His Name Is Cedric, And He Does Blogging

Bloggers will have their eyes opened wide when they learn about something that will help driving traffic to their blogs. Get real people, we want our blog to have more readers don’t we?

I supposed the current talk-of-the-blogosphere is a widget called BlogRush, and I’ve read about a lot reviews, some are supporting it, some just don’t. I’ve embedded the widget in my blog for quite sometime but I don’t see much traffic flowing in, instead, StumbleUpon was the only thing that helped out a lot!

The problem with BlogRush is this, the headlines keep changing because bloggers update their blogs from time to time, meaning if I make a new post, my headlines are not likely to stick there for quite sometime and people will not notice my blog at all!

Despite the tips offered by a blogger which heavily criticized bloggers who monetized their blogs about pumping in unique titles to attract readers, I doubt people will really aware of it as the updates are going too fast!


Notice the headlines will change as you refresh your page.

Currently BlogRush is having upgrades, I’m not sure how will they really benefit the bloggers but I will not take that widget down YET. So fellas, if you think BlogRush would really help driving much traffic to your blog, I would suggest you to try other methods like how I mentioned in my previous post.

Till then, I’m expecting great improvements from BlogRush. If you want to give it a shot and try your luck to have readers noticing your blog, sign up here.

Happy blogging people!

Filed under: Widgets | 1 Comment »

I know it’s been a few days since I drop a few posts here. Well stay tuned as I’ve got more topics to cover, blog reviews will be included pretty soon too. Cheers everyone!

Filed under: Announcement | No Comments »

I mentioned about balancing your blog posts with pictures, sometimes you can use your pictures to humor your readers. You can upload captivating sceneries, beautiful statues pictures and so on.

Let’s say you came back from a party and you wanna blog about it (I assume you have taken some group pictures) and you decide to upload 10 group pictures, trust me, it’s boring! And people won’t bother to read your long long descriptions!So why don’t you pick like 2 or 3 pictures and make them “talk”? Add some funny captions or add talk bubbles in your pictures and they will look pretty alive!

Let me show you the example:

And this

Now you decide which picture will humor your readers? But of course, you don’t do it to pictures that don’t need any effects to captivate your readers. Like I mentioned, if it’s a wonderful scenery, talk bubbles are unnecessary, but if you think the pictures you wanted to present in your blog look dull, make them talk!

Happy blogging everyone!

Filed under: Blogging | 4 Comments »

When inspirations strike us, that’s when we have the urge to blog. But planning before blogging is important as it will create different effect to your blog, don’t believe me? Let me show you.

• Framework: You will have an idea what to blog about, and this is important so that you won’t jump from one topic to another and confuse your readers a lot! A framework will help you to slowly elaborate your ideas.

• Choice of Words: You can use beautiful words to describe something and impress your readers! Through planning you can then think of your choice of words, sometimes it’s important because some words do cause havoc, don’t even think of asking me to give you examples of words that will leave your readers shooting you like crazy.

• Additional Ideas: When you plan your post, you will avoid losing important things which you want to blog about, let’s just say you want to blog about an outing with friends, isn’t that sad if you left out someone’s name unintentionally? Just take your time and plan and you will never go wrong!

• Systematic: How irritating is it when you’re reading a bloggers’ experience in a restaurant then she talks about her boyfriend, then back to the food part, then her mother’s story then back to the food? She has lost it! Not systematic at all! Now you start to understand why planning is important?

• Save Effort To Re-edit: You will go crazy if you keep editing your post because you kept remembering things you left out! And your post just lose its credibility if you are the type who like to rush for a new post. So plan first!

This is your blog, and you’re not doing this because you have time constraint, take your time and plan for your post and you will see the difference. You will ask me, how to plan?

For me, I have a little notebook which I will jot down whatever that comes into my mind then rearrange my points to present them in my blog. Notebook would mean the classic paper made book, not laptop or whatsoever. I adopt mind mapping because it helps a lot for me to elaborate my points.

You can plan in your head as well, the whole idea is to get you to think carefully before hitting the “Publish” or “Post” button. Try to plan before blogging, I’m pretty sure it helps a lot!

Filed under: Blogging | 6 Comments »

Isn’t that depressing when you realize that your readers are shying away from your blog? I believe it is important to ask for honest reviews for your blog so that you know what your problems are and how are you going to curb them. There are a few reasons why you are losing your blog readers which fresh bloggers should take note:

• Too personal: Unless the blogger talks about interesting incidents that happen to him/her, many people dislike reading blogs about how their new clothes look like, what did they have for lunch, same activities in school. If you are a superstar then it’s different! Oh everyone wants to know what you’re doing! Otherwise try to avoid focusing too much on yourself if you’re the type who wants more readers.

• Tiny Fonts: Don’t you feel irritated reading blogs which have extremely small size? Maybe you think it looks nice for your theme but truth is if you want people to read your blog, don’t try to torture your readers’ eyes.

• Lack of Updates: If you only update your post every 2 weeks or so, people will forget your existence, try to update as soon as possible! But do not omit the fact that your content has to be good.

• Boring content: Imagine this, you go to a blog that talks about how boring his/her life is… You know you don’t have to go back anymore because you can guess what is going to happen next! People don’t like boring contents so try to pump some energy in it! And avoid blogging in just 2 or 3 sentences like, “I’m so bored today. Not much activities. I’m sick”

• No pictures: Now this is my problem, I receive feedbacks saying that I don’t use pictures in my blog. But in this blog, I do not squeeze my content in one paragraph so that won’t really hurt. As for those bloggers who love to write in a long essay format, please add some pictures in between, give your readers a break! And face it, most readers prefer PICTURES to words.

• Slow Page Loading: You have too many scripts in your blog which cause your page to load very slowly! And when your readers notice that your page loads very slowly, instead of waiting, they might as well read some other blogs. Always keep your blog simple and neat and that will do the trick!

• Too many Ads: Some readers don’t like Ads that are scattered all over your blog, I mean come on, you see Adsense almost every corner of the blog! Learn to organize your advertisement, it’s understood that you want to earn some living for yourself but if you scare your readers away, how are you going to even think of allowing people to click on your ads?

• Sudden change of Style: You will run away from this blog if I start talking about how bad the weather is, what is so special of this new car. Readers have their demands too and if you do not know how to maintain your style of writing, they will leave you.

• Unnecessary Widgets: I don’t know how you guys feel but I hate it when there is song auto-played in the blog that scares me. If you notice, almost all probloggers do not have musics being played at the background! Some widgets are helpful and some just don’t have its purposes and they might even slow down your page load.

• Rude: You do not respect your readers, you think that you are always right and if they hate your blog, they can leave it. Well you certainly have to bear the consequence if it really happens when they decide to just ignore your blog.

I have listed down 10 reasons why you are losing your readers, of course, if you have any extra suggestions don’t mind dropping me a few words at the comment box! I hope all of you will avoid making these mistakes if you want to have more readers. Cheers!

Filed under: Blogging | 10 Comments »

You know you can have good contents in your blog and yet you strive to have more visitors to your blog instead of having your classmates to view only, these are what you should do to promote your blog.

• Submit your website: A lot of fresh bloggers do not know what is submitting websites.This means you allow your website to appear in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and so on. To submit your website in Google, click here. After submitting to Google, you can use Submit Express to submit your websites to other search engines, all you need to do is to enter your email address and website so that they will require you to verify. Please constantly check your spam box. Why is submitting your websites so important? So that people will bump into your blog if they search a certain keywords which happened to be mentioned by your blog. Wicked!

• Websites: You can promote your website through other websites by creating a profile in Facebook, Myspace and Friendster. Sign up for Stumble Upon and Digg. I have a lot of traffic coming from Stumble Upon, so if you think your blog is awesome enough, submit it! You can also apply to have your blog reviewed.

• Comment: Comment in other bloggers’ blogs is very useful because from there you will get to know new friends/ readers. And each time you comment in someone’s blog, try to be sincere and not just go there and say, “Hi, nice blog.”, elaborate more on why you think the blog is fun or showing constructive opinion.

• Forum: Participate in forums (for example: Forum on blogging) will benefit you a lot because the members may be your new readers and you can learn a lot of things through forums. For me, I find The Blog Experiment very awesome because not just I made new friends from there, I learn a lot of things/knowledge!

• Real Life Gathering: If there’s a gathering for the bloggers, attend it! And inform people about your blog when there’s an ice breaking session. This usually works! Some people even have their blog address printed on their name cards, either way, use your chance wisely!

• Contest: Some bloggers would organize a contest and reward the winners, sounds interesting but you need to throw in efforts to succeed this event, you need to brainstorm the ideas and calculate the cost needed. But the benefit is great! People will start spreading about your contest and that’s when traffic flows in!

If you follow the steps above, you will somehow have some new readers. However, whether you can make your readers come back again that’s another story, you can have 100 readers for today and the next day you will have perhaps 30 or 40 readers, why? That’s when you need to examine the reasons why you are losing readers which I will cover later. Any question please leave me comments/contact me by clicking the page above.

Filed under: Blogging | 6 Comments »

Please distinguish between “Do not comment” and “Do not read”. There are differences, here I would like to point out something about blogging and comments. Supposedly you wrote an excellent entry and you know you have readers, but why is it that people don’t comment in your blog? And it’s sad isn’t it? You want people to read your blog so badly but people just don’t comment.

• Buddies: Sometimes your good friends don’t comment in your blog, why? Because they can see you the next day and they can tell you about how they feel with regards to your entry!

• Chatbox: When you embed chatbox in your blog, sometimes people will not take the trouble to click on the link to comment, wait for the page to load or pop up, the easiest way to tell you how they feel about your content is through chatboxes.

• Unawareness: Trust me, there are still people who do not know what blog is, so they will read your article just for the sake of reading and killing times.

• Complexity: This is what I hate to see in someone’s blog, after entering my details, I have to enter the verification codes to make sure I’m a human. Sometimes the blog (Best example: Blogspot) only accepts people that has Blogspot/Gmail account to comment. What if your readers don’t have gmail/blogspot account, isn’t that too complicated just to comment?

• Link to comment is not obvious: People do not know if they can comment if your link to comment is not obvious or is located above your article, think about it, people respond to your entry after reading your post and you want them to scroll up again to comment? Some readers might as well just don’t comment!

• Nature of your readers: Some readers just WON’T comment at all and you can’t make them to comment. Or some have already read a post similar to yours. So just deal with it with open heart.

• Readers don’t know if they should comment: Sometimes readers do not know if they should comment to your blog because you did not specifically request for comments, passive readers are everywhere so you must encourage them to comment by adding simple sentence like, “I want to hear from all of you!”.

• You are unfriendly: As much as they comment but they still don’t get heard by you, they might just won’t comment anymore. Don’t let this happen to your blog, try to show some gratitudes to your readers.

• Have original post to refer: This is suggested by Sc_Bone, he says that it’s best to have the comment box along with the original post so that people can comment while referring to the post! It’s a good point and thanks Bone.

It’s not always because of your entry that prevented your readers from commenting, of course people won’t bother to comment if your blog is lame in nature, but if you think you have written a good post, encourage people to comment. Another trick to gain more comments is to have more readers, which I will cover later.

Honestly, having no commentators is still better than having NO loyal readers, I will also write about how to promote your blog to gain more readers. Stay tuned and happy blogging!

Filed under: Blogging | 11 Comments »