“Brave and Reckless” Advice: Five Tips for New Bloggers from Christine Ray

Just several months into her blogging adventure on WordPress.com, Christine Ray of Brave and Reckless started to figure out what worked for her — and what didn’t — while navigating this online community. For a dose of Christine’s advice, here are five tips on building a successful site and growing a loyal audience.

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1) Learn from peers or people you admire.

Read guides for new bloggers. WordPress offers some great guides but some of the most useful information is from other bloggers.

 

2) Consider how people read you.

Remember that many WordPress readers are following you on a SmartPhone or tablet and reading you at lunch. Shorter posts are more likely to get read. You can always divide a longer post into sections that you can publish separately if you have a lot to say.

 

3) Read as much as possible — and find your people. 

Look for writing that excites you/resonates with you/makes you smile/fits your interests and FOLLOW those blogs. Reading good writing makes you a better writer. Writers who write what you like to read have followers you have something in common with. Check out their followers — very often these are also people you will want to follow.

 

4) Make interactions meaningful.

There is a fine line between posting “Hey, I’m a new blogger. Come check out my blog/follow me” and “Your writing really resonated for me. I think we have a lot in common.” If you ask me to check out your blog and you haven’t followed me, I tend to think that you are more interested in numbers than in my writing.

 

5) Don’t stress over the numbers.

Don’t think of this as a numbers game. We post our writing because we want to be read, but 15 really engaged readers can sometimes give you a lot more than 200 disengaged readers.

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Read all 15 tips on Christine’s blog, Brave and Reckless.