Revise Old Posts and Show Your Readers that You Do It!

Don't know what to write? Then maybe you should spend some time going through your old posts. If you do, you will probably find a lot you want to change. When you do, don't forget to mark that particular post as "revised" and at which date you last did that revision.

Always strive to show your readers that you're actively improving and evaluating your blog and that it's up-to-date. The impression you make is almost as important as what you actually write.

Happy blogging! :-)

Turn Your Webpage into a PDF-document

Would you like to be able to convert a webpage into a PDF-document? Now it's easily done. Just head over to pdfmyurl.com and type in the URL of the page you want to convert to PDF.

Great if you have a lesson or article that you want to make available in a portable format. I plan to use it for the drawing lessons I've been writing, for instance.

Happy Blogging!

Get Maximum Traffic in Minimum Time - Keeping the Positive Spiral Turning

Do you recognize yourself in these words:

I should really be spending more time marketing my blog, but I just caaan't find the time needed to do so?

Then I have a very simple solution. The next time you use Google Analytics (a post about the importance of using this tool at an at least weekly basis can be found here) for your regular analysis and evaluation of your blog, do the following:

1. Make sure you're only viewing stats for the last week
2. Look at from which social (twitter, facebook, online forum) source you have been getting the most visits lately
3. Seek out that source - preferably every day that this particular source is the most traffic-bringing one - and do something (retweet, answer a forum post etc) to make people notice that your are still actively participating and interested in keeping contact.

This way you'll keep being noticed by the same "target audience" that have been most interested in your blog recently and - voila! - you are keeping a positive spiral turning in the right direction. You will also find that since your main source of traffic is the place most interested in what you write about, it is almost certainly a place where you as well will enjoy spending time keeping a social network alive.

Therefore I recommend that you skip any search engines or similar that may come up first and look for the first social source you can find. This is unless you are particularly interested in SEO, but that is another topic.

Blogging is all about communication and the ones most likely to be interested in what you have to say are people you know well. Therefore BUILDING AND MAINTAINING SOCIAL NETWORKS is the most important aspect of running a popular blog.

The good news is that this is one of the things that are most rewarding about blogging - if you're actively building and maintining contact with like-minded people you will no doubt make quite a few friends along the way.

It is my firm belief that only a person with a sincere interest in making and keeping new social connections and that senses a joy in doing so, will become a successful blogger. After all, if it's all struggle and no joy doing it - why do it at all?

Happy blogging!

Be Patient and Do Something To Grow Each Day!

So, your blog is not growing fast enough? Not getting as much traffic as you dream of? Feel you really SHOULD be promoting your blog more, but where o where to find time and energy for that?

Don't know if you recognize these things but they have certainly been something to tackle during my first years as a blogger. I have two suggestions, that at least has worked for me:

1. Patience, think about your blogging as a long-term activity

To build a successful blog takes time and commitment. There really seems to be no shortcuts in life and blogging is no different: Think of the growth of your blog in terms of months - or even years. If you can't imagine yourself keeping the same blog for more than a year I doubt that you'll ever be a successful blogger (whatever that is)

My most popular blog last year, Fantasytree, grew steadily in 2009. Not by far as much as I dreamed of, of course, and at the end f the year I thought: "I've put so much time and effort on this blog, it should have much more traffic, it should..." etcetera etcetera. Disappointed I checked the traffic increase for the year - and was surprised to see it had grown not by hundreds of percents, but by thousands!

Run your blog for a year and THEN evaluate how it has done. Remember that if you seriously think about making money blogging, you must be ready to do it for many years, maybe decades. Otherwise your probably not passionate enough. To be a pro blogger that is - blogging can be so much more than a job of course.

But I imagine that those who visit blogs like this one is rather serious and anxious about increasing traffic.

My second advice has to do with that enchanted word to anyone serious about building a succesful blog: TRAFFIC. How do you keep building traffic, day after day, week after week. My second advice for this time is really deceptively simple (but is working remarkably well for me):

2. Do Something To Make Your Blog Grow Every Single Day

No, no, no you say, don't give me this crap, tell me how to gain 10 000 visitors in a week, you might complain. The truth is however, the way I see it: If you can't start building up your blog in a more continuous way, starting with something each day, then you - in my humble opinion - never will have the drive/passion/enthusiasm to run a really successful blog.

Let me ask this: Can you honestly say that you do SOMETHING every day (of course even a blogger is allowed to be ill, go on vacation etc, here I'm taking about that usual "blogging day") to make your blog more succesful?

If the answer is "Yes", then you probably won't need my advice much longer. If it's "No" on the other hand, then why are you expecting your blog to grow so much?

Enough preaching (I often fall prey to the "Why can't people keep visiting my blog even though I'm not putting in the effort necessary to make it worth visiting at the moment - I have many old articles they should enjoy reading?"-thoughts myself), let's round this of with a few concrete examples of what you might do (at least I keep doing these) every single day in order to keep your blog growing. Just one of these each day is a great start. Sounds simple? It is theoretically, the catch is that you'll have to keep doing these things for days, months, years or even... oh my... decades.

- Visit one other blog in the same genre and write a comment, maybe even link to that blog
- Increase the number of followers on Twitter (you do use twitterfeed to post your blog posts as tweets, do you?)
- Find a blog directory where your blog is not listed and list your blog
- Send email to your mailing list or old readers
- Find a guest blogger
- Evaluate which posts are most popular and make a mental note to write a similar/follow-up post soon
- Be active in any online forum about something related to your blog and have a link to your blog in your signature
- Start another blog that links to the one you wish to grow
- Visit a blog on "How to build your blog" or read a book, watch a video etc about it (Warning: It's always easy to spend hours upon hours on the theory - what will bring in those real visitors, as opposed to those imagined, potential ones, though, is the actual physical actions/changes/contacts that you really make.)

Who said it should be easy to build a succesful blog? The challenge should be half the fun to the serious blogger. Remember: If you don't love what you're doing, why do it? You don't HAVE to be the most succesful on the planet. Having a good time doing something you enjoy can be quite enough.

Happy blogging!

Want A Guestblogger or to Guestblog Yourself? Try This Site!

I recently found a great site for finding a guestblogger. Or a blog that is looking for guest bloggers. The site is

blogsynergy.com

and seems to have great potential. (I have already found one new guestblogger for my blog Fantasytree.)

Why not give it a try, guest blogging can be a great way to promote your blog or your blogging skills.

Happy Blogging!

Just launched a new blog!

Happy to announce that I just started another blog. This time written in my native tongue (Swedish) and focusing entirely on my interest and progress in art.

I hope all Swedish readers will enjoy it. Find it here:
Pennans vandring (Way of the pencil)

Site update - Added 9 more links to the best blogs about blog improvement

Just found a list of the most popular blogs about blog improvement. The most popular one, Problogger was already in my list, but now I have added 9 more. None of these have less than 15000 subscribers. Do check them out (I sure will, as there were some I hadn't heard of).

Happy Blogging!

You do Analyze and Evaluate your Blog Regularly, don't You?

Every Monday I do a quick analysis of how my blogs are doing and try to establish a strategy for which changes need to be made in order to keep it as succesful as I possibly can. Of course I stick to the topics I ordinary write about, but I use the data collected from Google Analytics in order to perhaps put some extra focus on what seems to be most popular among my readers.

Let me illustrate this with a simple example:

You blog about apples and pears. You write ten posts, five about apples and five about pears (50% about each). When you use Analytic's "best content" tool you find that every post about apples has been visited 25 times, while the ones about pears have only had one or two visits. Should you then keep writing as much about pears as about apples?

Well that depends on the purpose of your blogging. If you write just for fun and don't care about traffic, by all means keep writing about those pears. Then you could even skip the posts about apples altogether.


If you want your blog to be popular, however, you must consider what your readers really want to read about. You must think of your blog as a business where you try to sell the product that is most popular at the moment (while at the same time offering those "pillar articles", quality content that will keep being valuable to your readers over a long period of time).

Of course you still have to enjoy writing your blog (why do it otherwise), but perhaps you could write 75% about apples and 25% about pears instead. Or focus on making your "pear articles" more interesting. But that might be a more demanding task than "switching focus".

To summarize I encourage you to use some kind of tool to analyze the general trend of your blog's popularity and also which subjects and posts that are most popular. I have so far only used the free Google Analytics and so far I have not needed anything else.

I suggest that you establish a routine (once a week, once a month, what you find suitable) and find answers to the following questions:

- How is my blog doing? Has it been getting more traffic or less lately?
- Any particular days when the traffic was remarkably good?
- Which were the most popular posts and topics? Did these posts contain something that other posts lack? What could that be?
- What do I think my readers want to read about? (A good way is to ask for their feedback. Socializing with your readers is not only enjoyable, it also keeps them returning for social reasons. Most people need attention. By being friendly, making sure to reply to comments you establish a positive atmosphere one that reader's want to come back to. But that's a topic of its own)

I do this by the start of each week, since I find this kind of analysis really interesting. I'm always curious about how my blog is doing and why. You must find what suits you, but if you're serious about improving the amount of traffic you must be aware of what attracts your readers.

Hope these suggestions were valuable to you. Do give feedback and let me know what you want me to write more about.

Happy blogging!