Millions of people blog now. Things are always changing, and most enjoy tips to keep us up to date dealing with new developments. But there is more to blogging than technical matters. I’ve been blogging on WordPress for thirteen years. Below, I’ve listed some quick tips I’ve learned over the years.
Photographs
Tip One: Resize your photos and choose a lower resolution. They load faster and take up less space. I use Classic Lightroom to resize mine as I load them. The setting I use is to limit the size to 400K. Cropping also reduces the size. This photo is 394K. An average blog image should be 1200 x 800 pixels. This one is square. You can change the aspect ratio to 3:2 (average for a blog) by clicking on the picture and altering it in WP. This one is 1:1. You can also change the resolution. I kept this one at large because it gets pixelated at medium.
Tip Two: Label all your photos, including the description section, so that you can locate them later. Labels like “IMG 296340689” hinder your efforts. I use the form in Lightroom to label my pictures as well. I still have trouble finding them in WP. 🙂 Usually, the name of the post is part of the label as well as what is in the picture. Add an Alternative Text to help those who have visual challenges by clicking the photograph as well.
Blog Content
Several of these tips work for marketing as well as content.
Tip Three: Focus your efforts on a few related topics. Hosting challenges helped me organize my blogging. Story Chat is now in its 4th year. Wednesday Quotes also ran for four years and is now co-hosted by Sadje Keep It Alive and Kim Possible Fresh Cup of Coffee. Cee Neuner and I started Photographing Public Art (PPAC), and Natalie the Explorer now hosts PPAC.
Let’s Chat About Blogging will be a link-up post rather than a challenge on a regular basis. Dr. Tanya from Salted Caramel ran a Blogging Insights Challenge for several years. Sadje now integrates blogging questions as her Sunday Posers. When possible I will double dip with Sadje. Unlike Hugh’s Views and News blog offers tips and in-depth how-tos, this will be more conversational, with occasional quick tips thrown in. I will link to Hugh’s posts for specifics.
Tip Four: Reward yourself until your blog takes off with your blogging credentials – awards given by others. These are like chain letters and take a lot of time, but they build relationships and help the cyber world get to know you. Sadje wrote about Listicles, as a way to get started. Listicles are your blog posts in which you answer lists of questions posted by other bloggers.
Tip Five: Feature other bloggers on your site. I ran a Featured Blogger post for a while. This takes a lot of time browsing sites, and commenting. In some cases, but not always, this establishes long-term relationships. Interviewing people who write the same kind of blogs you do, is fun, too. I recommend looking for five new sites a day to look at, starting with your most recent followers. Another place to look for new blogs is to visit blogs your friends like.
Tip Six: Participate in Photo and Writing Challenges. If you Google Photo Challenges, you find contests, most of which cost money to enter. The photo challenges I entered were started by other bloggers. You honor the person hosting the challenge, and you meet new people who can help you grow. Share your unique perspective through your narrative. Cee Neuner kept a list of all the blogging challenges. This was my most successful way to start making friends in the blogging world.
Tip Seven: Write book and movie and reviews (link to my how-to post). Feature a page highlighting YOUR recommendations for reading. You have to be a voracious reader in order to write – even poorly. If you write well, people will wonder what you read and watch and why. Don’t forget to copy and post your review on Amazon and other big sites. Then, ask your friends and readers to like your reviews on those public venues. Or don’t and be underwhelmed at the results, like me.
Tip Eight: Write about yourself, but do it sparingly. Readers and publishers want to see your unique perspective and what you are doing. People frequently ask me what my days look like. How do you work, raise a family, eat and do normal routine stuff, and still have time to write? I write Over a Cuppa and link to Natalie’s Weekend Coffee Share, and there are several others who also do a weekly Coffee Share-type post.
Marketing
Tip Nine: Market your blog in each post. Even WordPress. com blogs may now be used to earn an income. Publishers and advertisers look for excellent, sometimes specific work and lots of interaction, not necessarily lots of followers. WP says it sends emails to all your followers. I don’t know if they do this or not. Do you get an email from me?
“Yes, WordPress emails everyone, but only those who have their settings set to receive notifications of new posts via email will get the email. Many users turn that setting off to avoid their email boxes being flooded with emails from WordPress, and use the WordPress Reader instead.”
Hugh W. Roberts How Easy Is it to Follow Your Blog, How to Add a Subscribe Button to All Your Word Press Posts
For in-depth tips every month, you should follow Hugh and check out his About Page, which he updates every month with his categories of posts, including tips. He also answers specific questions when he can or works hard to find the answers.
WP also captures your readers’ email addresses and blog sites when they comment. This enables you to contact them to collaborate or use their services.
Organization
Tip Ten: Clean out your blog. Take out articles that did not do well or rewrite them to post them later. Keep your categories organized. Click here to read a complete WP article on editing categories.
If you have tips about blogging or want to link one of your posts about blogging, link your post below or post the a link in the comment section .
Now It’s Your Turn
Check Out our Story Chat Trailer
Order the Popular Short Story Anthology
To be really cool, get your paperback copy of Story Chat Volume II on Amazon. Read Diana’s Tips on POV. It’s great! If this post doesn’t give you enough ideas, Hugh Robert’s tips chapter about how to write an unforgettable story might stir your muse into action.
Upcoming and Ongoing at Always Write
- January 21 – Story Chat Digest #2 Micro-Fiction Challenge “Winter Storms”
- January 28 – Story Chat Digest #3 Poetry Day
- February 4 – Story Chat Digest #4 “All About Sophia” by Nigel Byng
- February 7 – Story Chat Digest #2: Summary January Poetry Day
- Embracing Life Over a Cuppa in a Dog Park
- Embrace These Seven Secrets of Journaling to Refuel Your Writing and Blogposts in 2025
Like this post? Please share. 🙂
Terri brought up the commenting issue that seems to be affecting so many of us. She wisely suggested that we should all report it. I had problems doing that. If it doesn’t work, it’s best to get help from a real person, but you need to have a paid subscription to have this ability.
- From Any WordPress.com Site:
- Click the three dots next to the “Follow” button at the bottom of the screen
- Select “Report this content”
- Choose “Technological Harm”
- Then “Other technical issues”
When reporting, it’s helpful to include:
- Which sites you’re having trouble commenting on
- Whether you’re logged in when attempting to comment
- What error message (if any) you’re seeing
- When the problem started
This will help the WordPress.com team investigate and resolve any potential system-wide commenting issues.”
Marsha Ingrao Always Write 
64 responses to “Let’s Chat About Blogging: Ten Quick Blogging Tips”
These are good tips, Marsha. I also use Lightroom to resize the photos. I set the to 800px for the longest edge.
If this comment is duplicated, it’s WP’s fault, not mine.
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This wasn’t duplicated, but WP definitely has a problem with comments. 🙂
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Thanks Marsha.
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Thank you! Have a great week! 🙂
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Thanks for the invitation. I checked it out. My calendar is full at the moment, but I will try to get back to you in the late spring.
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Wonderful! Whenever you’re ready or if you have questions please email me at contactdaal@gmail.com
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ok
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These are all fantastic. Tips .I tend to be very disorganized unless it come to planning for a story. But I do organize need to feature more bloggers this year, as I enjoy sharing new writers with my readers. There are so many talented writers our there.
I will definitely try to include of these tips for 2025.
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I noticed that you are in a new book coming out on March 8th. Congratulations. There are several authors featured with you in that anthology. It looks like a great one.
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Oh, thank you. Yeah, I haven’t posted on it as yet, but several familiar faces were invited by Michelle Navajas to contribute to the anthology. I am always supportive of anything that is directed toward helping the victims of domestic violence, and I was happy to do my small part.
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I am enjoying getting to know you better, Nigel. I don’t know how I missed you all these years. 🙂
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And I you, Marsha. Don’t worry, I have only been around for a few years on WP. I am an unknown entity, which is good. 😉
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You are getting around, though! You are a real go-getter!
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Lol.. thank you. That’s a first for me. But I do tend to follow the wind. Wherever my soul floats and settles, I am contented to sup a while. But I can be very intense when engaged in a process.
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Yes, that is so true!
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I’m glad it’s not just me having commenting issues on some of the blogs I’ve been reading and commenting on for years. I have found I can comment in the Reader if it won’t work on the post. So frustrating.
I resize all my photos to a horizontal pixel size of 650. I think they work at that size quite well.
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They seem to be perfect. Your pictures are always crystal clear. The commenting issue is going to chase some people to another provider if WP doesn’t fix it soon. I can comment through my comment box on my blog, but I can’t through other people’s blog posts some of the time. Some of the newsletters people send allow me to comment, and some don’t, so that’s annoying, too.
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I’m pleased to hear the photos look okay at that low pixel level. It certainly saves a lot of space.
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Great tips. I’m a rea fan of blogging and am always sad when people quit because it doesn’t work. I think if they followed your easy tips, they’d find more success.
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Many of us have been blogging for a number of years, and we don’t get tired of it – and we are still meeting new people. I think part of the reason people quit is that it takes a while to get invested, to find your niche, and to allocate your time so that it doesn’t interfere with real life. Once they get those things figured out, some people discover that they still don’t like it much.
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Thanks for the mention, Marsha. These are all excellent tips for beginners and those who have blogged for years.
If, like me, you don’t want to publish posts about what’s going on in your life, I suggest that you put something on your ‘About’ page. This brings me nicely to mention that every blogger should have an ‘About’ page and ensure it is regularly updated. I am still shocked by how many bloggers do not introduce themselves on an ‘About’ page or update it regularly. A few days ago, I came across an author’s blog whose about page had not been updated since 2017!
Ensure you engage with other bloggers and never leave lazy comments like ‘Nice post’ or ‘ This was well written.’ Those types of comments are as bad as spam. When left everywhere, other bloggers quickly realise that the person leaving those comments probably hasn’t bothered reading the posts.
One last tip from me: Don’t feel obliged to follow every blogger who follows you. Just follow those who publish content that interests you. Otherwise, it won’t be long before you follow too many blogs and feel overwhelmed by them. This leads to what’s known as Blog burnout.
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These are great tips, Hugh. Your tips are so timely, and I read, respond to, and do what you talk about most of the time. I want to turn this into a regular link post, so as the renown expert in our community, I’m sure I’ll always have a link to one or more of your posts depending on the subject.
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Here’s a post I wrote today, and I plan to make blogging my topic for A to Z blogging challenge in April
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My comment took – Yay! I’m sure there will be lots of ideas that come from that challenge.
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Thank you so much Marsha. I’m actually taking your advice to write about blogging. Thanks for the suggestion
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I saw that! That’s great, we can collaborate, if you like.
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Sure. 👍🏼
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Sounds good. We can chat later by email. 🙂
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Cool.
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Hi Marsha, great suggestions. I do a few of these already and appreciate what you have to say. Resizing, and labeling photos, (always a good idea). Hugh is my ‘go to’ guy for WP how-to articles. I shared my thoughts about blogging in this post a while back. https://aslifeevolves.com/2023/11/12/lets-talk-about-blogging/
P.S. thanks for the encouragement to join photo challenges. I will be joining CFFC through Dan’s blog on Sunday.
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I’m so glad. I’m thrilled that he took it over. My last comment on your post didn’t go through, but my comment levels have dropped immensely. They’re working on it.
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Great tips Marsha.
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Thanks, Leanne.
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All great tips! I usually put a description of the photo as the title of the photo, that way, if the challenge calls for “mountains,” I can just type “mountain” into the search bar in my archive to find all the photos of mountains. Of course, I’ve only discovered it in recent years and had been needing to go back and label all the photos from the prior decade of blogging.
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That’s my problem, too. There are way too many pictures to label. I found it easier to do in Lightroom because the program can sort by text as well as by attributes. If I can’t find the picture I want in my blog, I add it and have more than one copy. I definitely need an employee to sort them all out from years past.
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Haha, don’t we all need someone to manage our blog for us. 😄
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Blog and house, LOL.
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Wow, there’s some really good information here, Marsha. Thanks! I think a problem for me is consistency. I might blog every day for a couple of weeks and then I miss a day and then two and before you know it, I lose the momentum that I built and it’s easy to do something else other than blog. And then guilt: I don’t feel that it’s fair to expect anyone to read/comment on my blog if I’m not reading/commenting on theirs. That’s the whole point of community. But if I run short on time I can’t do that which I think makes me want to pull back from posting anything.
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I get that, Michael. I was so erratic at first. Sometimes I drove people nuts with all my posts, then, the same thing happens. One of the main reasons I host challenges is to be consistent with my visits. When I post on other people’s challenge, I sometimes take the time to read several posts, but I don’t get to all of them, but as a host, I do get to everyone – eventually.
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Hi Marsha, I love this post! So many fab ideas, of which I’ve employed many over the years. I can’t use the inlinkz without creating an account and Facebook choice says the app is removed. We talked about this on the phone today about the fun of meeting other bloggers in person when possible! I will leave my link here.
https://secondwindleisure.com/2017/11/17/creativity-flows-when-bloggers-meet-up/
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I love your post. You capture the perfect flavor of “Let’s Chat about Blogging.”
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Hi, Marsha – Thank you for the great tips. Yes, I get an email everytime you publish a post. I find that helpful for the blogs that I like to follow. ❤
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Thank you for that information, Donna, and more than that, thanks for subscribing. 🙂 xxxxx I’m glad the tips were helpful. I’m sure you have tons of tips because you do such a great job with all your posts. I got one great tip from you that I have incorporated into my blogging practice. You did a post that I remember several years ago where you summarized people comments. I thought that was so impressive, that became a core of Story Chat and some of my other challenges as well.
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These are great tips, Marsha. I would love to participate in challenges, but with my writing and reading/commenting on blogs, there is no extra time. I try to post once a week just to keep one foot in the game. I especially like the idea of labeling photos – and resizing. Thanks!
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I’m glad. Relabeling is a huge task. It’s one of those things you do while you’re watching a movie you don’t like very much or a boring poker game – my husband sleeps through poker games on the TV, but if I want to wake him up, I turn them off and he wakes up almost instantly. It’s so weird because he turns the volume off completely.
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So I can’t comment on your blog, but I think I can through the bell menu. 🤦🏼♀️
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This is a bummer, Colleen. A lot of people are having that problem with WP. I haven’t had any other people having a problem with my blog yet, but it is a puzzle. I think both Hugh and Terri have questions in to the Happiness Engineers. So when they get an answer I’ll definitely tie into it. Someone suggested that it might be tied to our themes. As you know I updated themes last year, but I need to check and see if it still supported. I love your new look, BTW.
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Thanks, Marsha. I’m very frustrated! I’m thinking of moving Sunflower Tanka to Substack. This mess with WP has been going on for years. I will still have my author blog colleenchesebro.org on WP. It’s all so frustrating! I tried to use the theme you’re on, and I couldn’t get it set up to work. How frustrating!
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It is so frustrating. I hope that my theme isn’t causing the problems. Enough people have complained about not being able to make comments that they have it prioritized. Is substack easier to comment on? Maybe I should do a blogging post about it. I don’t know much about it.
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Great tips, Marsha. I really like the one about labeling images. I haven’t done that, and I’ve created a little nightmare for myself. My challenge is finding time to keep up with my busy blog. Having ready access to my images would be great. I spend a lot of time searching!
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I know. Wouldn’t it be great if we could afford to hire someone to come in and just catch them all up to speed with names we could find?
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I would love to have “staff” lol.
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Me too. I tried training a couple of high school kids years ago. They learned a lot, but it was more work for me than it was helpful to me.
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I turn off email notifications so that I don’t get them. It’s up to the person to subscribe to that. I choose to be notified in the app/web browser. I have too much email already.😵💫
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I can identify with that! 🙂
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These are excellent tips, Carla. I started blogging in 2014 and have learned a lot over the years. And WP keeps changing, so it’s a race to keep up. 🙂
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Lol! Sorry, Marsha. I knew it was you. 🙂
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No worries!
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😁
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I agree!
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Great tips, Marsha! I’ve blogged for a number of years on two different (still active) blogs but am re-orienting myself into blogging for the love of blogging with my current site and am fully enjoying getting to know new-to-me-bloggers. Thanks for the links for further exploration! I’m looking forward to this new series of yours 🙂 Have a great day!
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I’m so glad. Feel free to leave a link with your own tips.
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