Top Ten Tips - Improving Your Blog

Join Entrecard - Entrecard is basically a blog’s business card. You install a widget on your blog where other Entrecard users can drop their cards. You can drop your card on another Entrecard user’s website as well. Being both a dropper and droppee earns you “Entrecard credits,” which you can use to buy advertisements on others’ Entrecard widgets.

Copy Your Posts To Qassia - Qassia is a no-brainer - you post your “intel” or intelligent articles, and you get a free link back to your blog. Your Qassia “worth” is determined by your intel, which could either be fresh content, already published or a reprint of others’ articles with distribution rights. The higher your worth, the better you are ranked in Qassia’s directory.

Join Blog Directories & Communities - There are many blog directories on the web that will list your blog for free, usually by topic. Tip Diva’s top picks include: My Blog Log, Bloghub, Blog Catalog, Blog Mad, Blogorama and Blogtoplist. These directories and communities list you the quickest, but you can Google for other directories and communities by typing “blog directory” or “blog community” into your favorite search engine.

Sign Up For Technorati - Technorati ranks your blog based on other blogs’ reactions to your content. But it’s also an avenue to bring your content to a wide audience, because when you post and ping Technorati, your content will show up on its website and is searchable through tagging.

Give Subscription Options - Give readers a way to sign up for content, whether through a feed reader or e-mail. This will help readers pay attention to updates. Tip Diva prefers Feedburner.

Have Social Bookmarking Buttons - Install a plug-in or other code to allow your readers to submit your blog or posts to social networking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphere, del.icio.us and Reddit.

Install HitTail, QuantCast And Google Analytics Code - These blog-tracking tools give you information on site visitor trends, such as where your readers are coming from and what they searched for to get to your site. Using this information, you can tailor your site to what your readers are looking for.

Use Blog Carnivals - Blog carnivals are blog posts with a list to other blog posts based on a certain subject or theme. By either publishing your own blog carnival or submitting your blog posts to others, you attract people interested in that subject or theme. For more on using blog carnivals, see Top Ten Tips - Using Blog Carnivals. To demonstrate the power of a blog carnival, Tip Diva submitted her Top Ten Tips - Learning HTML Basics to a few relevant blog carnivals. Freelancing Journey read the post in a carnival, and posted it on her blog. Writing For Hire then picked it up from the Freelancing Journey blog and posted it on her blog.

Promote Your Blog - Get your blog’s name out on the web and you will be seen. For promotion tips, see Top Ten Tips - Getting Out In The Blogosphere.

Read Blogs About Blogs - This blog post is about Tip Diva’s experience about blogging, but don’t stop reading here. There are many blogs that deal with promoting, monotizing and improving your blogging experience, and the more you learn from others’ experiences, the better blogger you’ll be. Good starts are Pat B. Doyle and Blog Basics For Everyone Carnival.