AH, blogging.

Always so much to learn, so much to do and never enough time to do it all. I hear ya.

As I’m sat here typing this, in the back of my mind right now, I’m thinking of about five things that I desperately need to do to my blog. And also thinking, “when on earth am I gonna find the time to do THAT!”.

So it’s tough at times granted. Most improvements take more time than we’ve got and lots of effort, but for now, I want you to forget all about those and concentrate on the quick, little things you can do to improve your blog TODAY.

Or if not today, well then some time soon. When you’ve got five minutes spare and ideally a cuppa or a glass of wine in hand.

Are you ready? Are you steady? Ok, here we go.

1) Add a search bar if you haven’t already got one – Help people stay longer on your blog and find what they want with a simple search bar. And whilst you’re at it, pop it near the top of your sidebar too so it’s easily spotted. Besides your readers, PR people and brands also need this on your blog, so they can check out your previous content or see if you’ve posted something for or about them.

2) Make sure ALL of your social media accounts are linked from your blog – an obvious one you’d think but I only noticed yesterday that my LinkedIn account was missing and I’ve been blogging for over three years. Oops!

3) Update your header – If your blog is looking a bit stale, change your header (like I did yesterday!) Either employ the services of a professional if you’ve got the cash or create something yourself with images and text using a free online tool like Picmonkey.

4) Give your blog a strapline – If you haven’t got one, create one. So for example I’ve just changed mine to: REAL Life. REAL Inspiration. REAL glamour. Help people get a sense of what your blog is all about and spell it out to them in a sentence. Oh and make sure it’s on your header too.

5) Make sure your contact details are easy to find – In my other work as a freelance PR, I am quite frankly astonished how many blogs don’t have contact details or have them hidden away in some obscure place. If you want people to contact you and if you want to work with brands, then you need to put your contact details in an obvious, easy to spot place.

6) Space the copy out – The way we read online is very different to say, reading a book as our attention span is severely limited. So if you want to keep your readers, reading, make life easier for them and introduce more space into your posts. Don’t publish huge chunks of text with no breaks or spacing. It is exhausting for people. Add more white space, break up your paragraphs and give people some reading ‘space’.

7) Join a linky! – A simple to way to boost your stats, audience and comments is to join in a linky, where you share a couple of your links for people to read and then visit a few other blogs through their shared links. It’s quick, it’s fun and it works. The lovely Aby from You Baby Me Mummy has a mammoth list of them all here.

8) Clean up your sidebar – Ditch the blog clutter and make sure your sidebar is as clean as possible. Get rid of any widgets which you no longer benefit from or which look messy. Too many will only distract from your fabulous content.

9) Add an SEO plugin – If you use WordPress, boost your SEO super easily with a plugin. I use SEO Yoast for this blog and it is marvellous. Trust me, when I say a simple SEO plugin like this really will make a difference.

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With love,

Kate