Read enough tips and it’s easy to convince yourself that your blog is wholly inadequate or there’s no way you’ll ever be able to find the time to incorporate all of them into your own blog. Fear not. It’s easier than you think. All it takes is the right approach and the desire to form some good habits.
Tips to improve your blog are everywhere You can read a tip on writing a better title for your post and another on how to better design your posts. You can find tips advising how to increase comments on your blog and how to create the right content to achieve your goals. If someone has discovered something that works there’s a tip about how you can do it too.
Taken in total all those tips can be overwhelming so what’s a blogger to do?
5 Steps to a Better Blog
Here’s my own process for incorporating the advice of others in the hopes of improving my blog.
- Decide which tip(s) you want to add to your blog – The obvious first step is to decide what exactly you want to incorporate into your blog. You don’t need to change your blog every time you come across new advice. Choose the tips that make sense to you.
- Take the time to understand why it works – Parroting a tactic isn’t enough. It might help temporarily under one set of circumstances, but if you truly want to improve your blog you need to understand why something works so you can adapt it and really own it.
- Incorporate tips one at a time – Don’t try to do everything at once. If you do you’ll end up with mediocrity. Like it or not, you can only master so many new skills at once. The best approach to making a permanent changes is to work on those changes one or perhaps two at a time.
- Slowly work new tips into your blogging routine – Similar to the idea above. Trying to do things too quickly also leads to mediocrity. Changes made slowly over time are more permanent than quick changes made once. Slow and steady wins the race.
- Make it a habit – As you work on one new skill and actively incorporate it into your blogging routine that new skill will become a habit. You’ll eventually find less of your time goes to actively trying to write a better post title. You’ll simply find that your post titles are better.
Examples of the Process in Action
Let me share a couple of examples of tips I learned that I’ve tried to incorporate here.
First consider post titles here since I first started the blog. Take a look at the blog’s sitemap and scan some of the post titles. By no means would I say all the titles are the best they can be, but if you compare a few of the more recent titles at the top of the list with a few of the earliest posts at the bottom of the list I think you’ll agree the recent titles are better.
I don’t think there’s a specific point where the titles crossed a line from bad to good. There are examples of good titles early on and examples of poor titles recently. But overall the trend has been an improvement in the average title. And because I’ve slowly worked in the habit of writing better headlines and post titles I expect the trend to continue.
Second consider the use of images within posts. I’ve used images here and there since early on, but images have found their way into posts more and more since I came to the conclusion their use would improve the design of each post. I’m still working on making a habit of finding and adding images so not every post currently has them. But overall the trend is for more images to make their way into posts and in time all or nearly all posts will have at least one image inside.
Summary
As you read and come across more and more tips don’t try to incorporate everything all at once. Decide which tips you think will improve your blog and realize that not every tip will necessarily be appropriate for you. Spend time understanding why a given tip works and begin to make a conscious effort to incorporate it into your blog. Make that new tip part of your blogging routine. Accept that it will take time to fully integrate any new tip into your blog and keep at it until the habit develops. Rinse and repeat.
What tips have you been actively incorporating into your blog?
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I do read tips on how to make my blogs better. I have to confess that the ones I almost always ignore have to do with titles. Maybe it is because I worked with newspapers when I was younger, but I really dislike headline type titles. I know they’re better for search engines, but I just don’t like them. I always try, and probably rarely succeed, to be witty or funny in my titles. I suppose I should probably make them more factual, but I keep resisting it.
Pay attention to title writing. Your page titles are probably the most important words you’ll write on any page. Read through the Magnetic Headlines series Brian Clark wrote.
I’m subscribed to at least 100 feeds. Those feeds produce a lot more information than I can reasonably take in and I have to make decisions about which posts to read and which ones to skip. Fair or not I’ll make decisions based only on the title of a post. It’s the same for most people.
Your page title is also what will show as the link in search results and will be among the most important words on the page in determining where in the results your post appears.
You don’t have to make them dry. In fact you want to make them interesting enough so that people will want to click. At the same time you don’t want to make them too mysterious. Have them tell people what’s inside in a way that makes them want to click for more.