Armchair BEA Day 2: Blogger Development & Advice for Newbies

If you're a book blogger who can't attend Book Expo America and the Book Blogger Convention in New York this May, you don't have to miss all the fun - this virtual convention is the place to be!

Tell us about things you've done to expand your blogging horizons, and the things you'd like to do but haven't managed (or figured out) yet.


As a newbie blogger, getting traffic and page views is one of the hardest things. I remember my first month I got 20 hits, 15 of which were from my own computer. At the time, however, it seemed like an OK amount. I figured it would increased gradually, but who could have known that two months later I'll be hitting 1,000 page views? The thing is, your blog popularity is constantly increasing, and so are your goals. Once you reach 50 page views per day, you'll a 100, then 500.. and so on.

Now, how did I jump from a practically dead blog to a somewhat visited one? Commitment. That is the most important thing. The blogging community is like any other community out there. Imagine sitting in a class for two months without saying a word to any one else, would you expect instantaneous friendships? No, I don't think so. That was me during my low months; I didn't check out any other blogs, let alone comment on any.

Now that I know what kind of blogs I like, and have made a little blogroll for myself, I can constantly check on my fellow bloggers, and drop a comment on discussions that I like. When you start blogging, you realize how much a comment means for the blogger.

Another thing that hugely increased my stats was memes. Memes are a tricky thing, however. Too much memes and your blog will look incredibly unappealing for anyone interested in following you. No one wants a blog full of memes and no genuine reviews or discussion posts. I have done only one feature, which is a must for new bloggers: Feature and Follow. It is hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read and is something you should check out. It helped give me that initial push, and some great followers so that I could feel like someone was actually reading the things I wrote. I have stopped doing them now, however, because I'm a taking a little break from features and focusing on building my own audience.

Now this one you might have heard before, but always, always include nice images in your articles. Apart from giving a nice appeal to your post, it gets you a great amount of visits from Google images! I can't tell you how many of those I've got just from people checking out the pictures they liked. Another very important this is your title heading. It is important. Make it as attention hooking as possible, because that's another way to gain traffic. You might think ranking on Google is hard, but in some searches, I find this little blog ranking as number 2.


My twitter account is personal, and the one I use to interact with my school friends, so I was a little wary of trying to link back to my blog from there. Granted, even though I post every new article there, I don't do that much publicity as other blog dedicated twitters. Of course I thought about making one of those, with my blog's name, but why loose the followers I already have on my account and start from scratch?

Facebook is still a land I'm afraid to conquer. While I do check out my personal profile there, I have no future intentions of making a Facebook page for my blog. It's just that the time and effort it will take to maintain it is better (in my case) spent reading or blogging.


What are your tips and tricks for your blog? Share them with us!