Blogging from A-Z – A-Z of Blogging – T

T in my A-Z of Blogging for the Blogging from A-Z April Challenge stands for Tags, Time Management and Traffic.

Tags.  If you use Twitter or Instagram then you may be familiar with the hashtag (#) that is put in front of certain keywords to help your tweet or image to reach others that are searching those words but did you know you can also add tags to blog posts?  Most blogging sites will allow you to add tags to your post (here on WordPress when writing a post there is a sidebar to the right – post settings – categories and tags).  By adding tags to your blog post it can help your post to appear in searches and be found more easily.  There are a few things to note about using tags on your blog – you don’t need to put the # symbol in front of any words or phrases you use, only use tags that are relevant to your post or the topic and only use up to 10 tags on any post – many blog sites will not make posts searchable if there are too many tags used as it will consider the post to be spam.

Time Management.  When starting a blog it is easy to get caught up in trying to do all the things that you see other bloggers doing and before you know it you have no time to do the things that you should be doing for your blog.  To help manage your time it is worth thinking about the elements of your blog that are essential, making a list helps, then prioritising them in order of most important to least before focusing on the most important ones.  For me this is – researching post ideas, posting schedule, writing time, photos/graphics/images, before I even think about other social media platforms.  Once you know which tasks need performing then you can allocate time to getting them done.  Being aware of how you spend your time on your blog can help calm feeling of overwhelm and can streamline your blogging experience freeing up time to work on other parts of your blog.

Traffic.  Traffic is the number of views and visitors to your blog on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis and as 2 types – organic and direct.  Organic traffic comes from external links (for example a tweet that contains a link to your blog) and direct traffic is generated by someone knowing your web address (URL) and directly typing that into a web browser.  You can generate your own organic traffic by using other social media sites to promote your post or blog by sharing a link that directs people to your blog with a short explanation of what the post is about.  Direct traffic can be harder to generate as you are relying on people remembering your blog and the site name which is why it is so important to choose a short and memorable name for your blog.  Another way to generate direct traffic is to get some business cards made up with your blog address on and hand them out to people either at networking events or whenever you mention your blog to someone.

Do you have any thoughts or opinions on Tags, Time Management or Traffic?  I’d love to read any comments you may have!