One of the secrets of blogging is holding the interest of your readers so that they’ll want to come back for more. Try out these blogging tips and tricks on your blog.
You’ll doubtless get the spammy “Wow, this blog is so useful and I’ve bookmarked it so I can come back again” comments. What you want to encourage are real users to post comments on your blog. This kind of interaction is one of the things that makes blogging so special. The dialogue that exists between a blogger and their readers allows you to find out whether your comments have been well received or whether there are things you could maybe explain more.
This doesn’t mean you have to swear like an alternative comedian or turn yourself into Howard Stern. Just don’t necessarily always follow the mainstream. Too much of today’s media is bland because that’s what is demanded of it by the advertisers. Feel free to state your opinion and don’t just squash dissenters when they post comments that aren’t aligned with your point of view. You’ll begin to attract a lively audience to your blog and there’s a good chance it will almost take on a life of its own.
Twitter is a good way of announcing your newest blog posts. OK, you have to be really good at editing to get your point across in 140 characters but it’s at times like these when you learn just how real life editors earn their money. Posting a Tweet is a good start. Adding a re-Tweet button plug-in is even better as it allows others to Tweet your posts as well.
There are several different caches available for WordPress – I usually use WP Super Cache. These speed up your blog by holding posts in a cache rather than asking your server to recreate them every time. Very useful if your blog gets Stumbled or picked up by Digg.
There’s almost nothing more disappointing than finding a blog that fits your personality and outlook and then seeing from the age of the posts that it’s been abandoned and left to gather virtual dust. I know that our schedules often don’t allow us to spend hours in front of the computer but even adding a short post every week or so shows your readers that your blog is still alive and also alerts the search engines to continue their spidering.