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06/28/2012 • 5:05 PM 9

AB Challenge 28: Top 10 How to keep the blog ball rolling, George Clooney!

GET BIGGER THAN JESUS FREE ON AMAZON TODAY JUNE 28

What can bloggers do to keep their blog fresh and moving forward? Everyone experiences blog fade at some point. You have lots of other stuff to do or run out of ideas or just don’t feel like blogging all the time. You can still keep your blog traffic motoring on. Here’s how:

1. Guest blogs. New people fresh energy. Interact. Engage. Find allies in the struggle. Kill their enemies to make more solid friends.

2. Interviews. Interacting with new people on your blog equals even more energy. Your blog is about you. Too much about you becomes boring and pathological. And by you, I mean me.

3. Scoopit! I monitor a bunch of choice feeds and when I see something I think is helpful, entertaining, educational or strange about publishing, I use the Scoopit tool to point my readers to the useful link. It’s a great curation tool that makes your blog a hub of whatever niche topic you want to research.

4. Read other blogs. This is where many bloggers fall down. They don’t read enough input to enhance their output. Reading and commenting on blogs is another way to feed #1 and #2, as well.

5. Watch forums for current topics to discover what issues already interest your target readers. If I ever get stuck for a writing prompt, I can always go over to a publishing forum and within a minute, I’ll read something that irks, spurs or inspires me to write about the topic in question. (Today I looked and it was disrespect for indies on a Kindle forum. Filed for later use.) Whatever your topic, there’s a forum for that.

6. Step away from it. Don’t blog just for the sake of blogging. If you aren’t interested in a topic, don’t force it. Better to rest, wait and recharge. Yes, more posts lead to increased traffic, but don’t sacrifice quality for quantity.

7. Blog your experience. Whatever you do, there’s something about it that someone needs to learn about. Any post that begins with “How to” will be read. Evergreen topics, like How to format with Scrivener, for instance, will be an anchor for traffic to your blog for a long time. Think small. Go into step-by-step details to help your readers if you have the tech and teaching skills. Every time I run into an obstacle with book production — and there’s always something — as frustrating as it is, I also think Hey, this is material.

8. Revisit old blog posts and update them from a fresh angle. The SEO spiders will notice changes to your blog and that helps your SEO. Your readers will appreciate the update, too. My feelings have changed about using CreateSpace, for instance. I’m more in favour of CreateSpace than I used to be and I’ve cooled on Lightning Source.

9. Think big, as in sprawling, iconic examples and topics. One of my most popular posts that gets traffic forever is Create More Interesting Characters (Superman vs. Batman). Lots of people are probably discovering the blog simply because they’re searching for the superheroes and need them to save their city. That’s okay. Lots of comic book nerds are interested in issues of character development using familiar examples. (I say this as a comic book nerd.) All that helpful editorial advice will distract them as the Joker and Lex Luthor team up to watch their cities burn.

10. Write top ten lists of something (easy ones, like this!) They’re easy to write and people love them. Well, not this one, but usually. Pick a film genre, book genre, blogs, celebrities, roles, whatever. Relate it to a trending topic on Twitter (or George Clooney at any time) and watch your readership climb higher. Make George Clooney relevant, though, not some tenuous, lame joke to illustrate your point like I just tried.