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The afternoon is starting with Becca Ludlum‘s VIP session, where we’ve requested she tell us about all the things. You can find links to her spreadsheets and more here: http://MyCrazyGoodLife.com/Type-A-Tips
Grow Your Blog in 10 Minutes a Day
Start at the Beginning: Blog Design
- 10 minutes = 5 items
- Picture
- Sidebar (if it’s not doing anything for you, take it out of your sidebar)
- Contact info
- About page
- Ads
- Check load time
- Popups
Best way to check these things is to use incognito mode to look at your site like a visitor would.
Take 10 Minutes to Find (or Create) Support Groups
- Close everything else and do this.
- Support groups are huge for bloggers. This is not a comment/RT group. This is for actual support.
- “Have any of you written a post about ____ lately? Link me!”
- “I’m cleaning up my sidebar. Can you see if I missed anything?”
Go Old School
- Leave blog comments
- 10 minutes = about 5 comments
- Comments mean so much more now because no one has time for them anymore.
- Comments can lead to clickthrus to your site.
Optimize Previous Content
Pinnable images, better writing, and SEO
- Repurpose old posts, use more shareable titles
- Fix up the writing on those first posts you wrote when you got started.
Diversify Your Traffic
- Don’t neglect SEO as a traffic source
- Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket
- 10 minutes = 2-3 posts
- Yoast makes a great plug-in to help with this
- You don’t have to optimize SEO for every post, just for the ones that will benefit from it
I’d Like to Introduce You to Buffer
Becca likes Buffer for scheduling social shares to push content. You can drag and drop old updates you’ve set up. They also make it easy to share the feeds of your favorite bloggers. It’s $10 a month.
(I prefer Sprout Social, but I have a grandfathered account. No drag and drop there though.)
Higher Level Social Sharing
- Multiple re-pins
- Hashtags
- Strategic stalking
- Share what your readers love
Pin things multiple time to the same board if it’s fast-moving. If you can’t see it by scrolling down a few times, it’s usually a decent time to re-pin. You can do testing by using different images from the post to see which ones perform better.
Doing hashtag research can help you figure out the best hashtags to promote your content. You can find the more popular hashtags you wouldn’t normally think of.
The strategic stalking thing is for brands and people you want to connect with. Add them to a Twitter list and add that list as a column on TweetDeck so that you can easily see when they tweet and reply.
Higher Education
The day you stop learning is the day you’re done blogging. Look for eBooks, podcasts, etc. to learn about current trends. Keep on top of things.
Now What?
- Schedule your 10 minutes.
- Make a rotation schedule. (Monday: social. Tuesday: comments. Wednesday: spreadsheet. Thursday: sidebars. Friday: schedule/share.)
- Close any distracting programs.
- Set a timer.
- Make connections and grow your blog!
That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.
I sure wish I could’ve been there, but thank you so much for your live blogging, Christina! It makes me feel almost like I am! I have been brainstorming ways to get back to loving my blogs. This is some really helpful information!
It’s comments like this that keep me doing this even though it’s totally exhausting! It’s good for me to help process the information I’m learning, but I love that it helps other people, too!