Blogussion » blog improvements

Use Your Lowest Quality of Content for Improvement

Derek Jensen — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 04:00:46 +0000

Say what?! Yes. By finding and using your lowest quality content whether it you measure it by the number of retweets, comments, trackbacks, or just the copy and message you can improve your blogging practice. We should all want to improve our practice of blogging and make it clear to your audience that you are serious and here to play.

Just looking at some of the content here at Blogussion, I noticed so many posts that could be improved. Either the idea or message could be better or that message or idea has evolved.

Surely, we up’d our game here and say we are your perfect seat to evolve the blogosphere. If you have decided to go change or improve a direction with your blog you should take this post to heart and put it into action.

Define Your Lowest Quality

I’m asking you to use your lowest quality of content for improvement because this is ultimately the areas where you can improve your blog and your blogging practice. What’s better than pulling up an old article that never the light but deserved to for your target readership?!

What posts have received the lowest amount of retweets or overall shares? … this tends to answer how well someone is willing to pass it onto others. It has to be good!
What posts received the lowest amount of comments? … are you encouraging discussion or it might not fit the voice they’ve come to connect with…
My favorite: what content do you just find to be of low quality by not even looking at the retweets, shares, or amount of comments?

Your definition of “lowest quality” needs to be yours. But I want to push you to deliver the best and quality content to your readers! Surely don’t make your definition something that just doesn’t even matter to have it being defined. Make sense? If not, I’d love to hear your comment.

But before you begin making improvements you need to define what is considered to be your lowest quality of content.

What Improvements are Needed?

The improvements I’m talking about are NOT fixing spelling or grammar mistakes. The improvements I’m talking ARE:

Adjusting the voice of the message to match with your true values, belief, and personality.
How are other perceiving or responding to the message you are striving to deliver? Make those needed adjustments.
Do you need to try out podcasting, internet broadcasting, or offer paid content?

Surely there is more improvements that you could make. You as the voice and direction of your blog has to figure out what improvements could be made to better match what you are good at and what you’re striving to achieve. We all want to have a successful blog!

You might be thinking you need to improve your SEO, interaction with others to promote your content, or that your message and quality of content just sucks.

Every blog and blogger will have different and unique improvements.

Feeling the Glory

Once, you have defined your definition of lowest quality and make the needed improvements, feel the glory!

It’s about feeling like you are making a difference in the blogosphere with your content in whatever category or interest you strive to aspire. Start feeling the glory today by looking at your lowest quality of content for those needed improvements. Only you wanting to make the change will make the change!

What prevents you to make improvements?

Photo by Mariano Kamp

Using your Strengths and Weaknesses to Become a Better Blogger

Kwame — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:00:28 +0000

There are many bloggers in the blogosphere who are doing pretty well with their blogs. Then, there are those who don’t seem to be going anywhere with their blog. Chances are, the bloggers who actually have something going for them have taken a very important step in reaching that success. Identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and making the best of each.

Identifying what you are good at when it comes to your blog is a very essential activity that will go a long way to improve your blogging flow. We are going to look at just how we can do this.

Identifying Your Strengths

To help identify your blogging strengths, you need to answer a couple of questions. I have compiled a short, but self-defining list of questions to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses blogging.

When it comes to blogging and everything it includes (writing, promotion, maintenance, etc), what are you best at and what do you enjoy the most? What type of content or article types do you write well? What promotional technique(s) are you best at using? What ways of monetization works best for you?
What advantages do you have over other blogs in the blogosphere? How many RSS subscribers do you have? How many Email subscribers do you have? What is your blog’s traffic ranking?
What do you have more of that you can put into your blogging activities? Do you have time to blog? Do you have money to pay writers for your blog’s content? Do you have money to pay for your blog’s marketing?
What do your blog’s readers commend you for when they leave a comment on your blog?

Finding the answers to the questions above will help you determine your strengths in blogging. You can write your answers on a piece of paper, or put them in a text document. A piece of paper will work for you because you can place it by your desk or anywhere around your home that you can review it. You must aim to provide absolutely honest answers to these questions.

After answering the questions, take a special note of anything you didn’t list in your answers. For example, if you answer that the promotional technique you are best at is social media marketing, then it means the other methods of marketing – guest blogging, search engine optimization and article marketing are some things you may want to work on improving. We will talk about weaknesses later on in this article.

Leveraging Your Strengths

Learning how to leverage your blogging strengths will help you make the most of your blogging activities. Leveraging gives you a big advantage over other blogs because you use your identified strengths to add more value to your blog.

To better understand leverage, let us look at the leverage China has over the manufacturing industry.

Many companies like Nike and Apple have set up manufacturing plants in China because China provides almost all of the resources (cheap labor, large labor market, cheap raw materials, etc.) needed to manufacture the products of these companies at an excellent price. Many retailers also purchase most of their items from Chinese wholesalers to sell them in their retail shop. China learned how to leverage their strengths (in this case, their resources) to their advantage and now they have taken over most global industries.

The following questions will help you find a way of leveraging your own blogging strengths to add more value to your blog.

What do I want to achieve with my blog? How can I achieve my blogging goals using my strengths (expertise)?
How can I get my blog’s visitors or email and RSS subscribers to promote my blog? Think of giving them something extra to motivate them to talk about your blog to others. You can host a contest with some stellar prizes. Preferably, give out a prize related to your niche.
What other ways can I monetize my blog? You can think of selling products such as your own eBooks, plug-ins, website themes or services such as premium content (by paid subscriptions), writing or design services. These are just a few examples from me; don’t limit yourself to my ideas alone.

Leverage is all about adding options and improvements based on your strengths. You need to constantly aim at using your existing strengths to improve your blog. As the old adage goes, “use it or lose it.” You need to identify and use your strengths the best you can. Otherwise, you will lose that leverage on your strengths as a result of worrying too much about your weaknesses. Instead, work at using other alternatives to your weaknesses and aim at constant improvement in all areas of your blogging activities.

In your quest to leverage your strengths, remember to take your blog’s readers and visitors into consideration, especially when it comes to adding other monetization methods. You have to remember, without your community, your blog is nothing. So if you choose to throw banner ads all over the place, expect those ads to have a negative impact on your community.

Remember, that any change you make to your blog, someone may not like it. You can’t try to make everybody happy. Make choices you think will be most beneficial to your blog, and if someone doesn’t like it – it’s their loss for not supporting you trying to grow your blog.

Identifying Your Weaknesses

It is very important that you pick out your weaknesses in your blogging skill set. They are just as important to know as knowing your strengths – maybe even more important.

Do another self-analysis by answering the following questions below:

What do your readers criticize you for?
What are your worst traits when you are writing an article?
What is the impact blogging has on your personal life?
When it comes down to maintaining the technical aspects of your blog, what do you know?
What holds you back when you really want to work on your blog?
What are your competitors good at that you are not? (Of course, if you want your own uniqueness and not copy what they are doing, you don’t have to see this as a weakness)

Basically, your weaknesses are the things that affect your blogging career negatively. Write them on a piece of paper or note pad. Put them right under your list of strengths, because they are just as important to know as your strengths.

Making Improvements

Once you know what you excel at and what holds you back, it’s time to work towards improving your weaknesses. Do you have enough resources ready to improve your blog? Can you invest some time and maybe money to improve on your blogging weaknesses? You need to ask yourself questions to find out if you are really ready for improvement.

Even if you have a nagging edge for improvement, it is not enough because sometimes the feeling will be there but there wouldn’t be much time or available resources to go ahead with improvement.

The three basic things you will need in order to make a sound improvement on your weaknesses are:

Mindset for improvement - Be willing to improve and think positively about the things you are doing. You won’t improve if you think you cannot improve. You need to have a vision for constant improvement of your blog..
Time -You need a lot of time in order to make improvement. You need it because you will be spending much of it on improving upon your weaknesses.
Education & Training - By this, I don’t necessarily mean going to college and earning a diploma or degree. Reading blogs for blogging tips and joining paid tutorial sites that teach you how to improve at something are all forms of education.

I didn’t include money because sometimes, it is not important. You may need money to create resources when you lack them though. For example, you may need money to pay for education (that is, if you opt to pay for tips rather than find free sources of information), you may also need money to buy someone else’s time (hire a consultant who can help improve your weakness) if you don’t have any time of your own.

I will however advise that you work on improving your blog on your own. If you get stuck, get someone to take you through the process and work on it yourself by following the process. It is better to learn and master it yourself than to pay someone else to make it better and keep on paying him or her to maintain that improvement again and again.

Final words

Tackle weaknesses one at a time. You don’t have to burn yourself out by trying to make two, three or even 10 improvements at a time. You may not get anywhere if you try to improve in many areas all at the same time.

Tackle your greatest weakness first. List which weakness you will want to tackle first in order of priority and you will do just great.

You can skip one weakness and tackle the next one if you are getting frustrated. For example, if you are getting frustrated designing your blog, take time off from it and work on something you think you will have more tolerance for. However, you do need to come back later on and work on that design. You should also note that some things take more time than other to improve, patience is a virtue here.

5 Easy Blog Improvements in under 5 Minutes

Alex — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:12 +0000

Your blog is not perfect. There are many things you can do to improve your blog, and after reading this post – you will be glad you made some of these changes.

There is just so much you can do to improve your blog. You can make a major change to it by adding a new design, or adding a forum to it or something minor like changing a title of a blog post to something more search engine friendly.

Whatever it is you want to do, you do it because you think it will make your blog better. Of all these little things you can do to make your blog better, I came up with five things I found on Blogussion that I chose to implement with hopes it would make my blog better.

And everything I did doesn’t even take five minutes to implement.

1. Add a “back to top” link to your footer

This is something so simple, but so beneficial. Blogs have a tendency to create huge scroll bars. Whether that scroll bar is long because you don’t use the more tag to cut down your posts, or you get a lot of blog comments – the fact of the matter is if you have a huge scroll bar and no easy way to get back to the top, it will annoy us as your readers.

So when a user gets to the bottom of the page and sees the link, when the click it – they go to the very top of the page. It’s very easy to create. Just use this code and add it to your footer somewhere:

Back to top

It’s just that easy. When that link gets clicked, it automatically shoots to the top of the page.

More on this method: A Short Story about “Back To Top” Links

2. Little Icons

Every minor detail counts when it comes to designing for a blog. It’s the minor details that make some designs so excellent, and adding icons next to links on your blog can really make some parts of your blog stellar looking.

Here are a few examples:

Copyblogger uses a nice mail icon on a slant to represent where you can sign up for email updates

Nettuts uses a nice RSS icon to represent their forms of subscriptions

ProBlogger uses icons to represent all kinds of ways to sign up to the RSS feed

3. Customized Input Forms

Input forms are used all the time on blogs. To sign up for newsletters, to fill out a comment, and anything else that generally involves getting information from the user.

Input forms without style are often very ugly and boring to use. Luckily, they are extremely easy to customize. You may want to check out a past post on Blogussion with four tricks to making input forms great.

4. Creating thumbnails for posts

I love thumbnails, they make lists look so much more attractive. Just take a look around on Blogussion, there are thumbnails to display the popular posts on the blog, and there are thumbnails to represent the names of commentators in the top commentators list.

Take for example my other blog, Asnio. You see thumbnails everywhere on the blog, and it really makes the design stand out. If you use the Thesis theme, using thumbnails for posts is as easy as it gets.

5. Numbered page navigation

At the bottom of the homepage on Blogussion, you can see a list of pages you can visit on the blog. All of those numbers link to a page full of articles on them.

Using numbered page navigation gets a lot more posts available to readers, which increases pageviews and can really show off the age of your blog with the more number of pages you have. It is a much more effective method of navigation than the standard “previous” and “next”post links that is standard on many blogs today,

Here is the plugin I use to represent page numbers on my blogs. It is very simple to use and comes with some great pre-styled themes.

Download WP Page Numbers

A Little Goes A Long Way

If you implement these five minor changes on your blog, you should see some real improvements to your blog usability wise. As I mentioned in this article, every little detail counts and if you can make your blog more convenient in even the smallest ways – you will see small rewards.

Photo by Joe Popp

Personal Reflection: How Has Your Blog Changed You Offline?

Alex — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:07:01 +0000

Whether you are really aware of it or not, becoming a serious blogger for a long time leaves some kind of affect on you even when you’re not actually doing it. I think it’s normal too, because when we blog we are so concentrated that it just opens our mind up to a lot of different perspectives of things.

Since you have started blogging, what do you think has changed in your life? Has it made you smarter, a better writer, a better speaker? There has to be something that has improved since you started blogging. Not to say there aren’t any negative impacts that blogging can have on you of course, but right now I want to focus on the benefits!

How Has Blogging Made You A Better ____________?

Blogging has improved me in many ways. Since I am a student in High School, it’s benefits have been my grades. But more specifically, I can come up with a list of things that I have become better at since I started blogging in 2007.

Organization Skills

Everything I do, I am more organized. I was always organized, but ever since I started planning out posts, marketing strategies and other things on my blog, I have learned to carry over those concepts to the outside world and use them to better myself.

Grammar/Writing Skills

I now exceed in my English/Grammar class at school. I can write better, more efficiently and more logically. I learn new words every time I write a blog post, and I try to try new writing styles as well which all follow me in my writings outside of my blog.

If I want something, I’ll get it

There is so much to want on a blog that you have to work hard as hell to go and get it. I have learned that through all of my blogging ventures, and I don’t let myself forget that in the real world.

Take for example my Mac computer. I had to work a month in a dish pit at a seafood restaurant to come up with enough money to buy my computer. Normally, I wouldn’t have the motivation to go through with that. But, there was something about setting my goals/priorities in blogging that helped me go through with that month of work.

Deeper Thinking

I realized that you cant always be satisfied with what some people tell you. Any advice you get, or anything you read has to be interpreted in your own way for you to truly understand and make use of it.

Think of all these “make money online” blogs out there – they tell you ways that they make money from their blog. They share with you methods they came up with that work for THEM. Does it mean that they will work for you? You have to know how to read.

Reading does not constitute as knowing how to pronounce words, but what you make of those words. That is what I am trying to say here: I learned how to really read by blogging.

What About You?

I listed a few things up there that have improved since I started blogging. What about you? How has blogging made you better at __________ in real life?