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This article was written by Monika Mundell

If you blog for fun and don’t want anything to do with an online business, you might not need to read this post. If however you do run a business online, regardless of creed listen up as the tips below can present your blog in a more powerful way.

Blogging is fun, I’m sure you agree with this, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. In general bloggers start out because of two reasons:

1. They heard it is cool to start blogging and did so
2. They purposely started a blog to get more exposure for their business

Do you fall into one of those two categories, or did I miss an obvious reason here?

So we start out, hoping to attract a flood of traffic and repeat visitors while posting our thoughts, experiences, tips, tutorials and gossip. For some this dream will become reality, while most others will eventually disappear.

In the time I have been online I would have probably seen half of the initial crowd get lost along the way. They stopped blogging eventually and that was the end of their journey online.

While some do come back with another blog, business idea or else, most will never make it because life gets in the way.

To have better chances at being noticed means we have to make sure that our blog looks its part. Since most of you can’t afford a professional blog theme, you have to make do with changing a free theme into something more special.

This is easy enough for those who are versed in coding, but for the rest of us it is pure annoyance and frustration.

I must admit that personally I’m fascinated with the language of coding and try to advance my knowledge all the time, but when things don’t go as I want them to, gee can I get impatient and upset. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about here too.

Don’t worry though as there is hope. Try to implement some or all of my suggestions and see whether this doesn’t help you to spruce up your blog.

1. Upload a different header logo to your site. Even if you are not well versed with code you should be able to pick out where the code is actually located and then change it via the stylesheet or create a new image to override the existing one. This will help you in branding your blog to stand apart from all the others who use the same theme template
2. Sort out your navigation. Clutter can really deter from staying on a blogsite for too long and might lose you repeat visitors. The worst kind are those blogs who have a billion flashing adverts that distract from the actual content. I normally just click away.
3. Make it easy for your readers to find things. Use Plugins to showcase certain parts of your blog like podcasts, contact form, about me widget, latest comments, sitemap, etc. You’ll want to avoid losing visitors because they can’t find things.
4. Enable comments. You would be surprised how many bloggers don’t do this. It beats me, since a blog’s purpose is to do well in the search engine, especially for business owners, but they fail to enable comments. For those of you who don’t know this, commenting on your blog actually helps to get spidered more often which is great for SEO. Especially if the post’s keyword is repeated in the comments.
5. Stay away from loud colors. Unless of course you are simply blogging for fun, then everything is allowed. If you blog for business purposes, either to attract more buyers, service your customers or else, stick with a simple color scheme for an optimum effect.
6. Don’t play music clips on your blog. Hey, if your name is Mick Jagger, then I accept that the sound of “I can’t get no - satisfaction” screams at me when I load the page. But for everybody else, don’t bother.
7. Show your readers that you are having fun with your blog. Even a boring old business blog can be very attractive if the blogger has an unique voice. Nothing attracts more than seeing a blogger have tons of fun. It makes you want to be part of it and take some of that fun home with you.
8. Last but not least apply the KISS principle.

• Keep
• it
• simple
• stupid

It really works a treat. Please feel free to add your tips to the conversation. As you know by know, the spiders will like this very much. Anything you feel has helped you to make your blog more attractive would be great.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 and is filed under Blogging, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.