Organizing Your Blog 203 - Closet Blogs

Your blog is up and running, and you've got 30... maybe 40 posts.  How do you organize it all so people can find the articles they're looking for?

You might say: Oh, let's organize it like a closet.  But let's be honest.  If your closet is like mine it's a big jumble of clothes on the shelf, the hangers have been ignored, and I have no method of organizing it all to find what I want to wear.  Somehow this just doesn't seem like an appealing way to run a blog.

So let's look at our blogs for a moment in relation to a closet.  Like a closet a blog is a place you can store (or display) your posts for whoever wants to pass by and open the door.  We don't want them to open the door and see a big mess however.  Even using hangers it might be hard to distinguish a pattern of where things go.  We can try color coding our clothes and hanging them up, but it still looks a little messy.  Blogs are like this too.  You can code your posts by turning them into series, but if they're all to be found in the archive or by just going from page 1 to page 100 at the bottom of the page, it's still going to be difficult for people to find exactly what they want.

Luckily for us Blogger has given us a way to organize our posts just like we might buy a storage unit with drawers to go inside our closet.  We can put one type of thing in each drawer, and then label the drawers.  Things are tucked away then, the closet looks cleaner, and we know exactly where to find everything we need. Ta da, welcome to the feature of adding pages to your blog.

Our post HERE will get you started on making pages, but lets talk about benefits of using them for a moment first.

Take a look at the tabs at the top of this blog and you'll see that we've got six distinct pages (drawers) for different types of posts.  Now when people come to Hot Shot Blogger, instead of having to try to sift through every post we've ever written, they can open up the right page and browse through only the topics that are of interest to them.

We've done this by creating pages, and then linking to specific posts written in each category.  Having a blog organized in this way allows the landing page (Home page) to be used in a different manner than simply displaying a jumble of posts.  You can add a content slider, or feature only your best articles on the front page. It leaves room to run promotions for your followers, or dress up the blog with a well crafted image or description.

Use a critical eye (or borrow a pair from a friend) and go over your blog to see where you can organize and tuck things neatly into pages.  This will add to ease of use, and will add to the enjoyment of users, who may now return because the blog looks more professional and usability has gone up.

Be sure to check out our other great posts on building your blog!

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Money From Micro-Blogs 402 - Don'ts

Now that you know what a micro-blog is and how it can be used to make money, perhaps you've decided you'd like to try your hand at it.  Let's go over some things you should avoid while micro-blogging then.  You may notice many of these things also apply to regular blogs... that's because it's good information.

1) Too Little Content

Avoid starting a blog that you don't plan on putting much content on.  Example: don't start a blog about cars and then only upload 10 posts.  This blog will sit stagnant and never make a dime... and if it does make a dime, it probably won't make anything after that.  Starting a blog with only a few posts and never working on it again is just time wasted that you could have spent updating or blogging on a larger blog.

2) Topics You Don't Know About

Why on earth would you start a blog about something you know nothing about?  I don't know, but some people do.  They probably think along the lines of, "Oh... finance is a hot topic right now, so I'll start a blog about it and make some money!"  Wrong.  How can you write any content if you don't know much about it?  You also don't want to give misleading information.  If you're going to blog, you need accurate, trustworthy information so that your guests will come back, or send their friends.

3) Starting Something You Don't Care About

This goes right along with points one and two.  You may know quite a lot about finance, but aren't passionate about it.  Why write about it then?  It's guaranteed that if you don't at least care about the topic a little, then you'll end up abandoning the blog at some point down the road (waste of your time at that point), or your content will turn out flat and uninteresting, which will leave your blog stagnant with no returning visitors (also a waste of your time).  If you're going to take the time to do it in the first place, then write about what you know, and love.

4) Avoid over-Advertising

Have you ever seen a blog or website where there was actually more advertising than there was actual content?  Avoid bombarding your readers with advertising or they won't stay long, and won't come back.  They're there for actual content, not ads.  Ads are meant to be unobtrusive, and are meant to compliment your site, rather than be the entirety of your site.


5) Avoid grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes.

6) Avoid Keyword Overload

I've come across blogs online before that are nothing more than a post or a page full of a bunch of keywords with no actual content.  Not only does this go against Adsense policy, but any visitors you may have will come in, see that there's nothing there for them to read but a list of words that make no sense, and then leave.  They won't click on any of your ads, and they won't send any of their friends.  Odds are you're likely to get reported, and your blogger and adsense accounts suspended.

7) Avoid Plagiarism

This is the big NO-NO in blogging, period.  If you plagiarize you can get hit with lawsuits, as well as get any accounts you may have with blogger or adsense terminated permanently.  Don't do it!  What is plagiarizing?  Plagiarizing is using someone else's  content without their express permission and without giving them credit.  It would be wise to research how to give someone credit online if you plan on using a quote or something from their works at all.

8) Don't Spam

As always, don't spam the web advertising your blog.  This means you don't want to go to forums and just spam your url all over the place.  The same goes for facebook, the e-mail, or any other place you can think of.

9) Don't ask visitors to visit your ads or 'sponsors'.

This is a big no-no and your adsense account will likely be suspended if you do this because this is a violation of policy.  Other affiliate programs may have different policies that allow you to ask them that, but if adsense finds it on your page and have adsense enabled, you risk losing your account.

While there are many more things that you may learn that will hinder your efforts in making money or running micro-blogs, these are some of the bigger ones that I hope you will avoid.

Check out our other tutorials by clicking the category tabs at the top of the page!

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