My 7 Blogging Habits

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Hello guys, gals, co-bitlanders and everyone! I know you are doing great and I hope that is true right at this moment. In the past, I had shared these two topics on how to go about working on bitLanders. The first one was bitLanders 101 : How to Start Using bitLanders and the second one was How to Start Earning with bitLanders? .

Today, I am going to share yet another topic which most of the users here have been asking me as well. But before that, please do accept my apologies if I am not able to reply to each and every inquiry or message on the inbox you have sent me because I don’t really check it every now and then so I might as well share my answer to everyone through a blog. I believe it is definitely better this way as old and new ones who’ll be asking me about this will just be referred over to this article. I do hope you understand.

Now, let’s move forward. This blog is about how I write my blogs since I have been blogging here in bitLanders for the past two years, I guess it is just right time for me to share how I am able to receive 3-5 stars of ratings with all these blog articles that I have been writing. Please also note that I am not a professional writer. I am just a normal person who wants to share my experiences specially in traveling because my husband and I loves to go to new places, I don’t want these experiences to just pass. I at least want to keep a documentation on the specific province, location or even events on that area so when time comes that we both are not able to travel anymore, at least we have something to look back to and that will be through blogs. It just also happen that bitLanders is giving revenues for these blogs. That is a divine plus point to my virtual diary.

So, since most of you are asking me how to write, what are the tips that I can share to make your blogs better and to receive higher rates, let me share to you some key points that I usually or shall I say most of the time apply to my blog posts.


1. I WRITE THE ENTIRE BLOG BEFORE TITLE

First tip is that I write first before I add a title. I need to finish writing the entire blog before I could end up with a title. This happens most of the time, although there are also moments where I come up with a title before I could write the entire story. There were instances where I got the title and I started writing then I ended up splitting that blog to two because the content didn’t really reflect the meaning of the title.

So, I have to write first and the title comes later after the story had been finalized. Then, I can come up with the title.


2. I MAKE A GOOD LENGTHY TITLE

I normally give my blogs a bit lengthy titles but enough that it catches the readers’ attention. I don’t put a one word title, I like it to be a combination of words, questions, phrases. I don’t make it too long that it becomes a paragraph. Sometimes, I get to add the Wh-questions for these blogs specially if the topic is about reasons or it comes with lists of things.

Let me share some examples:

All of those blogs comes with a list and so I give them a title that has a WH question. It makes the readers curious on what could be the reason why the writer love Anda Beach, something like that.


3. I WRITE MORE THAN A THOUSAND WORDS

Two years ago, my first ever blog submitted for review, believe me or not was composed of only 176 words or 901 characters. It was super short right? But believe me, I got five stars! I guess I was the first one to try the content submission actually and glad I got good results. I always thought that this length is enough, in fact for the next blogs after the first, I still write with almost the same number of words but then it came to a point where in the bitLanders review team would consider that a short blog content so I have to adopt to the change and started writing longer blogs.

These days, I don’t submit blogs which don’t contain at least a thousand words. Yes that sounds very tedious and I understand that it takes a lot of work and a lot of typing but you might noticed the team will say that it is if it is lower than that, it will be considered short.

I don’t know if this applies to all but that is in my case. I also have not bumped into any specific short blog which received five stars. That is also the reason why I normally write blogs with points so I can expand my topic.


4. I ADD EXTERNAL OR INTERNAL LINKS

Normally, I add these after I am done with writing the entire blog. This is the part which I hate the most because it takes lots of effort in looking for links for this keyword. Note that I don’t just add random links to any parts of the blog but I select the keywords.

Keywords by the way are those which highlights the blog. Let’s say I am writing about Boracay, then I will be adding external or internal links which connects to the topic. Related Blogs, videos or Wikipedia information is enough for me. I will be adding these links in words which states Boracay, beaches, Philippines and such.

External links by the way are those which are coming from sites apart from bitLanders while internal links are which can be found inside bitLanders, it can be a video link, another blog link or gallery. I also add links to the bitLanders shop, charity, and leaderboard and etch as long as it is related to the topic.

As I had mentioned earlier, adding links is a bit tedious for me so sometimes, I get to add only a few of these.


5. I EMPHASIZE IMPORTANT WORDS/PHRASES

This is also important so that our blogs won’t look plain and boring. Highlighting don’t just include adding bold texts, but it also includes changing the paragraph format to Heading 1, Heading 2 and so on.

I also would be emphasizing phrases or group of words through black quotes. That normally happens when I am adding quotes on my articles which I really love to do. I always add these quotes because they add perhaps design in the blog. Aside from that, italic is also one way of highlighting a part of a sentence and even an entire paragraph can be turned italic if you want to. It really depends on how you feel like. Underlining the words is another one. I usually do it when I add links on a specific word or phrases, it creates an impression that this word is clickable.

Although we have a very limited set of options, we can definitely make use of these available resources. I actually want to add CSS codes to beautify my blog but I had asked LRY about it and he said this is not allowed but I can still see some of the users doing so. I stopped looking for ways on how to do it and just stick to the options given by bitLanders. But again, I still want to change the font styles and colors of my blog if there is an easier way to do it.


6. TAG SELECTION IS CRUCIAL

Believe it or not, I still have issues with adding tags. This is normally the last thing that I usually add to my blog because it is very challenging. There’s this point where I think my blog is worthy for five stars but ended up getting only four because of the tags I had used.

Until now, I still don’t know how to get the perfect tag. I guess there’s no resource to find that. But what I normally do when I am on the add tag stage is to pick the words which are close to the topic. This is really hard to explain but I hope you’ll get my point.

Example to this is this current topic. Since we are talking about Tips on creating a blog, I normally would add these tags:

How_to_create_blog, tips_on_blogging, bitlanders_blogging, tips_for_blog, blog_submission, blogs, blog_tips

Something like that.

But this is a miss and hit point for me because as I had said earlier, I only get 5 stars in 1 out of 5 articles. That perhaps make it  less than 40% of my blog content reviews. I don’t know if there’s a tool for which we can enhance the tags.


7. I ADD IMAGES AND VIDEOS

The last point is basically my favorite part. I don’t submit any blog content without these and I would always make sure that as much as possible, I am adding my very own photos. I mean originality is still the best content. Original idea, resources and even graphics.

Here are some examples of my own photos added on my articles. Note that I usually add watermarks to these images to make sure that if someone is copying it, I am able to still recognize that this is my own. Cyber stealing is very common now a days and it is better to be safe with adding my own signature in it.

This one below was taken in Boracay during our last travel :

Most of the time, I add texts too inside the image, I edit them through Adobe Photoshop and I have to do that specially when I am adding one for the photo thumbnail in the blog list.

Here's one taken in Siquijor. It shows the beach front view of the resort which we stayed.

But aside from plain images, I also love adding GIFs. It makes the blog lively plus it is more interesting looking from the blog list.

Here's one example when I wrote about how I earn here in bitLanders:

However, for those who are not able to secure their own original media, you can use images on the web but ensure to add a referral link on the image as a credit to the owner of the said photo.

For videos, we can add ones from Youtube or from the site itself. I sometimes use YouTube videos if I don’t have any available ones on my bitLanders film list.

Also, take into consideration how these images are added on the article. You must consider the words versus media gap. I don’t add photos if I know that the paragraph is too short. Instead I make it a habit to add more words then I’ll add a media. Another paragraph or two and it should be good for another media. Just ensure that if you are adding pictures consecutively, add captions on it.

For this specific blog, I am adding more of my own previously published photos to illustrate my points:

We had finally reached the end of this blog and I do hope you have as well learned something out of this article. Thank you for taking some time to read this.

Enjoy!

 

Copyright 2016 Jean Beltran-Figues

All rights reserved.


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