Quick Tips To Improve Your Blog from Blogopolis

I have some followers who were unable to attend this year's Blogopolis conference and I promised to share what I learned to improve my blog.  I have to say the conference was absolutely fantastic this time around and I learned lots.  I have been inspired to keep improving this blog and the service I provide to the community surrounding it.

So here are 10 quick tips which you can employ with little effort to improve your blog.

Working the Room at Blogopolis 2012

1. On your blog.......Be yourself because everyone else is taken - Oscar Wild

2. A small following is not necessarily a disadvantage, because you can truly get to know your audience to a greater extent than a big blogger.  With this intimacy follows trust, and if you recommend something to your readers, a marketing company will take note of followers who comment that they purchased the product as a result of your recommendation.  When pitching to the PRs use emails/comments from your followers as evidence of this trust.

3.Ensure the primary key words in your title are closer to the left than the right.  So if you are posting about banana bread that is moist for example, make sure those words are closer to the left rather than say a title like  Garden Gourmet Cook off Tommorrow and a fabulously Moist Banana Bread, which is what I did.  Doh!!!!

3. Google has 90% of the search engine market and people search it for answers, not the latest headline.   Google likes descriptive information in the title, that is correct and directly related to the content of the post.  So even if your title is boring, if it is descriptive of the post's content, that will ultimately give you a better ranking in Google search results.

4.  Google search results use 67 characters in the title and 155 characters in the descriptive paragraph below.  Stick to that amount of characters and use the key words from your title in the first paragraph of the post.  Google gives more weight to what is said higher up in the post than in the content lower down in your text.  This is because when people click onto your site they will see what's up the top, but may not scroll down to the bottom.

5.  Spend a few minutes before you confirm the title of your post, doing research on the key words you intend using on Google Adwords here and how often they are searched.  If the competition for a search is 'high' on that keyword, you may be better off picking a keyword with 'medium' competition, but with a large number of search queries.

6.Create links back to your blog from other blogs as much as you can. Because links equal votes and this gets noticed.  We all know the power of linky parties ladies  And link to several other relevant posts of your own in your current post.  Ok doing that now, with one of my most hit on posts of all time.

7. Pinterst has 18,000,000 unique visitors per months, so set up an account, which I intend on doing very soon.  A 'unique visitor' is one human being and does not include the amount of times they click around once they are on a site.  So that means 18,000,00 sets of eyeballs go to pinterest each month and then start clicking around.  Oh and that figure was as at March 2012 and is growing wildly. Again, when you are labelling shots on pinterest or just for your post for that matter, be descriptive so they are more likely to come up in search results.

Copyright is still a grey area with Pinterest, and because I have a legal background, I will only be pinning my own shots or those of which I have express permission to use.  

Racheldevine who spoke at Blogopolis has a great photography blog here

8.  Good photography is very important on a blog.  Blogging is a visual medium and people 'read' your pictures before they read a word of your text, except perhaps your title, so they have to be good to encourage people to stick around.

9.  Light is the most important thing in photography.  If you are photographing food for example, don't rush a few shots just before serving up the meal to a hungry family.  Make the dish earlier in daylight, maybe you can reheat it at dinner time.  (That's why I do so much baking actually) Shoot it next to a window with your back to the window.  You can diffuse light (spread it evenly) in your little studio by the window, by using white and light grey sheets of cardboard strung up around the picture.  I have only ever used a point and shoot camera on this blog and those shots can be absolutely fine if you know how to rock it.

Also when you are ordering your shots in the post, put the best one first.  This shows up in your followers dash and any blog rolls you are on and needs to be attractive to encourage clicks.

10. And a final tip about content.  Ideas can come from anywhere.  For example, you can write a post about questions your readers ask you in the comments or in emails.

For example, the top 6 questions I get asked in emails and comments are:

What paint colours to choose in a renovation

Measurement conversions from metric to imperial

Where does your creativity come from?

What restaurants/accommodation options/ tourist attractions are there on the Northern Beaches of Sydney

Where did I purchase a certain item in my home

Queries about ingredients I use.

If you were to write a list of questions you are asked you would probably have 5 or 6 ideas for posts right there.

I hope these tips will inspire you to rock your little baby and blog on.

Oh and right at the end of the conference some lovely ladies representing brands got up.  Here's a couple of things they said:

Blown away but what I have seen here today

Bloggers should not under value themselves

Corporates are still coming to terms with the power of blogging.......give us some time.

You guys are amazing

I will be taking back what I have learned to the CEO and we want to be on broad this new media.

The High Tea was lovely as well

So there you go ladies.  Please let me know if I have inspired anything in you from this post.  Oh and I am doing a Twitter and Facebook drive this week so pop on over and like me and follow and I'll come back and do the same for you. Make sure you let me know you've done so in the comments. Links are in my side bar or right here in this paragraph.  Have a great week gals.  It's school holidays here, so I hope to keep up the pace, but will be putting the Beach House Brats first this week.

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