Blogging Tips
There’s heaps of information on the web about how to start a blog and what you should do to be a successful blogger. There is so much it can be overwhelming. How about a simple list of tips on those little extra bits to make your blog look good? Or some easy to use free resources to help you create great blog posts? Whilst I’m not exactly an old hand in the blog world, I’ve done my research and found some great free resources that are easy to use for an early blogger.
Create Headers, Banners & Graphics
You can make a killer
header, banner or graphic using Canva.
So easy to use and most of the designs are free. You can save creations in your Canva account
in case you want to make changes or download another copy in the future. There are also templates to create other things such as great looking social media posts and marketing
materials. The graphic at the top of
this page was made in less than 15 minutes using a free Canva template. You can download the image in .jpg or .png format.
Create a Personal Signature
To create your online
signature, like the one that appears at the bottom of my posts, check out MyLive Signature. Using the signature creation wizard, you can choose from
over 100 font styles, various sizes, colours and angles. It’s free and so
easy to create your signature.
Create a Favicon
If you don’t know what a
favicon is, it’s the little icon that appears in your browser tab when you load
a page. Mine is the little gold
footprint. You can create a free personalized
favicon at…Favicon. Very cute and easy
to use.
Check how fast (or slow) your blog loads
It's widely reported that most readers
will click away if a website takes more than 4 seconds to load. That’s not very long so you need to ensure
your blog is optimized to load as fast as possible. There are lots of tools you can use to check
your loading time, such as Google Page Speed Insights. Just type in your blog URL and it will
generate a score out of 100 for loading on mobile and desktop devices, as well
as tips on how to improve your loading time.
Compress your Images
You probably already
know that large image sizes slow down your blog. That is, if you use a photo straight from
your camera, it could be 3MB, which means your pages will load slowly. As readers don’t like slow-loading pages you
need to speed things up. By using TinyPNG you can compress your .png or .jpg images down to less than 200kb without compromising
image quality. All the images on my blog
are 200kb or less. Some are under
50kb! Tiny PNG is free and really easy
to use.
Write great blog post headings
You’ve written a blog
post and want to check if you've created a good heading, one that is
interesting and makes people want to read the post. It's worth running
your heading through Headline Analyser to see how effective it is and get ideas
on how to make it better. The analyser will report your mix of common, uncommon, emotional and power words, the character and word count, the sentiment of your heading and key words used. You'll be given a score out of 100, aiming to score 70 points or better, although if I'm happy with my heading and it scores over 65, I can live with that.
Writing and reviewing your blog posts
You’re in the middle of
writing a post and just can’t find the right word to use. The word you keep thinking of is pretty bland
and you’d rather use a word with more punch.
Put the word you’re thinking of into the online Thesaurus and it will
generate a list of synonyms to help you find the right word.
Once you’ve written your
blog post, you can review its readability using Readability-Score. Just paste your text into the box and the
site will generate a readability score from 0-100 and give you a grade level
(based on the US education system) equivalent to the number of years education
a person has had. It will also generate
statistics including character, word and sentence counts, as well as keyword
density so you can see how you’re going with SEO. Alternatively, type in the URL of an existing page and Readability-Score will generate a report for that page.
I hope you enjoy
exploring these resources and they help give your blog that little edge you were looking for.
I'd love you to continue following my explorations - just drop your email into the 'follow me by email' box on the right hand side of this page and you can receive all new posts straight to your inbox. No spam, I promise.
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