Do You Need Help With Blogging?

One thing I’m making a note to do more of is to make sure I give back. I used to be fairly active in Facebook blogging groups, but then I joined a few paid ones for self development, so I feel like my interaction with other bloggers has gone down a lot. Then I remembered the great thing about being a blogger is that you have your own platform! So, do you need any help with blogging? 

 

Do You Need Help With Blogging

 

Is there an aspect of your site that doesn’t feel quite right to you? Perhaps a post you liked the topic of but it didn’t quite hit the mark? 

 

Leave a comment below, with a direct link to the aspect in question and I’ll reply with my thoughts. Why via comments? Because we probably all make mistakes in similar areas, so we can learn from each other this way. 

 

Ready, Set, Go! 

18 Replies to “Do You Need Help With Blogging?”

  1. I love my blog! But I need to move over to wordpress from tumblr- no one seems to know how!

  2. I blogged for just over two years at my first blog with my L’s on and have just launched my second blog which is self hosted (launched on 4 Nov). There is ALWAYS so much more to learn about blogging! Now I’m self-hosted I need to learn more about html, plug-ins, SEO etc. I’m trying to take steps necessary to make sure my new blog gets indexed by search engines. At the moment – if you google it – nothing comes up – zilch. It’s a matter of time I guess! I’m also teaching myself MailChimp at the moment as I plan to send out a fornightly newsletter from my new blog. Always stuff to learn!! 😉

    1. I swapped to self-hosted about a year ago and had intended to write a post about it to help others, but I never took detailed enough notes to make a blog post actually helpful!
      I’ve been blogging here for nearly 3 years and only just got around to starting a newsletter – I wish I had started sooner!
      Congratulations on the new site – what’s it called?

  3. Hi Vanessa – I’m a newbie and have only been blogging for a few months (but loving writing about stuff that I actually like!). I’ve found the blogging community to be very friendly and supportive which is so lovely when you are just starting out. Hoping you can help me with a quick query – on my Facebook page I am receiving notifications on comments and new likes but I’m not getting notified when my page is mentioned by someone else on another page. Is this normal for business pages? I’ve had a good look around settings and notifications and can’t seem to find anything. I just don’t want to miss out on thanking someone when they have mentioned me on their blog’s Facebook page!

    1. In general, I find Facebook & how they manage Pages to be very hit & miss. I haven’t come across that issue myself, but I did find a help page article that talked about security settings of the person who posts the status tagging you:
      https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10201621910217885
      Of course, if it’s another Page tagging you, I have no idea why they would lock down security settings. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful on that one Tash!

      1. Thanks Vanessa – I’m definitely finding Facebook hit and miss. Will keep having a play around and see if I can sort it out!

  4. The blogging groups are a little frustrating at the moment. It seems to be the same questions over and over again. Just last week I saw a question asked…and the exact same question was in a post below it. That sort of stuff does my head in.

    A the moment the one thing that I struggle with is getting people to comment when I don’t link up to a linky. I put a call to action at the end of my posts and I’m getting the stats…people just aren’t commenting!

    1. I have the same issue Tegan! If I’m not in linky’s nobody comments even though people read the posts.

      1. Hey Toni. I replied to Tegan above with some things that might help you too. It looks like you get fairly consistent comments, which is good. I would make sure you guide the conversation, even on mostly image-based posts.

    2. Same – it must take a whole lot more effort for people to do so and they just can’t be bothered?

      1. Hi Winnie. I think sometimes the wordpress default commenting can stop people if you have it as compulsory to log in – have you checked your settings in that area?

        Also, random question – I see that you have share buttons on your posts – why do you have a print button?

    3. AH! I had a HUGE reply typed out and Chrome completely crashed and lost it 🙁 So I’m sorry, this will be shorter now because I can’t remember all the suggestions I had typed out.

      Basically, I was going to suggest starting with comparing your traffic sources on linky vs non-linky days, because not all traffic is the same:
      – does your non linky traffic come from a different source?
      – are different sources new visitors but linkys familiar visitors?
      – does your bounce rate differ?
      – do your comments come from the link up, or after you’ve commented on other posts from the link up?

      The more specific you can make the CTA, the better. Do some informal A/B testing on similar types of posts with variants of CTAs.

      Your tomato patch post left it open for basically any discussion on gardening. In that instance (if it was something you blogged about often enough to be reliable enough to A/B test on) I would try something a little different next time, like asking a favourite vegetable or what they would sneakily eat straight out of the ground/off the tree if they could choose anything that grew easily at their home. Sometimes the more specific you can make it (without feeling exclusionary), the easier you make it for your audience to talk to you. Curate where you want the conversation to go with your question.

      I think make sure you have a CTA on everything, even wordless Wednesdays. A couple of words at the end won’t hurt a wordless theme and will direct your audience into a discussion.

      Hope that helps!

      1. Thank you! That is all really useful information.

        Most of my traffic on non linky days comes from Facebook. The rest is search engines. I don’t really expect much from the search engine stuff because the terms that I can see, are leading to sponsored posts.

        I’ll work on some more specific CTA and see if that make a difference.

        1. It’s awesome that you’re getting traffic from facebook because that means at least your likers are seeing your posts! Do you think they are people who have liked your page or that it’s showing up in friends of friends feeds?

  5. Loving the comments on this post Vanessa, especially your advice on engaging commenters. One of my biggest things, which I can’t really be helped with, because it’s al on me, is replying to comments left on my blog. I am so bad at remembering to do this and I feel terrible because I really value the fact that people come and read and take the time to comment. It has been on my list of blogging goals for the year, to reply to all comments, and I have failed miserably. But it’s a new week and I am going to reply to every single comment I get this week!

    1. Sometimes I find it hard to comment, because not all conversations need to be carried on further really. Not in a mean way but in a “there’s just nothing more to say” way. If you get stuck, just try to come up with some canned responses, even if it’s just “thanks for commenting”. I try to remember to thank people for linking up in the comments on laughlink day but it felt so stupid to me at first. I kept doing it and now it doesn’t bother me as much.

    2. Canned responses as in not a spammer, but in your own voice.

Leave a Reply