I have been sharing my experiences and researches via my blog at http://mugekurubas.blogspot.com/ since July 2013. I have learned a lot about blogging, got acquinted with other bloggers and experts in my field.

During the design period of my website; my friends made valuable contributions to the design and content. One of the resources I benefited from was an e-book entitled “8 Key Steps to Blogging Mastery” by Jeff Bullas (thanks to Oya Yaşayan for the suggestion). In his book, Bullas shares his personal blogging experiences and (as the title suggests) summarizes these experiences under eight topics.

In this post; I would like to summarize the points from which I benefited the most:

Design

1. Create a distinctive a brand and design a logo for your web site. You can use the logo and the brand on different platforms so that you can ensure that your web site is memorable.

2. Have a well designed web page which works well. In his book Bullas shares an anectode of Steve Jobs. When interviewed by “Wired magazine” in 1996,  Jobs said:“design is a  funny word. Some people think design means how it “looks”. But of course if you dig deeper, it’s really how it “works”.

Site Traffic

1. Learn how to optimize your posts, labels and categories compatible with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Follow the recent trends in SEO.

2. Set goals that will keep you on track. For instance  target to reach 1,000 visitors in a month or 1,000 subscribers in 3 months.

3. Provide buttons for people to subscribe to your social media channels. The minimum recommendations are Facebook and Twitter buttons.

Interaction

1. Add polls to your page and ask your visitors for their opinion on various subjects.

2. Monitor your site ratings regularly. By doing this, you can understand what your followers like or don’t like.

I suggest Jeff Bullas’ web page and his e-book to all bloggers and to those who are beginners in blogging.