I have been following this along with other SITS girls for the last 6 days. Today our challenge was to read 27 different tips and tutorials to better your blog. I actually did this on day 5, because I had some free time.
These were great resources to go and check out. What a wonderful way to spend an hour or so, learning some great tips to improve my blog!
Here are things I already do.
- Short posts – most of mine are on the shorter side.
- Announce news – I feel like I do a lot of announcing birth news to my readers. Like my ACOG supporting VBAC announcement.
- Polls – I think those are fun.
- FREE BOOK – I made a free book and started giving it away in March. All people have to do is sign up for my newsletter. This has increased my following by SO much. I used to get about 6 people a month sign up for my newsletter. Now I have on average 130 a month sign up. That is an increase of A LOT (any statisticians want to help me with that one?).
- Newsletter Subscribers, having readers on your blog is great, but to have them sign up for your newsletter gives you so many more options. In Feb I had 169 subscribers, 5 months later I have 852 subscribers. All because of my Free Book!!!
- Titles – make them interesting. I am trying to do more of this. Like my Birthing a 20 Pound Baby Title.
- Pillar content – a link to my big babies page is a perfect example (though it takes you off my blog this is my page out of all my sites that gets the most hits) If you look at the right sidebar under resources you can see my pillar content. I only recently did this.
Here are some ideas for future pillar content.
- -how to choose baby name
- -cesarean page
- -vbac page
- -definition article
- -what is hypnosis for birth?
Things I SHOULD do.
- Use PHOTOS – http://www.skelliewag.org/a-complete-guide-to-finding-and-using-incredible-flickr-images-162.htm This was a GREAT link. I usually don’t use photos, but I can see how it would be helpful for those visual learners.
- Change to wordpress.org so I can have links for people to facebook or tweet my posts automatically. I am limited with what I can do with my WordPress.com site. This would also help me to have better stats and so many more widgets.
- Post on weekends!!! I always wondered about this and tend not to, because I worried no one would read on the weekend.
- Do not clutter your website with badges: Even if we are talking about awards and recognition badges you should place them on the “About Us” page. —- I like this ideas. I do have a lot of badges on my blog, but I like them all. But I also like putting them on the About Me page. I don’t know how to do it only on there, but I can figure that out. What do YOU think about badges? Are mine OK?
- Open by asking a question? it shifts your mind to the “what’s in it for me” sphere that you started reading from in the first place. Make sense?– I’ll have to try that.
- If you worry that a post might get “lifted,” include a few links in the original post that will politely show people where the content came from. (This totally happens to me and I didn’t know what to do, so I LOVED this!)
What does “lifted” mean? Do you mean people stealing your post ideas or content?
Visiting from 31dbbb challenge!
I wish I’d known about childbirth blogs when I was expecting each of my 4 children (aged 11 down to 18 months!) The information here is so comprehensive, and definitely beats searching through my 2kg Birth and Beyond book!
I think adding pictures to your site would be great. My blog is a self hosted wordpress blog and I use a plugin called photodropper which sits on my dashboard under the draft of my post and I just type my search term into it. After choosing a photo, the creative commons links are automatically placed in.
It’s great to hear that your subscribers increased after offering your free ebook. I’m working on my free ebook right now, so it’s good to hear that it did increase your subscriber numbers.
Birth wise, I myself had 3 water births in the UK, then a (just about, with much fighting) natural birth here in the Middle East. I’d love to share my experiences if you think your readers would be interested!
Hello. Great blog! I don’t think it feels cluttered with badges. If you have more badges that you would like to post but don’t want to clutter the page, you may want to create a “my badges” tab at the top of your blog. It really cleans things up. I made one for mine if you want to stop by and peek at it.
http://www.peekatmypaper.blogspot.com
Thanks for stopping by and linking up!
Hope you have a great weekend.
brenda
There are some Natural Childbirth “sites” which take my posts and just post them again. The whole entire post. I find out because I get Google Alerts with anything that says Enjoy Birth.
I just e-mailed you about being a guest poster and sharing your birth experiences! 🙂
I need to change to a self hosted post, I love that plug in you mentioned. I think this is my next step (changing to self-hosted) I am just nervous about it.
Ooh, I like your buttons page. That is a great idea! Thanks for sharing. I am loving this 31day challenge. 🙂