Blog tips

1. Never blog out of duty. It’s more like “bursting into song”.

2. Take advantage of your freedom. Be aware of your reader by making every sentence readable. But don’t feel you have to write to please.

3. Adding a photo makes the blog more real.

4. Go visit other blogs. Read, learn, and leave a comment. Hopefully fellow-bloggers will return the visit.

5. Let people know about your blog via Facebook and Twitter. It takes time to build up Friends (Facebook) and Followers (Twitter), and you will start small. No account yet? Start now! More on social media at my other blog.

6. Blog about what you know – you are the expert. And you have untapped reservoirs of unique you-ness to draw on.

7. Choose an angle. Don’t be too general, for instance: ‘My blog meanderings’. I chose food as my angle and I am glad I did because I eat every day. I never run out of ideas.

8. If you haven’t got a blog, go to get one. The best way to learn, is to do it. Go to WordPress.com to sign up for your free blog. All you need is an email address to register.

9. I use WordPress because it is one of the most popular and technically well-supported blogs in the world. I also chose WordPress because it is open source and does not belong to a corporate concern, such as Google’s Blogger. This appeals to my anarchic self but there is a practical reason: you can add an open source blog to a website, if need be, but it would be harder with a corporate one.

10. Don’t feel intimidated by the technology. The reason why blogs are so popular is because tecchies have made the technology easy-to-use for non-tecchies such as myself. You will pick things up as you go along. So just do it.

11. Chris Brogan, the online genius, has written a great post on writing better blog posts. Chris  uses subtitles to break up text. When a visitor (one of his zillion) commented on this, Chris replied: “I break mine up with a bunch of h3 tags, which also tells Google what I think is important to think about.” (I put this here as a reminder – an example of how your blog is your personal resource).

12. Many thanks to Mike Farrow, who did the research on the best blogging platform to use (without telling me until recently), saying only: “Go to WordPress.com.” As always, I listened to him – he is a technical genius, after all.

14. How do I do I get the sort of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies pay thousands for ? I think it is because I and the people who comment contribute fresh content regularly. The more visits (doubling every year) , the more Real Food Lover becomes findable.

15. This blog started as an experiment and I chose its name, Real Food Lover, spontaneously (literally seconds), without any thought for its Google future. As it turns out, it was a good name because of the times I repeat the word: food.

16. Why blog? Because blogging offers glorious self-expression, creates a record of your work, teaches you  online skills, gives you an unique marketing and communications tool – and it is free.

Thanks for image of Harry Belafonte (1954) to wapedia.mobi