I’m not going to talk about how to make money off your blog. If I knew how to do that then I wouldn’t be where I am now. This is all about how to enjoy and stretch your blog to the point of mild success. Okay, tiny success . . . I make no promises. With that being said:
- What works for one blogger, might not work for you. This doesn’t mean to avoid things, but don’t get upset if you copy someone and it fails. Maybe people notice you copied and compared it unfavorably to the original. Perhaps you missed a few key points in the delivery or it doesn’t match up with your theme and style. Never be afraid to put such post types down and only go back if you think you figured out the problem. Although, you might want to return only a few times if it keeps failing. Don’t want to be seen as a glutton for disaster.
- Open the door to as much as your life as you feel comfortable. I’ve been told by many to throw everything into the light, but that doesn’t work out very well. You can end up pulling in friends and family members who would prefer not to be hinted at on your blog. That leads to drama, which you’ll put on your blog, make things worse, and continue the cycle because you get a ton of hits. Seriously, think before you share because there are consequences.
- If you’re running out of topic ideas then try to get some public input. This helps with interactions and makes you more relatable. It will reveal some topics that you might have overlooked as well. This can also show you how many people are paying attention as you get a request for something you’ve written about 5 times over the last year. Some people might be new and missed them. Others might have forgotten. Either way, you need to decide on politely skipping or finding another avenue to touch on it for a 6th time.
- Be careful changing the physical theme of your blog. The wallpaper and header is one thing. Those are designed to change around at times. When you swap out an entire theme, you might find that some of the toys you liked about the previous one are no longer available. Gets worse if you learn that you can’t go back because they took that other theme away. Not all themes are created equal and you can knock yourself back to square one in terms of design if you’re not careful.
- Use your blog as a hub for other social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and whatever else is there. This keeps you active on all of them . . . Except Facebook, which no longer allows WordPress posts to show up for some people. At least you might get a few curious guests with the others. That is unless the LinkedIn connection is lost for the 10th time this month. Does anybody use Tumblr any more? It’s the thought that counts here.
- Do not think that every comment in the spam folder is spam. Yes, the porn, medication, sneakers, porn, gibberish, porn, badly written offers, porn, porn, and porn are obvious problems. Yet, you might have a new face hidden in there. Older ones can be randomly shunted there too because only Cthulhu knows the requirements for banishment. Just be careful and accept that technology can be a pain.
- Go to other blogs and comment. This is really important at the beginning when you have no followers. You can learn more about the platform such as picture usage, tags, categories, and whatever else the veterans are willing to share. Eventually, you will find yourself in their shoes, so you better be ready to give sage advice. That or shrug and admit that you have no idea what you’re doing.
Legends of Windemere 
These are great blogging tips.
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Thanks. 😁
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Great points, Charles. What happens at Tumblr anyway? I post there every day and nothing. Facebook is a non-item for me now. I used to get a lot of interaction on my posts there but since they eliminated the auto-post from WP, I’m almost non-existant. Twitter keeps plugging along although I can’t say I ever sold a book as a result of being on Twitter. Thanks for the reminders on staying with the current theme. 😀
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I have no idea. I never figured out a natural way to communicate there. Yet, I’ve seen people do it. Facebook is just a mess.
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I agree.
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I fail to get mileage out of any of the social media forms. My blog is where it’s at, and I feed to the other places, because we’re supposed to. You are a sage and that is some sage advice.
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Thanks. It’s amazing that other platforms don’t get results. Maybe they’re too clogged and restrictive?
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They aren’t really designed for what we want. Twitter is to share images of food, or dumb selfies. Facebook is similar. My stuff still feeds there, but it feeds to the Entertaining Stories page, and not to the Lisa Burton personal site. Rule of thumb, if you’re selling something every platform wants paid – usually more than you might make on the deal.
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I noticed that issue with paying for promos. The Facebook prices are ridiculous for so little actual success. They only care about you being seen and not selling stuff.
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Great tips again! What do you think of the blog hops that some people do when featuring new books? I used to see more announcements of those. But I haven’t seen many recently.
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Thanks. I think blog hops worked really well and still have an impact. Yet, people don’t do them as much. My opinion is that part of it was caused by many authors going to their own corners a few years back. Most stopped promoting others and put their blogs in a spot where it didn’t connect as well.
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Oh okay. That makes sense. So hard to know what works best in book promotion.
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Pingback: 7 Tips to Blogging: You Would Think I’d Have a Category for These Things By Now — Legends of Windemere | When Angels Fly
I think you make a really important point about being careful not to drag family into the content of your post. You could argue that it is infringing on their rights as they may not want anything about them at all shared in a public forum.
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Thanks. It really does infringe on their right to decide if they can be made public or not. It also gets really weird when people demand to know about the others in my beyond me mentioning them in passing.
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Great tips, Charles. Thank you.
The Linkedin connection hasn’t worked on my blog for months, now. It said to go to the sharing page, which I did and followed the instructions there, but it didn’t fix it! 😡
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I have that Linkedin problem too. Seems like I have to fix it with every post, so I doubt it works by the time the post goes live.
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Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio and commented:
Check out this great post from Charles Yallowitz with 7 blogging tips
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Thanks for the reblog.
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My pleasure. Great post.
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I got around the Facebook thing by sending my blogs to Twitter and then sending my tweets to Facebook. Not sure that would work for everyone, though.
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I considered that, but people complained when all my retweets turned up. I think I’m too little a blip on Facebook for it to matter these days anyway.
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But they do say that repetition makes ads more successful, and if you consider that the point of most social media is to sell books, I think that complaint is kind of hollow.
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It isn’t exactly hollow when you’re always reaching the same people. Repetition doesn’t work if the audience has already bought the product or decided they don’t care.
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