1 – Concentrating on Content Over Design
No one, and I repeat no one wants to read your amazing work if you have light text on a dark background. Keep the layout clean, clear and central. No right or left aligned texts, keep it centered. Don’t clutter the sides with irrelevant badges. Pepper your posts with images or videos.
2 – Concentrating on Design Over Content
You have the main gist of design sorted, so move on and concentrate on the content. Share some flash fiction, poetry, novel extracts, interviews. Your future book buyers want to suss out your voice. Writer tips are great but enough already…share your voice and style to future bok BUYERS not future book writers. You are aiming at a ninch market and lets face it, aspiring writers probably will not buy your books. Readers will want to buy your books, spoil the future reader.
Ensure that you have an archive list and a label list. See my blog archive on the right of my blog and my label list on the left. And no, most deffiniately do not have a word cloud, it is messy and counter-productive.
3. Specialising – The majority of blogging tips say to find your USP and specilise. But I think you are just painting yourself into a corner. On this blog I write about; writer interviews, book launches, book reviews, blogging, social media, teaching, computer programming, e-learning, multimedia, flash fiction, personal truths, Irishness, social media, technology, art, guest posts. Once you are passionishnet about what you write about then you are golden. My theme would be creativity, where I investigate social media, technology and writing.
4.Thinking you are not good enough to run your own blog/site.
We all had to start somewhere, no one is born designing websites/blogs, google any questions you have on blogging and read a few blogs. Suss out what you like, which designs you like, what posts you love and which bloggers you love. And keep it up to date, even if you only post once every 2 weeks…keep at it. And set up a twitter account, it is the bees knees for doing promo for your blog. But do NOT re-tweet non-stop or pester people about your blog! Think of Me Media ( see the blogger labels on the left to found out more)
5. I lied, there is no 5th one. Ya see I did my research and I know what keywords are used a lot in searches! So if I could offer one last piece of advice it would be to watch your stastices. Use google analysticis. Track your links, I use google shortner to study my hits. I will post a KISS post about that during the week.
I have written a lot on how to blog so make sure you have a read of my ‘series on blogging.’
Best of luck guys and you never know your blog might even get a Blog Award Ireland 2012 nomination!
Michelle Moloney King 
Go for it MK, report back and let me know whe you do.
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I am seriously considering setting up a blog. I have the book writer and I am in the process of editing. What I need now is some sort of an on-line presence!
You make it all sound so easy
M.K writer
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