10 Ways to Take Your Blog Up a Notch

Have you noticed that there are two kinds of blogs?
There are the average blogs- written by people who are mainly concerned with keeping an online journal. And then there are the blogs with the bells and whistles. They resemble websites at times. If you are ready to take your 'average' blog up a notch, here are ten steps to get you started.

Ten great ways to take your blog up a notch. There are many more ways that I'll cover in future postings. But, here are ten good ideas for you. Many of them have links to more posts that I have done on the topic.

1. Do a Google search for FREE blogger templates. There are those you can pay for and there are those that you don't have to pay for. Find the template that best matches your theme. Before installing it, be sure to back-up what you already have. You can do this by going into your layouts tab and hitting the "html" link. At the top of the page there is a link to download your current blog. Also, if you have any active widgets or feeds, individually back those up as often a new template will discard these and you'll have to re do them.

2. Figure out what you will do for a header. There are sites where you can build one if you do not have the software to do so. I Googled "free header" and got over 5,000,000 results. The header is the first thing visitors see and it tells them what level you are blogging from.

3. Promote your feeds. At minimum, go to blogger in draft, layout, new page element, click on feed.

4. Post daily. When people subscribe to your feeds, they will be kept interested with your daily posts.

5. After you post, visit at least 5 other blogs (click "next blog" on the menu bar) and leave comments complementing the blogger. It's a nice way to make friends if anything. Be patient though, chances are 5 out of 10 will be in languages other than your own.

6. Start a newsletter. This is easy to do. Check out this post

7. Get a domain name. You can do so easily through GoDaddy. They'll take you through the process of pointing it to your blog.




8. Sign-up for Adsense. You might as well make a few cents.

9. Join a community. It's the latest thing in blogging- or one of the latest.

10. Check out the Blogger in Draft Gadgets. You can post a feed of your blog roll, links lists, feeds, polls and so much more!