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Jessica Konopa of Hill Holliday started a food blog, The Hungry Mouse, with the intention of trading recipes with her friends. Her blog transformed unexpectedly to having between 60,000 and 70,000 viewers every month and featured in Bon Appetit and Saveur magazines.
Although Konopa has no official coding, designing, or SEO training, she has taken the blogging world by storm and offered up a few tips to help others start up their own blog based on her own experiences:
1. Blogging is a DIY labor of love. Read everything that you can on blogging—and on your niche. And when in doubt, look it up. When I ask him for advice, my coder friend usually says, “Google it. Someone’s already figured out how to do that.” You know what? He’s almost always right.
2. You gotta have the content. You don’t start blogging to get rich. Trust me. You do it because you have something to say. And, it has to be interesting. As Copyblogger’s Sonya Simone put it, “The first rule of Copyblogger is you do not publish content that sucks.”
3. Less is more. It’s cliché, but it’s true. Resist the urge to stuff your sidebar full of junk that’s not relevant to your readers.
4. Learn to love Twitter. If you’re blogging, you’ve just joined a big community of like-minded folks all connected by 1s and 0s. Creating quality content aside, being a blogger is also about reacting in real time as things happen in your little corner of the interwebs.
5. Be genuine. Your readers will know when you’re not. The internet has a pretty good built-in BS detector. The other day, Adii, co-founder of WooThemes, tweeted, “You can’t buy loyalty and awesomeness.” He’s dead on with that.
6. Have a point of view. It doesn’t necessarily have to be unique, but you should be able to get behind it 110%. Stay focused.
7. Your blog is about you. But it’s also about your readers. If your audience is interested in what you’re saying, your blog will naturally evolve into one big two-way conversation.
8. Give stuff away. Giveaways are fun and engaging. People like treats and a chance to win something just for joining a conversation.
9. Make friends. A lot of them. But you have to be for real. Five-thousand fans on Facebook don’t matter much if you don’t know who any of them are.
10. People click the flat belly ads. No really, they do. At least they do on my blog. Pay attention to which ads get clicked and get rid of the ones that aren’t working. Apply the same principle to your content.
