01.24.08

Blogging Basics Series Wrap Up

Posted in Blogging at 8:05 pm by Anita Bruton

I covered a lot of material in the past couple of weeks about blogs and blogging.

I hope that you have found the blogging basics series helpful and informative. I would love to hear your feedback on it.

Please leave your comments below. Your thoughts matter to me, as my goal is to bring you the information you want in the manner you want.

Is there something I did not cover that you would like to see covered in another post or even a series of posts?

What did you like about the series?

What didn’t you like?

What worked for you?

What didn’t work for you?

Even if you are reading this a month after posting, six months, a year, whenever it is, please leave me your feedback.

I’m looking forward to bringing you new and exciting, informative material and the weeks and months to come.

Good writing and good blogging,

Anita Bruton

Professional Freelance Writer

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

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01.21.08

Five Ways to Keep Your Visitors Reading More and Longer

Posted in Blogging at 11:00 am by Anita Bruton

What is the purpose of your blog? Of course, the answer is to drive visitors to buy your products or use your services. The longer your visitors hang around your blog reading the information you share, the more they get to know you. The more they get to know you, the more they like you and the more they will trust you. How can you keep your visitors interested?

Here are five tips to keep those vital visitors happy:

1. Give your blog visitors unique content. Be original. People stick around longer if they find something that they haven’t seen anywhere else. This doesn’t mean your content has to be totally unique. It can be similar to other content but put a twist on it. Take this blogging series for example. There are plenty of other blogs that write about blogs. But I put it into a series.
2. Give your visitors a way to print the material you write about. Of course there is the standard copy and paste into a word doc, or right click and print; but look what I’ve done with the Writers Corner. I give you a way to save each post as a PDF. Save it to your computer for future reference or print it out.
3. Provide an online directory of resources and links for your visitors. My resource and links page is a growing list of people and sites that I have done business with or who provide information I find useful and hope my readers will as well.
4. Make your text easy on the eyes. You don’t want it too big or too small. You don’t want it too light or too dark. Text that is too big can come across as yelling, much the same as using all caps. Too small, and your text becomes difficult to read. Use a 12 pt font for consistent results. Try to use a black or dark blue font on a white background for easy reading. Too light, and visitors will be straining their eyes to see it.
5. Be professional and double check your content for spelling and grammar errors. Mistakes in spelling and grammar are huge turn offs to your visitors. Please, please, edit and proofread carefully! Even after you publish your post, go back in a day or two and read it again. Often a mistake that was hiding from you will blatantly pop out a couple of days later when your eyes are seeing it fresh!

There you have it. Five ways to keep your visitors reading more and reading longer.

Good writing,

Anita Bruton
Professional Freelance Writer

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