: pictures+in+posts