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Blog designs – make it personal

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About a year ago- when I started blogging, everyone started to complain about all the cutesy blog designs with cartoon women etc. I had already created my own design and this made me feel really bad, but like your idea for your design, mine is very personal. It’s Tricia’s Musings that I’m referring to by the way.

Tricia’s Musings header has a photo of my husband and neighbor in the background being silly, the photo also represents my love of gardening, the iguana on the couch represents my love of reptiles and that actually is my iguana Napoleon who passed away in 2004, the telephone table to right looks very much like an antique on I own (antiques are also something I’m interested in), and the nurses cap and stethoscope on the table represent the fact that I’m a nurse. Oh and the cartoon “me” does look a fair bit like I do.

I’ve posted on my site, not recently, about my design choices and everyone seems to get it. The majority don’t include my blog design in the general distaste for “cutesy” cartoon blog designs. Although some don’t love it.

Personally, I don’t mind the cutesy cartoon designs that much- but if the design is well chosen to fit the blog or blogger I think it works better. All those sex kitten cartoony women? Is that really you? LOL

Whatever anyone chooses to do, it’s your blog, your design choice. Remember that. However I do think that you should choose a header that reflects what your blog is about, or describes who you are in some way.

It’s always a good idea to try to customize the standard blogger or wordpress or other blogging platform designs if you choose to not get a custom design for your site (there’s lots of free blog themes out there- just search!). There’s days I’m surfing blogs and I sometimes see the same design, totally un-customized 100 or more times. There’s nothing wrong with the design but it really doesn’t tell me who YOU are – especially if I’ve seen 99 others just like it that day.




Blogburst – syndicate your content

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Shortly after I started blogging in 2006 a new company opened for business. This company’s name is Blogburst. It’s a syndication service that places your blog content on top-tier online destinations. Namely online news sites like Reuters, USA Today, Gannett, McGraw-Hill, Fox News and Internet Broadcasting.

What could I get out of listing my sites with Blogburst? Well increased visibility for one – especially if any of my sites or posts got picked up by online news services, plus a greater audience reach and increased traffic. Online publishers in turn would get more material to use on their sites in order to broaden their reach and increase their own page views.

So I signed up my sites and kept on blogging as usual. Nothing much happened for a long time. I’d go and check my account to see if any of the news services had picked up any of my posts every now and then and I was disappointed to find out that they had not.

I wasn’t ready to give up though and I kept my sites listed on Blogburst.

Late last year Blogburst started a service where they would provide quarterly revenue to their top one hundred bloggers who’s posts got picked up by online services consistently. Obviously I was not one of those bloggers. I believe that Blogburst has plans to expand compensation to bloggers as their reach grows and more online services start to use Blogburst’s bloggers for content.

Yesterday while I was checking site statistics for my blogs and my husbands two blogs I made a surprising discovery. One of the sites bringing new visitors to my husbands site was USA Today! It seems that they just started picking up his weird news posts from Odd Planet at the beginning of March. We hope that they continue to do so.

Now that I’ve actually seen how it works I can tell you that the online service- In this case USA Today, will pick up a post and place a short summary of the post on their site. Visitors to their site who want to read the whole post are brought directly to your site. This increases visitors and hopefully your sites popularity in the long run.

Naturally we were thrilled that Odd Planet was picked up by USA Today.

Pleased, I went on checking site stats for our other sites and made another amazing discovery. USA Today, and IBS (I believe this must be Internet Broadcasting) had been picking up some of my posts from As the Garden grows since early February. I think that over 33,000 post views have occurred since early February via those services. How had I not noticed this earlier?

I promptly got busy and placed a number of our other sites on Blogburst. I’m now keeping my fingers crossed that posts continue to get picked up from As the Garden Grows and Odd Planet and perhaps some of the other sites that we added to Blogburst.

Maybe we’ll end up on their top 100 list of bloggers and end up making some money through Blogburst. As of now I’m just happy that we should see an increase in visitors.

This certainly is incentive to create excellent content on all of our blogs.

Feedburner

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As you probably know by now, your blog has an RSS feed. Blogs are often set up by default to list your 10 most recent posts in your RSS feed. Feeds can be read in your browser, sent to site visitors by email via services like Feedburner, or read using a feed reader.

I’ll discuss a few on the most popular feed readers in a future post, but I’ll just tell you that if you have a number of sites that you enjoy reading it’s sometimes easier to keep track of them by listing their site feeds in your feed reader and quickly reading their posts or post summaries in the reader. You can visit the site to read the full post or to comment on their post – and you should do that every now and then anyway so that the blogger knows that you are a regular reader.

You’ll notice that I have my sites feeds listed in the top right sidebar. Those are the default feeds that my WordPress blogging software creates for this blog. However, I’ve also created Feedburner feeds for my site too. You’ll can subscribe to my Feedburner feeds by clicking on the second subscribe listing a little further down in my right sidebar.

I have created Feedburner feeds for my site because it allows me to optimize my feeds, and add a little flare or personal touch to the feeds. Feedburner feeds can easily be read by browsers or feed readers, but they can also be sent by email if a subscriber wishes to receive them that way.

Feedburner is actually the worlds largest feed management provider. Bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers use Feedburner to promote their sites and provide content to their subscribers.

One great thing about using Feedburner for your site feeds is that Feedburner keeps track of how many people subscribe to your site feed. It’s nice to know if you have one person subscribing to your feed or fifty.

There are far too many Feedburner features to discuss in just one post, but one recent change at Feedburner is well worth mentioning. When you create a feed for one of your sites at Feedburner you can add some extra code to your site that allows Feedburner to track your site traffic for you. In other words Feedburner not only helps you manage your site feeds but it also provides valid site statistics. I think this was a great addition to the many valuable features of Feedburner and I use it for all of my sites.

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