This post is in response to John Chow’s What’s Holding You Back From Blogging.

My blog has been up and running for a little over a week now. Getting into the habit has actually been a joy. In my line of work, I spend a lot of time on the internet and I come across a lot of things that I find interesting. My problem is that I need to work to keep my post count down and filter out the things that can wait versus the things that I want to post first about.

[update] I see I’ve been mentioned on John Chow dot Com for this post. Excellent. Want to know how John Chow does it? Read: Powerbloggers - How They Went From Zero to Heroes: John Chow

Staying in the Habit

• Track your traffic using CrazyEgg and Google Analytics (see below).
• Visit other people’s blogs and see what kind of patterns they get into.
• Love what you do.
• Keep your blog in mind with everything you do.
• Share your posts with your friends, get feedback.
• Make blog friends, we’re all in it together, don’t be competitive (for small blogs)
• Share discoveries with those friends

When it comes down to it. You have to love what you do.

What I’ve learned about writing blogs

• People like images. Including images in your posts gives people some visual stimulation and they may become more tolerant to reading.
• People love lists. Lists are the best way to give people lots of information in an easy to digest manner. Do it when you can to help break down your posts.
• Visit lots of other blogs. Frequent the blogs of people who have more visitors than you and gain an understanding. Apply this to your own blog, but don’t forget, you’re not popular yet, so don’t push it too much. Be modest.
• Make blog friends. Comment on the blogs of others and be constructive. Don’t whore out your blog unless there’s a related post that will actually add value to the post you are commenting about.
• Submit everything. Submit all of your posts to Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Get your friends to support your blog posts and have them comment and submit them as well.
• Don’t post too much on a given day. Keep the post count down. If you have too many posts on a day, each post is going to lose weight as there is too much competition between the posts.
• Ride the wave. Once one of your posts makes it big, make sure to ride that wave and get traffic circulating to all parts of your blog while that traffic is still coming.

Recommended Tools

Google Analytics

Seeing your traffic stats will keep you in the habit. This is the best tool for analyzing your traffic. Forget about AWstats or any of those other server side statistics. Sign up with Google Analytics now.

Crazy Egg

I love this site. It will give you a down-to-the-coordinates view of how users are behaving on your site:

• Where they are clicking.
• Where they are coming from.
• Where people are clicking depending on where they are coming from.

How does this help you?

• Ad placement
• Keeping your blog nice and circular, no dead-ends.
• Content layout

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