In my post Mr. Grumpy Goes Blogging I set out a few suggestions to help people build better blogs. Today, Mr. Grumpy Returns to share some additional suggestions. A few of these ideas come from readers of the original article who wanted to add their own nuggets of advice for creating great blogs by avoiding common pitfalls.
If you have an embedded Technorati account set up on your blog and you would like to swap links to support each other, let’s do it!
If you want to link up, please post a comment here or send me a note in email letting me know you forged a link to “David W. Boles’ Urban Semiotic” or — if you must for design or aesthetic reasons — just “Urban Semiotic” if that fits better.
I joined the blog promotion portal Blog Explosion one month ago today. Blog Explosion is a place where you can promote your blog, meet new people, and get some good tips on how to improve your blog.
I had no idea how many visitors I would have after a month. I hoped for 1,000 and, as you can see in the image of my account below, my hope was more than doubled with 2,084 visitors and those numbers reflect only Blog Explosion visitors.
Forgive me for being Mr. Grumpy today.
Here’s a short — okay, it’s longish — list of things that make me grumpy when I read blogs of others and I realize 99% of what I say will insult 95% of the blogs I’ve read so far:
The tagline for this blog used to be just Rendering Meaning in the City Core and this week I changed it to read… Where Blood & Bone Render Meaning in the City Core …and some have asked why I made that change. I came to realize this week that a successful blog, if it is to have meaning beyond the self, must in some way speak personally to you, the reader, in a genuine manner.
I decided to spend about $20.00 to buy some banner advertising on BlogExplosion and BlogClicker and you can see the results below.
I created seven banners and put identical copies of each on both BlogExplosion and BlogClicker to see how well I could push internet readers to this blog. I wanted to test the success of my banner designs in the real world. The test ran for a week.
Continue reading → Blog Ad Banners on BlogExchange & BlogClicker
Here are some tips on how NOT to write a blog:
1. Don’t Post for Days in a Row: No one is interested in what you have to say so why say it as often as every day? People don’t like an ongoing relationship so be sure to keep them at a distance with unpredictable posts. There is no better feeling than to read the same thing over and over. Leave it up to whimsy, instead of reliability, to find you.
2. Pick a Boring Blog Name: There’s nothing better for a blog than choosing a name that no one gets or understands. Be obtuse. Make no sense. Don’t use your actual name in any way because that would be too egotistical even though there is no better way to feed an ego and build self-importance than by blogging. Your name is not your brand you have not been building over a lifetime so why use that self-created goodwill in your blog?
Here’s an interesting survey from Ipsos:
Washington, DC – Debate continues about the effect that blogs are having on politics, media and public opinion in the United States. A recent survey conducted by Ipsos reveals one in three of Online Americans had read a blog at least once. More than half of blog readers say blogs influence public opinion (68%), mainstream media (56%) and public policy (54%). Updated periodically throughout the day, they provide online commentary on anything from politics to religion to celebrity gossip.
Three In Ten Online Americans Claim That They Have Read A Blog Thirty percent of the online population said they had read a blog at least once. Among those who read blogs, 38% do so at least once per week. More than two in five of those aged 18 to 34 (41%) and those with a college-education (41%) have visited blogs at least once. Geographically speaking, blogs are most popular in the western United States where 37% of residents reported visiting a blog.
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