Let’s face it, sometimes you just don’t have anything to say. When you blog regularly, there will be times where you may have blog burnout. Here are some ideas to get that fire going again.

• Change the look(theme) of your blog to get inspired
• De-clutter your blog, examine those crowded sidebars
• Add a new category that you haven’t written about before
• Get inspired by what others are saying, write a post responding to another post
• Sometimes just taking a small break is enough
• Write a post highlighting your favorite posts of the month or year
• Write a post that highlights other blogs in your category you love, and what you like about them

Sometimes just taking a look from a different angle will give exactly what you needed to get back on track!

Happy Blogging, Deb

blog, blogging, blogger, burnout

If you are looking for ways to draw traffic to your website or blog, you might want to consider holding a contest or giveaway. While these can draw a lot of “freebie seekers” who are only interested in the prize, you can generate a lot of buzz that will bring long time readers to you as well. Another thing you are going to do is build links without even trying to. By nature we bloggers like to blog about what other people are doing, and if we see something cool on someone else’s blog we write about it and give them a link. That is twice as likely when that something is a contest with nice free prize to win!

If your blog is devoted to parenting issues, you could hold a contest where entrants describe their funniest parenting mishap or the most embarrassing thing their children said in public, or ask them to tell you about their favorite must have toy for their kids etc.

When it comes to finding prizes for your contests, you can offer up your own products or services, or you can solicit prizes from other website owners. The latter can be a win-win situation, as the prizes will not cost you anything and the person donating the prize will also get exposure (just be sure to mention on the contest page who donated the prize).

If you are not the creative type, or you just want to keep things as simple as possible then you can simply hold a giveaway. Your visitors can enter their information into a form or your comments section and you can randomly pick a winner. Again, you can offer one of your products or services as the prize or you can seek out prizes from other business owners.

A giveaway can also be used to increase your customer retention. If you have a service- based business, such as virtual assistance or graphic design, you could hold a monthly drawing and each time one of your customers paid for a service that month, they receive an entry form. For example, if a client paid for three graphics that month, they would be entered three times. Your customers may want to win a prize so bad, that they keep buying your services each month just to have a chance at winning.

To be successful, you’ll want to promote your contest as much as possible. You’ll want to send a notice to your mailing list as well as putting information about the contest on the main page of your website and blog. If you offer a podcast, make sure you mention it to your listeners.

There are many sites that allow you to enter your contest information, and this info can get picked up and publicized by other website owners. To find these sites, do a Google search on a keyword such as “contest submission sites.” You may also want to send out a few press releases. And never ever underestimate the power of other bloggers to build buzz.

So let’s see…for lunch today, I had vegetable soup and…oh, you really don’t care do you?

You’re just learned a valuable lesson in that last sentence. Nobody cares what you had for lunch today, unless it was awesome and you’ve included the recipe. Maybe it was a great new restaurant you’re reviewing, and in that case you just may want to talk about those belly dancing waitresses. If you were just sitting at your desk eating some soup, it doesn’t really hold much interest to others. Bringing personality, having fun, or bringing useful information to people, will make them want to return.

Does your blog have snap? Or does your blog have too much bounce? What exactly is bounce? It’s a measure of how long people stay on your site and keep reading. If you have a high bounce rate, that means people are opening your page and moving on way too quickly.

It’s not just what brings somebody to your site, it’s what keeps them there. Do they keep reading, or do they jump ship too quickly?

A quick way to check your bounce rate is to look at your stats. If you have Google Analytics, you can see your bounce rate easily. In this instance, the lower a number is, the better it is. (Ex: a 40% bounce rate is better than a 90% bounce rate)

bounce rate, bounce, google analytics

Remember we talked about Twitter before? Well, there are a number of websites that allow you to use your Twitter account to garner traffic for your blog.

Twitterfeed allows you to send automatic updates from your blog to your Twitter friends. You can set the posts from Twitterfeed to only post at intervals. This is great for those of us who update our blogs every day and would like for people to continue to come back. Eventually those people become regular readers and will likely comment more on your blog. Continually reminding people that you are updating your blog is a surefire way to keep traffic coming in.

You can also automatically blog your Tweets for the day automatically with LoudTwitter. The bonus in this is if you can’t blog from your cell phone but you can use Twitter from it, you are able to blog about the day with your tweets. These tweets are posted in your blog as a post. If you have your Twitterfeed account going, the resulting blog post will end up in  your feed with all your tweets posted for easy reading.

These are only two of the ways you can use Twitter to keep a continuous flow of ideas and readers rolling through. Can you think of more?

Tags: twitter, twitterfeed, loudtwitter

Happy New Year! What does 2008 hold for your blog?

Many people think of the new year as a chance to have new beginnings. I’m certain many new blogs will be started as people vow to write to them on a regular basis. I’m also certain at least 70% of those blogs will end up being forgotten about at some point.

Rather than take on a new blog, let’s look at the blog you have in front of you. What direction do you want your blog to go in 2008? What worked well for you in 2007? Was there a series of articles or a topic that seemed to do well? Did people respond to one type of post over another? Did the posts with pictures gain more traffic?

When you have a clear picture of what worked for you in 2007 and what didn’t, you can weed through and tighten what you’re doing this year.

I’ve been looking at one of my blogs, and I’ve found it doesn’t have enough focus. My goal for 2008 is to give it better focus. On another blog, while it’s a niche blog, I found that by changing the particular angle, I was able to zone in on what I wanted my blog to represent. Another blog I found was too boxed in by being a targeted topic, and I’ve decided to open the topic up a little wider to include more categories.

I’m also trying to add clipart and pictures to more of my posts, as well as get better at tagging. Tagging is one of those things that just seems to slip my mind, and that’s not good! I’ve taken an inventory of my own blogs, analyzed my stats, and I’ll be making some changes.

What will you be doing to change your blog in 2008? Will you add another category, writer shorter or longer posts? Maybe you’ll work on social networking, and building traffic.

With a fresh year before you, it’s now the perfect time for you to go take inventory!

Happy Blogging! Deb

blog, blogging, social networking, blogs, build traffic