Dragos Roua: 100 Ways to Improve Your Blog

Dragos Roua: 100 Ways to Improve Your Blog - is actually more than 100 useful bits – because if one adds the high-quality advice added by readers in comments – the count is well over 100.

Mr.  Roua’s blog, Dragos Roua – The choice of a personal path, uses the Thesis theme. Uses it in an oustanding way, and worth the visit if only for that reason.

Let me take this opportunity to point out what I think is a recurring ethical dilemma  in blogging. Maybe it’s just because I need more coffee.

Mr. Roua’s blog, and this blog here – WordPressBlue – are both members of, and more importantly in this case, affiliates of Thesis.

He wrote the great post I”m sending you to (or trying to). So when I reference the Thesis theme in this post – whose affiliate code should I use? He’s created all the value added – I just noticed it and posted about it.

For the purposes of this post, anyway (and I think the fresh pot of coffee is probably ready) – I’ve used his afffiliate code.Here’s a sample about what’s excellent in this post, Everything he has to say about production and promotion makes an awful lot of sense to me. One gem:

2. Make A Mindmap Of Your Blog

Keep a bird-eye of your blog. Putting your blog into a mind-map, with posts, categories, promotion and income sources proved to be an enlightening exercise for me. Not only it offered a totally different image of my blog but gave me a lot of ideas for overall improving.

To this next idea I’ll add – having been an editor, an author, a copy editor, and ghostwriter – it’s very hard to proof and edit one’s own work.

27. Read Your Own Blog

Too often ignored. You must be your first reader. Whenever I have some free time I read some of my older posts. There’s nothing narcissistic in it, on the contrary, most of the time I dislike what I wrote, and think I could have done it so much better.

It’s not “just another WordPress weblog” (the default tagline which comes with a new WordPress installation, along with the “Hello World” default post.

41. Your Blog Header Is Your Identity

Pay attention to your blog header, that’s where the blog title is usually placed. People will remember your blog by visually recreating that zone. If it’s too crowded it will be hard to memorize. I Always recommend to keep your header as clean as possible, in order to be easily remembered.

Here’s one comment that jumped out at me as very helpful. Gloson, apparently a regular reader, posted as follows:

[Gloson refers to his own post],  7 More Things to Do to Improve Your Blog.But I think your list is far more comprehensive than mine. LOL

And since you usually reply to almost every comment on your blog, one way you could improve it is installing this “Subscribe to comments” plugin. Hopefully it will improve interactiveness.

Certainly my experience is that it’s easy to forget that you’ve entered a comment on a post – and by extension joined conversation. If I understand correctly, this post allows the reader/commenter to return to her/his other work – and be “paged,” as it were, when the conversation heats up again.