You might have noticed that a Blogging University badge has appeared in my sidebar. During the next couple of weeks, I’m taking part in Blogging 201: Branding and Growth. This WordPress course is designed to help bloggers who feel they are familiar with the basics of blogging and who want to move on to topics such as design, creating a blogging ‘brand’, and growing their blogs.
Image courtesy of Steve Bridger, sourced from Flickr Creative Commons
As part of Blogging 201, we outlined our three blogging goals for the rest of 2015. My goals are:
1. To increase my average daily hits by 25% by the end of 2015
I plan to achieve this goal by creating posts with a specific focus (e.g. a series of posts about a particular topic) and by setting myself a weekly target. At the moment, I post as and when I have time. This is usually a minimum of once per week, but I’d like to create a regular schedule and perhaps post on specific days during the week.
2. To encourage more engagement with my blog
Essentially, this involves receiving more comments on my posts. It’s great to receive feedback and I’m always appreciative of comments, so I aim to encourage more people to stop by and interact.
3. To improve the design of my blog and make some changes to my blog theme
One of the Blogging 201 tasks has encouraged me to think about the design of Cultural Life. This involves thinking about my ‘brand’ and how I can make my blog stand out in the crowd.
Do you keep a blogging schedule where you post on particular days per week, say, Mondays and Fridays?
Have you changed your blogging theme or kept the same one since you first started blogging?
And for bloggers who receive dozens of comments on each post, how do you encourage people to engage with your blog?
Cultural Life 
Interesting – I’ll be intrigued to hear how it goes. I do have a 5-day-a-week schedule, but I find it increasingly hard to stick to it. But I find doing the same type of things on certain days does mean a few people pop in specifically for those things. Always the same theme – partly because I’ve never found another with as good an indexing system and partly because, to be honest, I don’t really notice other people’s themes – just their content. (Unless it’s one of those themes on a black background which I find incredibly hard on my eyes.) And as for comments, I know that the reason I get comments is because I leave lots of comments on other people’s blogs. It’s not a ploy, honest – I’m just a chatty person! But it means over the months I’ve built up lots of mutual chit-chat pals around the blogosphere. Which I love… but which I will admit is deeply time-consuming too. That, and trying to put something in the post – a bit of humour, a jokingly outrageous opinion etc – that gives people something to leave a comment about.
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Wow, 5 days per week — that is a sign of a dedicated blogger! 🙂
I sometimes notice people’s themes if they are particularly well-designed or if the theme is too fussy and doesn’t really fit the blog content. I agree with you: a black background would make me unlikely to stick around long to read a blog.
I tend to frequent the same blogs and many of those blog authors visit my blog in turn. Perhaps I should start branching out and commenting on a few different blogs. It is nice to build up a community of blogging pals. Thanks for commenting. 🙂
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Since I’ve been blogging for over four years now, my blog design has definitely gone through multiple versions. I can’t say I’ll stick with the one I currently have for good, but I like the way it looks for now. In my first two years of blogging, I was definitely very gung-ho about posting at least once (if not several times) a week but then life happened and you know, it gets harder to think of new topics as time goes on. But in any case, good on you for having concrete blogging goals! I agree with FictionFan that getting comments is a matter of you also engaging with a good number of people and commenting on their blogs.. It’s definitely time-consuming but worth the investment because it’s the best way to meet people you connect with. I think writing about topics that appeal to some part of our humanity (way to sound philosophical about this, huh?) also draws people in. Hence, I often like to write about my personal experiences and what I’ve gained in the hopes that other people can relate to them too. 🙂
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I like your blog theme: it’s simple and there is plenty of white space, which I like because it feels uncluttered. Even though I’ve blogged since 2011, my theme has mostly stayed the same. I think it might be time for a change.
I guess I need to engage with more people! I have my blogging tribe of authors whose posts I regularly read and many of those bloggers (such as yourself 🙂 ) interact with my posts. It can take a while to find a blog that I really enjoy, so my blogging circle is fairly small.
When I think about it, some of my popular posts are posts where I’ve written about my experiences. Originally, I began blogging with the intention that my blog wouldn’t be personal, but my approach has changed over the years. I can certainly relate to many of your posts. 🙂
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