Problogger’s 31 Days to Better Blogs: Day 2

September 3rd, 2005 at 9:27 pm (Blogging)

Well, I’ve spent some time at Problogger’s 31 Days to Better Blogs. I have to say that I found the organization of the content a bit confusing. I was hoping to walk through the posts day by day — Day 1, click here, Day 2, click here, and so on — but I could not locate any such organization.

However, the content in the posts I found is excellent. In what I think is the Day 2 post, (Day 1 was a bunch of vision and mission statement stuff that I know is valuable but skipped anyway), I found the following great tips that I plan to implement as time permits:

    Post often. This will be the biggest challenge for me, as I have very little discretionary time and a lot of things I want to do with it. But I’m going to try to squeeze out more, shorter posts, and not worry so much about polishing.

    Position Adsense Ads closer to content.This sounds like a great idea, and I noticed that I had a much greater tendency to actually look at his ads than I did others for the simple fact that it was right next to what I was reading. I’m not sure I understood the blogger template well enough to actually implement this concept until a little while ago, but I think I can do it by pasting the Adsense code inside the Post block of the template rather than at the beginning. I’m going to try it as soon as I finish this post.

    Employ a higher standard blogging service. I think it’s only natural to start out free and simple. It’s the AOL model, but you are soon frustrated by the limitations of free and easy. For instance, I’ve often envied other blogs that employ categorization of posts. How do they do that? I think I’m learning that they do it with better blogging interfaces. I looked at Movable Type once, but it looked too complicated. I’m going to take a hard look at Wordpress as soon as I get the chance.

    Master your own domain.Again, free and easy is a good and natural place to start. But I do think that using the blogspot.com domain name brands you as a dabbling novice. Apparently search engines also prefer dedicated domains. I’ll look into that as well, but I know you get into cost issues like registration, storage, and band-width.

That’s it for now. I’m going to look at this stuff closer and see what I can do with it. Hopefully, you’ll start to see improvements soon.