Feb 3, 2016 / Intermediate

Take the Leap: One Extra Day, Three Ways to Enhance Your Blog

This year, February is a day longer — let’s use it to make our blogs better.

“If only the day had an extra hour!” “I wish the week didn’t zoom by so quickly!”

These ideas apply beyond February 2016, of course — you can work on the same goals when a class or a flight gets canceled, your town’s snowed in, or whenever you have an unexpected block of free time.

How often do you complain about not venturing beyond your daily routine because of lack of time? Well, 2016 is giving you a freebie in the shape of February 29 — a whole extra day, courtesy of it being a leap year. How will you use that extra chunk of time? Here are three ideas for investing in your blog beyond the here-and-now of publishing.

Experiment with a new blogging tool

Keeping a regular publishing schedule is often a challenge — throw in the rest of your busy life, and you’re left with very little time to explore new tools that might improve your blogging.

With an extra day at your disposal, why not branch out a little — play around with an image-editing tool like Canva or PicMonkey and create new custom Image Widgets or a bespoke custom header. Even if you don’t finish your design that day, these are online resources you only need to master once. Next time you’re up for some design tweaks on your site — or even a full-blown makeover — you won’t have to learn a new system from scratch.

Get comfortable with basic HTML

Many bloggers — especially those who recently started — feel daunted by the gibberish-looking text you see when you click over from the Visual Editor to the HTML one. And what’s with all those angle brackets?!

If you give it a try, though, you’ll see that the basic tags in your HTML Editor — the stuff that makes your text turn italic and bold, for example — are really straightforward and easy to remember and recognize. And mastering a few of them can help you in several unexpected ways, whether it’s to add oomph to your comments, format your poetry (or other alternative-layout text) precisely as you want it, create lists and headings, or troubleshoot an annoying line break you just can’t seem to get rid of.

Added bonus: bragging rights! You are coding, after all.

Give unglamorous-yet-impactful tasks some love

From housework to trip-planning, our to-do lists always contain shiny items that receive most of our attention, and more pedestrian, drab ones that are relegated to the bottom of the pile despite being just as crucial as their flashier neighbors.

Blogging is similar: publishing, reading, and commenting are immediately rewarding. In many cases they result in near-instantaneous feedback — how fun is that? But let’s not forget other blogging-related activities that can produce long-term benefits for your site.

For example, why not spend a couple of hours auditing your tags and categories? Make sure each post is properly tagged and that none have more than 15 tags and categories in total (which results in their disappearance from the WordPress.com Reader). Check your Insights page to see which tags and categories get the most traffic, and plan new posts on those topics. Get rid of “islands” — way-too-specific tags you’ve only ever used in one post — and replace them with more sensible ones that would connect you to a broader audience.

You don’t even have to browse on your mobile device; you can just visit your site’s Customizer, where you can preview how blog’s appearance on three different screen sizes (desktop, tablet, and smartphone).

Alternatively, think of all your readers who view your site using our mobile apps, and give your site a mobile “pass.” By now, the vast majority of our themes are responsive; even so, some of your customizations — like header images and long post titles —  might look different than what you expect when viewed on a tablet or an iPhone. So just spend some time digging into the far reaches of your site using a mobile device, and fix whatever needs some attention.

Share your own ideas in the comments — how would you spend an extra few hours to improve your blog?

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  1. I think the last one is the most important. If I take time to edit the post (and maybe edit it a few times) it will always turn out better. This is despite my desire to quickly finish it and hit the “post” button.

    Liked by 4 people

  5. I would recommend trying a free template on Piktochart and make your own infographic. I had a lot of fun with mine.

    So I made a 2nd different one with a different free infographic template. It’ll be published in a few months since I already have a lineup of new posts in the hopper.

    Do an informal small poll by using daddypoll.com on a blog post topic.

    Liked by 3 people

      1. I am rather intrigued that polldaddy isn’t used often by frequent bloggers. One can have lots of fun with harmless, general poll questions on a blog post topic. Maybe I forget the learning curve (which isn’t steep) on setting up a poll.

        Liked by 2 people

  11. Can definitely relate to the ‘gibberish’ part! This month I’ll try to take my blog from the online travel diary it currently is to a broader ‘travel advice’ style. Love the concept of having an extra day to fill with something new, thanks!

    Liked by 2 people

  13. I just started blogging and am feeling very overwhelmed! Tags, HTML, header images..my head is spinning! Thank you for these articles! Someday I will understand it all! theAmazingTasteblog.com

    Liked by 2 people

    1. When you just start out, it’s perfectly fine to take things a little more slowly and focus on one thing at a time — for example, on establishing a regular, sustainable publishing rhythm. These other things won’t go away!

      Like

  15. I started my blog January 1st. Prior to that, I had no idea what went into creating a decent blog! The learning process has been overwhelming and exciting! I try to teach myself something new everyday. This blog has been very helpful! Thank you!!!

    Liked by 2 people

  16. Over the Christmas holidays and New Year’s, I’ve explored some sketch apps and some to give my header a new look. Chose a new theme and now looking on learning coding which I think will be useful especially I use the mobile app every time!

    Liked by 2 people

  20. I feel like I jumped into the deep end without first learning how to float! Thanks for tips and hints that prevent me from drowning while I try to give my paynefulponderings.wordpress.com blog a decent start.

    Liked by 1 person

  21. I am with you on the auditing tags and categories. I would add, to go through all drafts and see if I have any good content that still might be usable or that I could expand on.

    Liked by 4 people

  23. I would like to know if there is any valuable difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org, whether there is a wider audience or a different audience or if the features either offers helps with acquiring followers? Or is the .com only for the novice and the .org is for professionals?

    Liked by 2 people

    1. There are some substantial differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org — you can read about them here:
      https://wordpress.com/support/com-vs-org/

      And here’s a post discussing the pros and cons of choosing either “flavor” of WordPress:
      https://wordpress.com/dailypost/2013/11/14/com-or-org/

      Either way, the distinction cannot really be boiled down to “novices” versus “professionals,” since thousands of accomplished writers, journalists, artists, professionals, and small-business owners choose WordPress.com and find that it more than meets their needs. It’s more a question of the degree of autonomy you’d like to have over the technical side of your site, since WordPress.org gives you more of that (for example, by allowing third-party plugins; here at WordPress.com we don’t, for security reasons, opting to develop similar features in-house).

      I hope that answers your question — do let me know if you have any others.

      Liked by 1 person

  25. I’ve just started my blog, and I’m excited to try these tips. My husband does coding as part of his job, so I’ll have to hit him up to teach me a bit of html!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. There’s no universal recommendation I can make — ideally, you’d want to balance high resolution (so the image looks great on all screens, including retina screens) and file size (so that readers on mobile won’t take a long time — and a chunk of their data — to load your posts). One thing I’d recommend doing is checking your theme’s info (just search your theme at http://wordpress.com/themes) to see what the width of your main column is — you wouldn’t images that are smaller tend to look faded and/or blurry, so it’s a good idea to try to at least match that.

      Liked by 1 person