I’m starting the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge over at the Sits Girls tomorrow (click the coloured bit for the link).  I’ve had a bit of a go at it before, and the book that it’s based on is superb.

But some of our best learning always comes from experience and this blog’s almost a year old so I guess it’s a good time to put a few tips down for people who’ve started recently.

I’ve done a couple of similar things before, but I’m learning all the time.  And, on a similar note, I don’t claim to be perfect at keeping to any of these tips myself.

– Create an ‘About Me’ page that tells us something about you.  I love to know who I’m reading about.  I think that a good ‘About Me’ page gives us a bit of background, an introduction to the main characters and a few hints of what we can expect as readers.

– Make it as easy as possible to comment. Both Blogger and wordpress.com allow the blogger to set their commenting options. Assuming that comments are important to you, set it so that anyone can comment. Spam filters reject most of the dodgy stuff, or you can manually approve comments once they’re made if you want to be totally sure that nothing gets through.

– Get involved across different groups sites and communities, including with people outside your normal niche. There are lots of lovely prompt sites and linkups out there, and once you’ve written your post there’s usually a linky to share it on and bring some new readers to your blog. I also love having twitter and pinterest as additional strands for my blogging.

– Never go anywhere without something to write on and something to take photos with. Even if that’s the back of a couple of receipts and the phone on your camera. If your memory’s anything like mine, you’ll need to write things down as they come to you rather than waiting till you’re home.

– Don’t keep a blog if you don’t enjoy doing it, and don’t write any pieces that don’t interest you. One of my greatest surprises this year has been the whole theme of monetising, PR relationships and being given samples for review. I’ve really enjoyed the times that I’ve worked with brands this year, but I couldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it.

These tips were written for this week’s Listography over at Kate Takes 5; the theme was “Top 5 Tips for Bloggers”. Click on Kate’s link below to find the other contributions.