If your Mother Gave you Blogging Advice…

She would make sure you were buckled up before starting the car

When setting up a blog, what you do in the beginning can have big consequences down the road.  Pick a good quality hoster, set better passwords than ‘password’, do some research before you buy your URL, get some spam protection, secure your twitter handle and start your mailing list.  All of these things can stop you from hitting a wall and flying out the windshield.

She would tell you not to take candy from strangers

It’s tempting to snag that sweet sweet nugget of linky goodness.  When someone you don’t know emails you to ask about link exchanges or buying a link from you, it’s best to avoid jumping into their windowless van lest Google throw you in the basement with all the nasty content farmers.

She would hound you to clean up your room

If it looks like a bomb went off in your sidebars.  If you have broken links and out of bounds images.  If you still use Comic Sans even though your blog has nothing to do with comic books or heros.  If you have a tag cloud. Please, listen to your mother and tidy up a bit?

She would tell you to eat your veggies

We realize that spinach isn’t the tastiest thing to eat and yeah, it can even smell funny.  But you gotta just plug your nose and shove it down the hatch.  Why?  Because it’s good for you.  It will help you grow up big and strong.  Many bloggers think of SEO the way a 4 year old thinks of spinach.  It’s often the last thing tackled on the plate and the hardest to power through. SEO is the key to growing your blog big and strong.  You need to learn how to build those links and write those title tags.  Get to it…you’ll be at the table until bedtime if you don’t.

She would ask you if you’d jump off a bridge just because all the other bloggers were doing it.

It’s normal to want to belong and embrace this sense of community bloggers create online. But if every decision you make regarding your own blog is based on the fact that one of the ‘big guys’ is doing it then you’re going to get lost down the proverbial rabbit hole.

Put your goals together and then make decisions to meet those goals; decisions that make sense for  you.  If your only goal is to succeed then you’ll find yourself floundering around wondering what it is you need to make it big.

What does success mean to you?  Does it mean having huge traffic numbers?  Or maybe it means having a nice sized subscriber base.  If you’re thinking you want both (or one or the other) then think about why you want that.  What does a large subscriber base mean for you?  What is the ultimate end goal?  Your end goal might be hugely different from someone else’s end goal so it makes no sense to blindly follow what they are doing because they appear to be successful.  Got it? Good.  Now go eat your spinach.