As some of you may have read from my About Me page, I started this blog not too long ago as a hobby that I’m gonna try sticking to! I had a blog that I had maintained (and do plan to continue posting on) that documented my volunteer abroad trip to Merida, Mexico! If you guys are interested, I linked it above, and maybe in time I’ll write about the experience of volunteering abroad here 🙂
As I’m getting myself used to working with WordPress (I’m gonna abbreviate it as WP to keep this post hopefully shorter) and visiting other blogs and learning things along the way, I found some helpful tips that I wanted to share. Maybe some of you (or most of you wahhh) already know these tips since y’all are more experienced and expert bloggers than I am at WP haha 😛
- Share your posts and link back to them.
A lot of WP users tend to have other social media accounts and I notice they have their accounts linked at the side of their pages. You can link a lot of your accounts actually… I link my Instagram and Pinterest accounts, while other WP users may have dedicated Facebook pages for their blog posts. I’m still figuring out what works and what doesn’t, but for the most part, I always share on my personal FB page, Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr. I tried with Instagram, but meh I don’t think I’m gonna get a very good following since it’s mostly my personal pics so I don’t want to saturate my account with pics from my blog since it’s not what my friends are looking for. I know for a fact some WP users have dedicated IGs that have good followings, so definitely find out what works for your personal blog! 🙂 - Add menus to your page.
UGH. I was trying to figure out for over a month how to get this feature without paying for a customized theme. I researched and researched until I found WP’s page with step-by-step instructions on how to get your menus. Why are menus useful? They make it easier for readers to pick and choose what they want to see in your blog instead of endlessly scrolling to the post they’re looking for! I attached an image of my dashboard with what I organized for my menus. **Depending on whether you choose Category or Tag for each of your menus, for your posts, you will need to include the name of the category/tag in their designated sections to have them show up in those pages. For example, my recipes all have “Food” in their categories section so they show up on the Food page.**
Maybe this is a question that’ll come up as you’re reading this post: What’s the difference between the “Page” and the “Category”? The “Page” is basically static and I just used it as my About Me page. As for the Category page, it keeps getting updated with every post that has the Category name (for example, all my recipes have Food in the Categories section, so they will continuously get added to that Food page!)
This is just a screenshot of my dashboard with some of my menus that I already created. Yours will look different when you’re first creating the menus but eventually it’ll look similar to this too! - Visit other blogs, comment, and like posts! BE ACTIVE!!!
I’m always super grateful when someone stops by my blog to like or comment on my posts, so I always try to return the favor by visiting their blog and checking out their posts as well! Most of the time, I’m pleasantly surprised by their eloquent posts and I end up following them so I can see their future posts 🙂 Additionally, when I was starting out, I had only been posting a couple times a month (because Google research told me to -.-) but after asking other bloggers, I learned that posting a few times a week is definitely the better way to go. I’m still experimenting with the times of day, but I’m pretty much posting in the evenings in Eastern Time since I’m in NYC! Don’t y’all wonder sometimes about the statistics of WP users? I wonder where most of us bloggers are located around the globe! - Add share buttons and the like button to your main blog page.
Finally got this up on the main page of my blog for all of my posts!! Looks so much better and less sterile and boring with just my words and pics haha. I love the little icons of y’all liking my posts! Thank you so much again!! This also seems so intuitive, but it took me until January to figure this out… *facepalm* I was visiting other people’s blogs and noticing how some themes are designed for photography-based blogs, while others like mine have a mix of posts with pictures… And then I came across one or two blogs with the share buttons and the like button on the home page under each post! I was thinking to myself, where have I been and why does my blog not have this? The only options for my readers to share were to click on the link to the post itself, and then share and like the post because the buttons were available to them. I found this gem when I was searching up how to add these buttons (you’re welcome, WP noobs who were lost little lambs like me and don’t know the first thing about how to work the dashboard or what to look up haha)
Am I missing any tips? I thought that these were the most useful from what I’ve gathered over these past few months, but I know my blog can definitely use some pointers!! I’m all ears to your suggestions and what you guys do to generate traffic and interest to your blog 🙂 I’m so sorry this ended up being a suuuuper long post, but I hope it was helpful for at least some of you guys 🙂
A Healthy Blueprint 