Best Blogging Tip

For Book Blogger Appreciation Week, My Friend Amy is asking:

What is one thing you wish you knew about blogging when you started or what advice would you give a newbie blogger?

What is your best blogging tip?


Well, I started my regular blog well before I started my book and cooking blogs. I learned a lot by trial and error! One thing that I learned is that to get readers and commenters, you need to be a commenter. This is something that can take a great deal of time and with it comes a great sense of obligation. It finally became too much for me. I didn't have time to visit and comment on every single person who came to my blog. I didn't have enough time to add all those people to my google reader. So, I had to come to the conclusion that I wasn't required to do all that. I eliminated my blogroll on my regular blog and I downsized my google reader. It was very liberating. I lost some readers, but the ones I follow are the ones I really connect with.

It's a bit different with the book blog. I want comments and recommendations. I love ARCs! But, I have also noticed that book bloggers don't necessarily comment on each review or each post, even though they may read it. Like anything else, you have to feel a connection with the book being reviewed. This was also very liberating.

So, my great blogging tip is this: don't feel obligated. If someone new stops by and comments, visit their blog. Comment if you can. If you truly like it or like their reviews, go back. If you don't connect or like the reviews, don't go back. It's as simple as that. You will find other reviewers you like and connect with. You won't, however, connect with every book blogger you meet, and that's ok too.

Head on over to My Friend Amy to see what other blogging tips people are sharing.

Comments

  1. I so agree with this advice! Blogging is a lot of work. Besides my reading blog, I also have a craft one and a poetry one. Some weeks are better than others as far as commenting but I try to at least visit a few other blogs on each of them.

    If it gets to be a hassle, I just won't do it but would miss it, I think.

    Anyway, thanks for visiting mine and commenting!

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  2. Oh wow! This is the advice that I need because I have the biggest guilt complex because it's impossible for me to visit everybody who comments on my blog. I know it takes comments to get comments, but sometimes it gets very overwhelming. Thanks!

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  3. well said! I love comments left on my blog, but I'd hate for people to feel obligated! and just because I left a comment on your blog in no way obligates you to even come visit mine, though I love it when people do. I often wish I had a way to contact people who left comments besides commenting on their blogs or replying to comments on my blog within the same comments section because--well, I seldom go back to check on replies to comments I've made, so I figure others are mostly the same way. And at the moment, blogger doesn't offer an easy way to do threaded comments.

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  4. You have list the one problem every blogger will face.

    I really, really agree with you. There are so many and only so many hours a day you can spend reading and commenting on other blogs.

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  5. I just recently eliminated my blogroll, too, but for a different reason. I kept getting emails from brand new bloggers asking for a "link exchange." Um, no. My blogroll was for the blogs I loved and visited a lot and who visited me regularly. I found it almost offensive that I had done all the work it took to interest people enough that they put me in their blogroll of their own free will, and then strangers would just up and ask me to put them in theirs. I didn't know how to answer these emails, so I just deleted the blogroll. No emails like that since then!

    The rest of what you say is also something I went through. For a while I was putting every book blog I ever ran across into my google reader!

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  6. I completely agree with you. Blogging is of trials & errors which is time consuming.

    I have also experienced that readers comment in large numbers in my Creative Writing blog, whereas they hesitate to comment in my Writing/Book Review blog, where the readership is more.

    Thank you for sharing these thoughts.

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