that, if I adhered to, I would have more readers.

Maureen has 7 habits of effective blogging.



I know nothing about being a super influential blogger but I HAVE picked up a few things in two years of doing this. If I adhered to my own seven items I would have far more readers ...

Here are mine

1. Narrow your focus. When I first started blogging I intended to stick with Catholicism and the documenting of my conversion. My traffic died when I started focusing on my severe weather interest. I refocused and have kept my blog more on topic. My focus is: Catholicism - within that; marriage, family, homeschooling, conversion, Early Church Fathers.

2. Post comments on and link to other blogs. Also, use the trackback feature (mine is broken right now and it hurts to have such an important feature disabled) ... This personal interaction lets people know that you are interested in their blog and not just interested in traffic from their blog.

3. Post frequently and consistently -- preferably at least daily. If your brain is suffering from a lack of creativity or just plain fatigue, collect some items of interest on other blogs and link them.

4. Increase your incoming links. Use Technorati and TTLB Ecosystem. Join relevant blog rings and groups (see column to the right under the TTLB Ecosystem). This ensures blog search engines place you high on search items relevant to your blog. Many of my hits come from Yahoo and Google search results.

5. Invest the time in setting up an aggregator (Bloglines is a good online one and I use RSS Bandit). This allows you to monitor scores, if not hundreds of related blogs without actually having to navigate manually to all of them. Bottom line. Keep up with this technology. It gives you a leg up on finding stories and items unique to your niche. FWIW I use Google Reader now.

6. Invest the time in maintaining a blogroll (Bloglines is useful here as well). Link to blogs you read regularly and especially to friends you pick up in blogland that link to you. See also my post on setting up a "fresh blogroll"

7. Include some occasional local flare and outside interests. Note the word occasional. This allows people to know more about who you are but do not allow this to detract from item #1 (FOCUS) ... My list of local churches to visit drives an amazing amount of traffic through my blog.