31 Days to a Brand New Blog Challenge: Final Roundup and Lessons Learned

Here’s the full roundup of all the assignments from the 31 Days to a Brand New Blog Challenge. If you weren’t able to complete all of them this month, go back and do the ones you missed! For those who were able to do most of the assignments in this month’s challenge, I want to [...]

Day 31: Analyze Your Blog’s Progress!

So yes, we’ve come to the end of the challenge (sad face.) Now is the time to really analyze your results from your hard work to improve your blog this month. Let’s take a  look at your posts, comments, subscribers and of course, go back to good ‘ol Google Analytics and see what’s what. Use August 1-31 [...]

Day 30: Write a Guest Post for Another Blog in Your Niche

Like blog carnivals, guest posts on other blogs can bring in new readers to your site. An added bonus is that you also get to form relationships with other bloggers in your niche and promote your personal brand! Today’s assignment Write a guest post and submit it to another blogger in your niche. It should [...]

Day 29: Plan a Blog Post Series

A how-to blog post pulls in readers because it promises that you’re going to give them information they can use and apply. Similarly, a blog post series attracts readers, but the added bonus of the promise of a follow-up post keeps them coming back for more. What’s a blog post series? Well, the 31 Days [...]

Day 28: Create a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

With 500 million people on Facebook, it’s a huge pool of potential readers for your blog! But if you’re like me and you don’t want your readers to friend you on your personal Facebook page, you can create a fan page instead where people can keep up with your blog updates. I started a Facebook [...]

Day 27: Email a New Blog Subscriber

A great way to connect with your loyal readers and keep them coming back is to acknowledge them as much as possible. Of course, you should respond to all your blog comments and you can even turn a comment into a blog post. Another thing you can do is email your subscribers. It takes a [...]

Day 26: Analyze Your Blog’s Audience Using Quantcast

By now, you should already know how to analyze your blog traffic and use Google Analytics to find out more about your blog readers. But if you want to know more about your audience, there are ways to dig even deeper into the stats of who is reading your blog. Quantcast is a free tool [...]

Day 25: Add a “Hire Me” Page to Your Blog

For many of you, blogging is not just a hobby, but a means to an end. Lots of bloggers begin sharing their thoughts and ideas online in order to build a reputation outside of their 9 to 5 job. The hope is that they can eventually craft a new career for themselves doing what they [...]

Day 24: Write a Link Post

Every blogger likes to be linked to. We love seeing our posts being mentioned on someone else’s blog. After all, we put the time and energy into writing so people can read and enjoy! Back on Day 6, we linked to a blogger in our niche, but today we’re going to take that concept a [...]

Day 23: Brand Blog Comments With Your Avatar

If you want to strengthen your personal brand through blogging, it’s important to remember that you’re not only building your reputation by what you post on your blog, but by the comments you post on other blogs as well. You want people to be able to connect with you even in the comments section, which [...]