Ten Ways to Pimp your Blog 1

[goodboys]

If you’re serious about blogging, the only thing to do at this point is to power through the dip. Spend some time buttressing your site’s functionality to make it more useful to your future readers (and avoid having to do much renovation later when the number of people it will confuse is vastly greater). And commit about the same amount of time you spend writing your blog to promoting it to keep that growth process moving forward.

1. First things first: UNPIMP YOUR BLOG! That’s right. Like a pimply-faced teen with no money who puts plastic wheel covers and fuzzy dice in his grandmother’s Civic hoping to impress the hot rod babes, beginning bloggers tend to put a lot of cra… er, “stuff” on their blogs. Counters. Chat rooms. Off-site forums. Badges for every web service and social network imaginable. LOL-Cats. Glitter art.

Most of this stuff isn’t making your blog any quicker, easier to use, or (let’s be honest) more attractive. It’s just cluttering it up and making it harder to find the good content your readers came to read. Be vicious in decluttering your blog — if a particular element adds no useful function for your readers, either a) lose it, b) move it to your “About” page (if it says something meaningful about you), or c) move it to a private page that only you have access to.

2. Install a new theme: While you don’t want to get into the habit of changing your site’s layout all the time, now that you’ve been driving it for a couple of months it’s a good time to ask whether your theme is everything it could be. Most popular blogging platforms offer hundreds, if not thousands of free themes — Google the name of your blogging platform and the phrase “free themes” and check out the first few search results. Put some thought into the mood you want your site to convey — is it serious and professional, fun and whimsical, tech-savvy, homey, country, urban? There’s bound to be several themes for any mood you can dream up.

3. Revise your “About” page: New bloggers tend to give short shrift to their “About” page. If your writing is at all good, people will want to know about the person behind the voice. Flesh out your bio with information about your background, experience, and reasons for blogging. This is also the place to put all those links to your profile on various social networks that you stripped from the front page while un-pimping.

Cont..