This is a guest post by Bilal Ahmed from TechMaish.com, blogging today to tell us some basic tips to keep in mind while creating/managing blogs.
Blogging is a very profitable and stable business, but the competition has made it very difficult for newbies to enter in this field.
The reasons are so many, e.g lack of knowledge and confidence, less experience, desire of getting popular in short time, expecting things is short span of time, coming up with competitive topics, not reading and following recommendations of the popular bloggers, monotony and having no proper business plan and so on…..
The only way for a newbie in this competitive environment is to stand out of the crowd.
In order to stand of the crowd, newbie is advised to start with a effective business plan and continue with the right steps. In blogging, blog is the first thing that will differentiate you from the rest. Blog must be very creative and well designed so that your readers can enjoy while reading it.
There are some tips, if you keep them in mind while blogging, you may create magic in the readers mind:
1. Attractive Design: We like anything on internet, if the matter is soothing to our eyes. Hence, this is very important to design your blog well not only that but it should be user friendly also.
2. Font Style, Size and Colors: Fonts that you use in your blog must be clear and easily decipherable never use the fonts such as Old English Text MT, Magneto etc. Even remember the fonts are not very large or very tiny while you are writing a blog must use the 12-14 size. We are aware that light color suits to dark background and dark to the light.
3. Images: Always add some images in your Blog that gives visual effects to the reader as we know that only reading can bore you and your eyes.
4. Proportionate the Sidebar: Give equal weightage to each and every portion of the blog. Do not enlarge the sidebars it makes the blog look yuck. Always keep the important points in the sidebars. This also helps you at the time when you get any advertise to post on your blog.
5. Don’t Overload the Blog: While writing a blog, remember that you write point to point. Do not use long sentences. Never use excessive images or description.
6. Highlight the Links: Always remember that the links given in the blog must be highlighted well. Thus, the links will stand out from the other contents.
7. Let Readers Make The Choice: Never keep the auto start music or videos in your blog. Let you readers decide if they want them or not. The auto playing music and videos take too much bandwidth and slow down the speed of PC. Always keep your videos in the sidebar, so that they are in sight.
8. Generate Sitemap & Navigation: It is advisable to create a sitemap in your blog. By doing so your blog will enable search engine spiders to know where to go. You can provide a search box in your blog where readers can search for keywords and find the relevant matter they are looking for. Always set your archives by category and by months.
9. Approachable Contact and Subscription Links: If you want to have followers, readers and subscribers who can visit you on regular basis, locate your feed, social-networking links and subscription links easily approachable for readers.
10. Remove Captchas and Have a Favicon: Captchas can create a trouble for visitor in leaving comment as sometimes, the text is very small & unclear to read and sometimes it takes more than one attempt to follow Captchas procedure. So you should remove Captchas to get maximum visitors’ comment. More over your blog should have identity which facilitates readers to search your blog in a big clump. For this propose, creating Favicon is perfect choice.
I hope you would have found this article nice. Please share your comments below and let us know if you consider some more basic tips that a blogger should know while he is blogging.
Excellent beginner tips, I have an article going in on Monday about specifics to choosing a blog theme. A Sitemap is a must for all sites for many reasons.
Interesting blog post! 🙂 To me personally I think the main key is to a attractive design 🙂 Maybe thats why you put it at the top of the list!?
just wondering for better technique to replace captcha…because I really sick of spam comments
Try Conditional CAPTCHA..I’m using it without annoying people.
It works on a simple concept…If Akismet detects something is Spam, then Conditional CAPTCHA comes in rescue and ask the human/bot to enter the CAPTCHA. If the CAPTCHA is wrong, it gets directly deleted and your Spam folder won’t get flooded.
Excellent article and some great points made. People who are interested in starting a blog simply have to realize that there is no easy route; it is going to take time, dedication and patience. If you recognize that you need to commit time to your blog for at least a year before you start to achieve any real results then you will be much better placed to deal with the frustration that comes with trying to achieve high rankings and get real traffic to your site.
This is a great post giving tips to beginners. One of the greatest tips is that you should have quality content in good English and without any typos or grammatical mistakes.
Even in guest posts one should be careful about typos. Only after proper screening and if necessary, editing it should be allowed to be posted on the blog.
Even on this post, even though the article is good, improper English and typos ruin the fun and do immense damage to your credibility.
Take care..
Simon@ Yes of course deigns is very important. Attractive design will attract readers.
Yeah, captcha is actually not a necessary for a blog especially when using WordPress.
I just use Akismet to fight over with spams and it still doing great job until today.
Some very helpful hints here. As a newbie I like to visit blogs and check if I can learn something new and also check if I am doing things right for my blog. I haven’t put up videos yet but now I know it is better to have them in a sidebar cos of loading time. I didn’t know that so thanks.
Patricia Perth Australia
Instead of Captcha I personally use “Anti-Captcha” plugin – it’s a hidden javascript that doesn’t require anything from user, yet catches all robots. Looking through my “spam” comments folder I was sometimes thinking that there was a mistake – a comment was clearly written too well to be a canned response, yet a simple googling for the comment revealed hundreds of other sites having the same exact comment. So it does a great job, without any effort.
Great list you have here for a new blogger. Even established bloggers can get a cue from this