What Would I Have Done Differently If I Were To Start Blogging Tomorrow? | One Year Blogoversary Celebration (8)

Spend A Happy-Medium Amount Of Time On Blog Posts

There are two types of people in this world, the over-thinkers, and the care-freerers.

My advice to the over-thinkers is.... you don't have to spend HOURS and HOURS on a single blog post, especially in the beginning. You want to be able to create as much content with the highest quality possible. When I say this, I'm asking you to find a good balance, a happy medium. Don't write 8 crappy posts a week when you could write 4 good ones. At the same time, don't write, deliberate, and spend forever one 1 post every two weeks. It's all about finding your personal comfort zone and how much pride you want to have in the finished product.

For the care-freerer (aka myself), I would advise that you just look over your post. Spend 10 minutes the day before it goes live to proofread it, because you will find so many careless grammatical/ spelling mistakes that could have easily been avoided if you had scanned it. Check for consistency - in terms of topic, conciseness - get to your point, and cohesiveness - make sure the reader understands you. I don't always look over posts, and I find that they can be greatly improved with 10 extra minutes of work and I will be a lot happier with the outcome.

Cut Down On The Memes!!!

This is a personal decision as to how many memes you want to have on your blog in terms of frequency and your ratio of meme:review:discussion:unique feature. For the beginning blogger who wants to have a lot of content and a diverse mix of posts, throwing in a meme is a great way to do so. The thinking work -in terms of topic- has been done for you. All you have to do is answer the question, insert the synopsis, or whatever that particular meme requires of you.

It's all about testing the waters and seeing what's right for you

On the other hand, having a ratio of 5:7 of your posts per week being memes is a no-no. I find that they can be tedious for the blogger AND the reader. I cannot begin to count how many "Waiting on Wednesdays" or "Top Ten Tuesdays" are in my bloglovin feed come Tuesday and Wednesday. I am also less likely to click on the post if it's something EVERYONE else is doing, but there are always exceptions. In the beginning, just like with the kinds of books you read, you want to test out the kinds of posts you write until you find a good balance for both yourself and your readers.

Schedule! Schedule! Schedule!

On blogger, wordpress, and I'm sure other platforms, you can schedule posts. UTILIZE THIS! There will be times when you have an entire afternoon to compose posts and other times where you have time to do anything but. I say, when you have the time and the inspiration strikes, take advantage of this and utilize this. At times, it will take me 40 minutes to write a discussion and at other, it will all pour out of me (usually @ 2 am), and I can always go back and EDIT what I have word vomited up.

Even if you aren't much of a planner, in life you have to put on the calendar when you go to work, when you have a dentist appointment, and when you work out. At the same time, making a reliable calanedar/schedule for your blog posts is a good idea. Even if you have no idea what you're going to write specifically, it's a good idea to know at least what days you are going to upload/publish for both yourself (so you don't stress out as easily) and for the reader (so they know they can rely on you).

During the height of my busyness, I will post every other day or even every three days. Even if the frequency of your posts isn't good, your readers will love you for being reliable. For example, one of my favorite bloggers has features I read religiously on Mondays and Thursdays. You can bet your bottom dollar that I will be visiting her blog every... Monday and Thursday.

So utilize a calendar, put it on your phone. Whatever you do, if the schedule has detailed bullet points and outlines on what the topic of the day is, or if you just label next Friday as a "Book Review" day, you will thank yourself for setting aside that day so you don't have to go scrambling for ideas.

This is what YOU could be like!

My biggest problem is that my attention span isn't the best. I sometimes panic the night before after not posting for four days, and other times, I can sit back and relax with a nice buffer. My blogoversary celebration posts were all completed in NOVEMBER (woot woot) because I had all of this inspiration and things to say. The gist of the matter is, whether you have to force yourself or the wrods come out like butter, you should seriously consider giving yourself a nice buffer of posts (a week, a month, even a few days) so that when life gets in the way, your blogging doesn't have to stop.

Cool It On the Promo

Promotional Posts are extremely similar to memes in terms of the fact that they are often considered as "filler." Blog Tours, Blitzes, and Spotlights all fall under the umbrella of promotional posts. The purpose is clear enough for authors/publishers, to make sure that as many people know about a specific book on a certain day. Yet, for the blog readers, it can get annoying when everybody and their mother has posted a stupid "copy and paste" HTML doc into the blogger draft and hit publish. It's completely up to you if you want to or not do promotional posts, but I would advise not to do them more than once a week or even more than once a month because they're annoying to me. Albeit it is easy for me when I'm in a pinch, and I SOMETIMES do promotional posts when it's a book/author I want to support or if I'm going to do a tour on a future date.

Post Frequently?

 When I first started blogging, I had this fixed thought in my mind that I had to post every day or people would forget about me. That obviously isn't true. Some bloggers (not book specifically) post once a month and get astounding traffic and followers. Those are not book bloggers, but people who spend hours on researching blog posts. So it is good to post consistently when the amount of work you put into a post doesn't total up to 30 hours. I would say to newbie bloggers that three or more well-written posts a week is adequate. For a beginning BookTuber, one or two uploads a week is more than fine. People (I'm speaking for myself here) enjoy reliability. When people know you have a schedule, they keep coming back on that day and likewise, are actually disappointed if you don't post/upload on that day.

The number one thing TO do is remember that everyone grows at their own pace and that hard work will get you where you need to go. (Now I sound like a self-help manual)