Almost six months have past since I published the first post on Blogsessive and during these six months this blog has passed through a series of events and changes that made me rethink my strategies.

As you’ve probably seen by now, whenever I’m sharing blogging tips with you, I always try to explain how they work through my own perspective. There are two reasons behind this approach:

  • First of all, it stands as proof that those blogging tips work;
  • Second, it provides information on how the tips where applied and also effect of their usage.

So, after six months of “competing” in a pretty crowded niche I’ve come to realize that Blogsessive has grown in a natural way, with about 160 subscribers, loyal readers and commentators, friends, social media profiles, on the point of entering Alexa’s top 100.000 and many more encouraging statistics.

Blogging tips that worked for me

What have I learned from these six months of Blogsessive experience? Read on as I’m going to share it with you.

Make use of your previous experiences.

At first, I had only my experience in working in the online industry for a long period of time. This experience served me well by knowing a lot about how websites and blogs should be structured and how they should look like. This has brought many visitors on Blogsessive, partially because of the design.
My personal interests in writing and my musical background helped me present every piece of information in a reader friendly way. The effects? Growing a base of loyal readers and encouraging personal interaction.

Don’t take tips for granted. Pass them through your own filter.

As most of you, I’ve read maybe thousands of post on blogging and blogging tips. Some where new, others brought nothing new to the table. Some where helpful, others where not. The hardest part is to choose the right ones, and that can only be achieved by applying them to your blog and experimenting with twist and changes until they show the best results.

For example, one of the tips I’ve encountered most was the famous “comment on blogs in your niche”. Some people spend hours every day commenting on blog posts and in the end, it still doesn’t prove efficient. Why? Because every blog you comment on has a different community, built around the blogger’s personality. Some readers will interact with you and follow the links you post and your profile link, others won’t. Pick the one that provide the best reaction to your comment and stick with them. You’ll win a lot of time and still get good results for your commenting actions.

Experiment with new approaches or old ones with a personal twist.

In any given niche, most things have been said and done already, but bloggers still find ways to become unique and successful. How? They simple add new, personal twists to their articles. Let’s take those “link round-up” posts as an example.

You’ve seen them on every blog, organized in weekly or monthly series. Some bloggers simple publish a simple list of linked titles; others go beyond, by adding their own views on the topics those posts approach. Some examples of adding a personal twist to these posts are my “Best Blogging Tips from the World’s Top Bloggers” posts that you can read here and here, or Alina’s Monday Reading Roundup posts on WordsOfABrokenMirror.com.

Build strong relationships with other bloggers and your community.

Although this does not need an actual explanation, I’ll give you at least two reasons why you should do so.

As I’ve already told you, the past two weeks have been totally crazy, keeping me away from my regular publishing flow and to be true, they caught my quote off-guard. This is where people like Hendry Lee and Eric Brantner, both readers of Blogsessive, came and helped with their wonderful guest posts.

With Alina’s help (and not only) those posts even got some great promotion and managed to attract over 5000 visits in a period of time when I couldn’t possibly be publishing anything.

So, judge for yourself how priceless blogging relationships are!

Do not ignore the social media.

Yes, everyone says so and I’ll say it again. Make use of social media. Make contacts, share opinions, share links, help others promote content and you’ll get the same in return, but be careful. Social media can eat up a lot of your time, so much that you can neglect your blogging responsibilities. Find the right services for your, the ones that provide the best results.

For me, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Digg and FriendFeed work best. So, they are the ones getting more of my attention. I use other services only occasionally or simply to help out friends. Experiment with different services, according to your goals and find out which one works best. If you’re looking for better conversion, try exclusive, niche social websites like Sphinn, for example. Try them out.

Learn from your blog’s statistics.

Even if some will jump and call you a stats-wh*re, do what you need to do. Some people write on blogs simply as a way to share their daily experiences and expect nothing in return. The ones that try to make a living out of blogging or want to make their blog a promotional tool for additional services are pretty interested in their stats.

I know that some will not agree with my statement but I still believe it’s true. Bikers have a saying about motorcycle crashes: “There are two types of riders: those who crashed and those who won’t admit it.” Same goes for statistics. Keeping a close eye on stats, but not letting it take over too much time out of your blogging activity, will help you better understand the effects of you actions, of your writing and SEO efforts. Analyze your analytics. You’ll be learning a lot about your blog from those stats.

Conclusions

Everything you do or try must be first passed through your personal filter. There are not 100% guaranteed truths, only realistic tips that you can build on.
From your own experience, what tips worked best for you and you blog(s) and what personal twist did you gave them?