No 365 post this week- I generally put it together on Wednesday morning, but yesterday was so full of errands and chores that trying to fit in another post wasn’t going to happen.

(When I say basic, I mean it. I’m not a big name blogger, but these are things that I’ve gleaned from my 3 years of posting off and on at different blogs, or from the big name bloggers that I do follow).
1. Word Verification
In a word (haha)- don’t.
Or if you’re adament that you must use word verification, make sure that it actually works and that your readers will be able to read it. Blogger especially is notorious for having a word verification that commenters can’t actually read.
In other words, you’re going to loose comments if it takes people 15 minutes just to get through your spam filters.
2. Check Your Spam Filters
On both your blog proper and your blog email.
I loose a lot of blog hop notifications to my spam filter. All of my emails route into a single address and I check my spam filter pretty regularly for BPAL swap notifications. What I noticed is that the larger my blog becomes (and I’ve tripled my traffic in the last month), the more emails I’m loosing to my spam filter.
I check my comment spam for the same reason- occassionally non-spam comments end up there. If you check it once a day or a few times a week, the spam doesn’t build up so large that it becomes unmanagable.
3. Go Hopping
If you have content that fits into blog hops, use them. They’re a good way to network your blog and grow your readership.
4. Be consistent
What is your voice? What makes you happiest to write about? Figure out what your voice is, and your theme, and stick with it. It may take awhile but people are going to get used to you writing about a specific topic- and come looking to you for that topic. I have a pretty split readership; my hits are pretty evenly split between the horror and the fiber/food content on this site.
Posting at roughly the same time a day, and posting with the same frequency each day, helps as well. It gets your readership used to what you’re writing. I try not to post more than 2 entries a day, I post at night, and I alternate the main theme of the blog.
5. Use a Schedule
Work out what you want to post and when you want to post it. I don’t preplan every day, but there are bloggers that do. I have columns that I post with regularity- Sunday Legends, Haunted Western New York, and my 365 project. I may not post them every week, but I post them on the same day every time I do post them. Again, eventually you’ll develop readership for that content if they know that it’s going to be there. I have readers from ONTDCreepy that know that on Saturday night they’re going to get a new urban legend.
6. Post Pictures, Not Links
This is a tip that I just got, and I have no idea why it works. If you post a picture to your Facebook blog page with your entry link in the comments, you’ll get more hits per entry from Facebook than if you just post the entry to your page. There’s no logic that I can see that suggests that it should work- but it does.
7. Don’t Compare Yourself to Others
It’s great to get ideas from other people. But you’re not another blogger, you’re not going to have their strengths- or their weaknesses. There’s no point in feeling bad that you can’t, say, paint pumpkins the same way- especially if you’re trying to run a cooking blog.
Blogging should be fulfilling. It shouldn’t be about who takes better pictures or who writes better cake recipes (my uncle is the professional photographer, and it’s my aunt who’s the baker).
The Frugal Girl has a couple of posts that say it better than I can, so I’m just going to link you other to her.
Linked up here