Sidebar Clutter

You've spiffied up your blog and now have all kinds of helpful and attractive gadgets in your sidebar. This is a good thing. Unless your sidebars are now so cluttered that your readerss can't find what they're looking for.

Visual clutter quickly happens, especially as your blog hosts add all kinds of fancy new gadgets for you to try. It doesn't mean you have to use them all, or that they are even good for you blog. For example, preview posts from other blogs sometimes simply don't support your mission. Think about whether you really need that information to make your blog better.

What about your label list? Do you have a nice, concise group of categories you shovel each post into, or is your list a mile long with one post in each unique category? Get rid of it, if so. Those post labels mean nothing to your or your readers.

Also look at your archive gadget. Is it showing daily post titles for the current month? Collapse it, so that only the months are listed. Much neater and will free up column room for a more important addition.

In Blogger, you will make these changes in the Layout section. Go now and tweak a bit, so that your blog is more attractive and easier to maneuver.

Connections

Our Blog Book Tours yahoogroup is now fully in session, and the current group of challengers is working hard at the post-a-day Blog Challenge. They are doing a marvelous job, and you can visit their sites via the blog links at right. Go help them out by leaving a comment!

The challengers are also tweaking their blogs with improvements like bookmarking, even more good links for you to explore, follow me options, and other add-ons to make your visit exceptional. How often have you visited a blog that didn't have an RSS feed, or a connection to the related website, or a way to follow on Twitter, or even an email link to contact the blogger?

So challengers, if you're on Facebook, or Twitter, or any of a number of other sites, make sure each location in inter-connected to the others. Make it easy for your fans. Sometimes this means you must simply type an email address like this:

Me at internethost dot com

This prevents robots from harvesting your address when typed in the usual manner.

So take a look at your blog and make sure that all your connections flow to locations that support and enhance your purpose.

How do you ensure your fans will come back to visit your blog?

Correcting Your Errors

The Blood Red Pencil recently had a good entry about editing blog posts. There's a traditional school of thought that, once the blog publishes, it lives as is - correct or riddled with errors. I completely disagree, and the reasons mentioned here are valid. Be sure to read the dozen or so comments for how other writers feel about the subject.

Now go read through your own blog posts for the past week, correct any grammatical errors, and while you're at it, check the flow of your posts from day-to-day. Bottoms up, of course.

Ping Alert

I make it a point to ping at least once a week. Try one of these multi-pinging services to notify servers about a recent update to your blog:

BlogFlux Pinger
BlogPingR.de
King Ping
Ping
Pingoat
Ping-o-matic
Poll-n-Ping!

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_(blogging)" - a must read if you don't quite understand what pinging is all about.

More Better Lies

Paperback Writer came up with Ten Reasons that prevent you from updating your blog - regularly. Funny reasons. Questionable reasons. Go read them.

What's your excuse? Since January Uno, who in the Blog Book Tours blogging challenge has not posted every day? What are your excuses? Come on! Get creative and come up with a really good list of better lies, and post them on your blog. That's your writing prompt for the day. Everyone can play.

Enjoying our posts so far? Be sure to follow us by clicking the Follow Me link at right.

Title Z

Do you know about Title Z? It's a fast and simple site that gives your book's amazon.com rating. You can get a rating for your title, your name, and for your publisher in one clear and easy-to-read list. Fun, isn't it?

But, it's more than that. If you're planning a blog book tour, or any book promotion, you want to get a rating before you start as a benchmark, and then for every day of your tour. You also want to watch your rating after promotion to see what it's popularity is doing. This is a good measure of whether your efforts are helping sell your book. It's a numbers game, and this is only part of the equation.

So what's your book's rating today?

The Blogroll

What is that? It's a group of links in the right or left columns of your blog, with links to other blogs. Why would you want one? Well, for several reasons. It makes your blog more noticeable to search engines for one thing.

You can use your blogrolls to connect to blogs that offer your readers added content that might interest them. My links would probably embellish on the theme of blog book tours. I also have a blogroll for members of the current blog challenge, and use these links list to visit the blogs. This is part of what we call "cyber-schmoozing" and it's a good thing to do in preparation for your own blog book tour down the road.

Finally, it's a good idea to have a separate blogroll of your favorite blogs that you think might make good hosts for your future tour. Scoping out those blogs takes a lot of time, so it's best to do a little work each day. It's so much easier to look at your own list of favorite blogs, and then invite those friends to host you, than to be left scrambling just weeks before your blog book tour is scheduled to begin.

Here's a starting point for you thanks to My Friend Amy's Blog - a list of book review blogs, lots of them. Click on the button at right, and then explore a few of them every day. Add your favorites to a blogroll on your site. It won't take any time to accumulate a list of fabulous blogs to host you. We'll also cover other techniques for finding great and unusual blogs at a later time.

How do you go about finding blog hosts for a tour? Leave us a comment.