I was reading one of Nose Graze's excellent tips Right HERE and she gives advice on html, wordpress and answers questions on blogging in general and this post was about how to get more traffic and why posting reviews isn't always enough (depending on your goals and objectives though. Some may just want to post reviews and not care about traffic which is just fine).
Obviously the main point is to post reviews and stuff about books so you should definitely do more posts about them but if you want a lot of traffic or to build a really large community then posting reviews might not be enough and she suggested posting original features. In her case she has a lot of wordpress, coding and design knowledge so she does posts on those and answers question and they pull in a lot more traffic than her reviews which really got me to thinking.
I know I'm still new at this and that building a community takes time but I think she's right. At least for me and my blog. We all have different goals and aims and I want to do more with mine. I don't want to just spam giveawway's and would rather save them for very special occasions and I haven't quite reached the point of posting book deals yet mainly because I'm still working on finding ways to keep track of them all plus I don't want to just post books that I wouldn't want to read. From the first day I started this I wanted to be me and to offer more than just my reviews so I'm trying to think about what I have to offer the world and so far what I've come up with are:
1. I'm about to start learning html and I thought I might make some posts on my trials and tribulations while learning it. It would be fun to share and people who know it could have a good laugh at me while also helping me. People who don't know it could learn a few tips and tricks from me as I progress from novice to knowing what the heck I'm doing - at least once I get there (and I will get there, I refuse to let myself get discouraged or give up on this). I could also post on the little things I've already learned which admittedly isn't a lot but it's a heck of a lot more then I knew when I started.
2. Obviously I have my cats which are always fun. I don't have a video camera but could get one and eventually run a whole cat circus. People might enjoy watching my cats crack a whip as I jump through flaming hoops. Come on, all you people who've owned cats know they're the one's who are really in charge. Just yesterday I told my cats I was the boss and my bigger fat cat was on his back laughing while pounding his paw on the ground and Kitty Poo was bent over laughing waving his claws at me saying "stop, just stop, oh it hurts." So yeah, cats are a lot of fun. Not sure if I want videos of my house on the internet though.
3. I could totally go the personal route and share all kinds of stuff. Lord knows I've had my troubles but I'm still around after all these years so I have a lot in that area to share. My only fear is taking on more than I can handle. I would hate to be responsible for having to talk someone down off of a ledge or something. I have no problems sharing anything though so it's always a thought. Anything from depression to insomnia, being picked on, shyness, drug abuse and more. I've had a lot of years to build coping resources and while I'm not perfect or all the way there yet I can look back on my youth and say "I would have done this" instead of what I did back then.
Anyway, these are just some of my thoughts and the things swimming around in my head. I've spent the last two days trying to figure out how to make my sites nicer or how to improve my Facebook page then it hit me that without rich content all of the pretty color's in the world aren't going to make a difference so I'm switching my focus to that. Also trying to figure out how in the heck everyone stays on top of cover reveals and new releases. I've been manually going to authors FB pages but that eats up so much time. Bloglovin is really helping in that department and oh yeah I found this site here: http://www.ereaderiq.com/ where you can keep track of kindle books and authors and have it alert you to price changes and stuff which will be an immense help in the future. Still adding all of the one's I like.
What do you'll think? I like to run things across you'll first because A. You'll have alot of book blogging experience and B. I trust you'll
I was thinking I might do one of these once or twice a week - something like that.
I think I'm going to try running a survey once I've figured out 4 or 5 things that I would love to blog about. That would also be a good way to get viewers to interact with me. I've been having a heck of a time getting people to comment. Obviously they don't find me near as amusing as I do :P