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Home » Blogging

From Personal to Professional Blog – 100 Tips & Resources

Posted by : zazo on March 19, 2010 – 8:54 pm16 Comments

So, you’ve decided to change your personal blog into a professional blog. Wait a second…before moving further, please let me take this out of your mind that professional blogs are not only “blog about blogging” or “how to earn money from blog” etc. From professional I mean better looking, well arranged, clean and resourceful blog, it could also be a mixture of your random stories and niche articles too.

To make this easy to understand let’s take an example. If you have a personal blog where you often write random posts like what interesting happened today with you, how was your experience eating in that famous restaurant last week or if you love sharing some photographs taken by you. In the meantime you also share stories concerned with your passion for motor bikes, like writing your riding experience, latest breaking news from motor bike industry, bike reviews etc. Motor Biking can be your niche.

Your personal blog is an online diary of yours where you allow anyone who is either interested in your random stories or loves to read about your biking experience and share their thoughts. I am sure that those who are interested in your random stories are mostly your real life friends or some very close online friends but not any professionals who find your random stories interesting for them (except you have a blog like Dooce). But writing articles about your passion for motor bikes you, may be unknowingly but attracting a group of amateur or professional bikers or bike enthusiasts who loves to read about your stories on motor bikes.

My point here is that why don’t you attract more bike enthusiast to turn up to your blog for latest biking news, updates, trends, bike models, bike reviews or your personal tips and tricks about bike riding or maintenance. It is the way your blog will become a professional blog related to motor biking from a personal blog.

While posting about bikes you can still keep on writing your random stories, may be your new biking audience may like your random stories too.

So, if you want to turn your online diary into your professional notepad then from my modest knowledge on blogging and some fair knowledge on blog reviewing, I found some helpful resources for you to make your blog turn professional to personal.

Now, lets concentrate on 3 core elements of your blog which are most essential than any other area to work upon. These core elements are Blog Content – Your blog articles and posts, Blog Promotion- Your marketing, promotional strategies & ideas and Blog Navigation- How easy and attractive your blog navigation structure is.

Lastly, whatever your blog platform is, either WordPress, Blogger or Typepad, free hosted or self hosted. It doesn’t matter much. The only thing matter is how much your content is resourceful, authentic and unique to provide value to a particular group of audience.

20 Top Blog Content Tips

Write consistently
Write random articles but keep focus on that one subject which you want your blog to turn as professional from personal.
Don’t write lengthy and too short posts.
Inform your readers if you are not going to be available for few days.
Reply instantly to your blog post comments.
Ask questions to your blog audiences while writing post.
Be little controversial. Sometimes.
Be helpful by providing values to your audiences. Blogging is all about providing value.
Join the conversation and try your best to engage your audiences with lots of interesting reads
Do make comments on other’s blog. But don’t comment for the sake of comment.
Make list of your favorite blog separately from your blog exchange links (blogroll)
Link other reputed blogs within your post.
Use your most favorite keywords in your post title.
Interview some people who are known masters of your favorite niche.
Be creative, search for great and innovative ideas.
Read your post thrice before publishing it.
Write reviews of products related to your niche.
Share personal incidents and stories. Remember it’s still your personal blog.
Share your favorite photographs, show your personal side
From personal to professional, go slowly but steadily. It takes minimum 6 months of continuous posting quality content and managing everything to start getting positive results. If you don’t have patience better try something else than blogging.

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20 Top Blog Promotion Tips

Use Twitter and be active there, tweet your every post.
Use Facebook, make a fan page of your blog and give time to engage with people.
Use twitter counter and link it to your blog
Use facebook fan badge on your blog
Use Google friends connect widget on your blog
Join networkedblogs.com
Use social bookmarking services like digg, mixx, delicious, newswine.
Make community in flickr and YouTube
Go step by step to build a community outside your blog. It will again take 6 months to build community.
Use Goggle Buzz too
Be active in all of your communities.
Submit guest post in reputed blogs.
Write Press Release.
Be active in your favorite community forums. If you don’t have any favorite forum then search for it.
Use signature link of your blog in forums. SEO trick
Use Signature link of your blog in yahoo and Gmail services
Promotion doesn’t mean spam. So don’t spam.
Submit your blog in free web/blog directories and major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
Add your blog link in any possible place you can either online and offline
Use feedburner service for RSS feed subscribers.

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10 Top Blog Navigation Tips

Select light weight and clean professional theme
Choose 2-3 columns themes
Choose easy to customize theme
Choose theme which gives option of blog category bar on top navigation panel
Choose theme which gives you option to add all your feeds and external community links (twitter, facebook, feeds, feed by email )on top column or it should get customize easily
Make attractive but clean banner for your blog
Must write About page. Bloggers often miss that.
Don’t put more than 10 posts on homepage of your blog, add post breaker instead. Use this plugin
Don’t use ads between the posts or just between the title and blog content.
Learn how to use META Tags if you have blog on blogger platform.

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Plugins will definitely add stars to your blog, no doubt content is always a king and marketing is a queen but plugins are best to grip both content and marketing of your blog. To improve you blog navigation check out these plugins.

20 Best WordPress Plugins

Akismet check your comments if they look like spam. Best plugin to get rid of spammers.
All in one SEO Pack Best wordpress blog search engine optimization
Disqus comment system, same comment system which you can see below this post. We also use disqus comment system here.
Sexy Bookmarks That’s some bookmarking links you will notice at the end of this article saying “Sharing is caring”
WordPress Related Posts It will select some related post according to tag you used and keywords and will put it below your post.
Tweetmeme Simple and mostly used retweets button.
WP Cform plugin will generate a nice contact us page for your blog.
Google XML Sitemaps, this will help search engines to index your blog better.
WP DB Manager , this is highly recommended plugin to back up, restore and repair your blog database.
WP Super Cache generates static HTML files for your dynamic wordpress blog. It will help site loading time faster than before.
Feed Burner Feed Smith will deliver your blog post (RSS Feeds)to your blog subscribers mail box. It’s a complete web feed manager of your blog.
WordPress Global Translator Plugin automatically translate your blog in 48 languages.
WP Post Ratings generate star ratings on your post
Advertising Manager will manage all your ads network including Google adsense, Adbrite, Chitika etc.
Sociable add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites . You can choose from 99 99 social bookmarking sites listed on this plugin.
Smart Youtube allows you to insert youtube videos in your blog post
Google Analytic for WordPress tracks your complete blog traffic, content, source of traffic and search queries.
Simple CAPTCHA will prevent your comment system from spam
WP User online enables you to display how many users are online on your blog with complete details.
Get Recent Comment will show the excerpts of recent comment on your blog side bar.

For More Plugins visit http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

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10 Best widgets/gadgets for Blogs on Blogger.com

: However, there are less choice of plugins in blogger platform than wordpress but thanks to blogger geeks like Aneesh and Amanda for developing great blogger widgets. Here are some which could be helpful to your blogger blog.

Disqus Comment System on Blogger works same like wordpress disqus comment system but you need some manual work
Blogger Related Post with Thumbnails Plugin will generate thumbnails of all related post below the content
Google Buzz Button for Blogger allows you to share your content to Google Buzz.
Top Commentator Widget will display the list of top commentators on your blog.
Add Social Bookmarking widget after each blog post will add a list of social bookmarking site below your post.
Uptweet Gadget for blogger will encourage your audience to tweet your blog post on twitter.
Share This Gadget allows user to share your blog post to popular social networking sites like facebook and twitter
Insert Contact Us Page on Blogger is a simple contact us form
Contact me form
How to add Stylish Menu to your blog side bar?

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Your blog theme is a dress of your blog and you always want your blog to be dressed nicely, look cool and feel comforting. There are thousands of blog themes available on web. Search it on Google and you will be lost in so many great themes available. Here are some which I like to share and hope I will make your searching easy. But I advise you to look for a professional theme with soothing colors (blue, green, grey)