Top Ten Tuesday | Blogging Tips

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted weekly by the lovely ladies at The Broke and The Bookish.

I've been blogging for less than a year, so I'm not sure I'm entirely qualified to give blogging tips. I certainly don't have any advice for acquiring ARCs (except to sign up for NetGalley) or joining blog tours. But as always, I do have Opinions. And I am Not Afraid To Share Them, because what else do you do on the internet? So without further ado, my ten blogging tips, in no particular order except for #1:

10. no how 2 rite good

Or alternatively, how to make your mistakes funny. Obviously no one expects you to be William Faulkner, but please, please learn the difference between affect and effect, allude and elude, bare and bear, and so on. Learn how to use a semicolon and under what circumstances your subject becomes a direct object. Spell "dammit" with two "m"s, dammit. It will make your posts easier to read and make you seem like a more reliable source.

9. Your blog needs to be literally readable

Oh God. My eyes.

Which basically means don't use a font no one can read, or neon colors, or a background that that obscures your writing. You may love Hello Kitty, but if your cute little cartoony background means I can't actually read what you're saying, I'm never coming back to your blog. And yes, I have seen this before, and not just on the random ambulance site.

8. Reviews should discuss the reasons for your opinion

It's not enough just to say "OMG!!!! I loved it!!!! Everyone should read it!!!" It's shocking, I know, but excessive use of exclamation points does not, as a general rule, actually convince people to read a book. Especially if I'm looking at an unfamiliar blog, I have no idea how much the reviewer's tastes match up with my own. Sometimes I hate books that my friends love and vice versa. Make sure to mention what you liked or didn't like about the story, the writing, the characters, etc. Your review should show anyone whether or not they want to read the book, regardless of their preferences.

7. Keep the GIFs to a minimum

Awww...I think I forgot to be annoyed.

This is one that could actually just be a personal pet peeve. To me, even a single GIF is distracting, and multiple GIFs are overwhelming enough to make the actual post very difficult to read. They're also only funny about three times, max, and the next fifty-seven times they cycle through the same two point five seconds are increasingly obnoxious. If you want to use a GIF, think very carefully about whether the same objective could be accomplished with a still picture. And if you love GIFs, leave a comment about it – I'm curious about what other people think.

6. Reciprocate comments

If someone leaves a comment on your blog, do your best to comment on their blog as well! This doesn't just apply to memes like this one, but to any post. I've been working on improving on this myself, and though sometimes it takes me a while to visit, I try to stop by the blogs of everyone who comments on my posts.

5. Learn some basic html

Did you know that if you just copy and paste a URL to a blog post comment, it won't actually go anywhere? If you learn the html codes for basic things like italicizing, creating hyperlinks, and adding images, it will make your comments much nicer and your blogging much easier. Here's a list of links to different html tutorials, and usually you can find whatever you need very easily by googling it.

4. Leave relevant, meaningful comments

On the other hand...sometimes irrelevance can be good.

This basically means don't just say "Great post! Please stop by my blog! [unlinked URL]. Despite what I said about reciprocating comments above, I do not visit blogs that do this. At least make a minimal effort to mention one thing that was actually in the post.

3. Always have a few posts ready to go in case you're behind

When you post often and also have a life outside of blogging, it's easy to get behind and not have anything to post on a certain day. Should this happen you can a) do whatever the meme for the day is, which is fine as long as you have something to say about it, or b) use a post that you have already written. If you write reviews right after you finish the book, it's possible in good times to have a couple weeks of pre-written posts, which is a very relaxing feeling!

2. No automatic audio. Ever.

I cannot think of any circumstances under which I would want a random website that's not Pandora to suddenly start playing music as soon as I arrived. This is a signal for "leave immediately."

1. For God's sake, turn off the freaking CAPTCHA!

This may just be me, but I'm pretty sure my keyboard doesn't come in Hebrew.

It serves no real purpose other than to annoy people trying to comment on your blog. You might not even know it's on – embarrassingly, even after hearing numerous people mention how irritating CAPTCHA was, I didn't realize it was active on my blog for several months because I didn't have to go through it when commenting on my own posts. Unless you have gone in and manually disabled CAPTCHA, it is still on! At least on Blogger – I know nothing about Wordpress. Here is an explanation of how to turn it off. Go do it! Now!

And if you thought yours was off, double check, because somehow Blogger keeps switching mine back on. I think it has something to do with a bug in the newer user interface. (Sorry everyone who's tried to comment in those times! And let me know if you have to fill one out, because I just had to turn it off again. Grrr.)