Elanso

Some random updates for all you BloggingTips enthusiasts

New BloggingTips theme within the week

I mentioned around 2 months ago that I was getting a new design developed for BloggingTips. Unfortunately, Ptah Dunbar is no longer designing the theme and a different design company has designed a brand new theme from scratch for me.

Ptah has wrote about why we parted ways in his post ‘What happened with the BloggingTips.com redesign?‘. The good news for all of you is that Ptah has decided to release the theme he was designing for me. I’ll update you all when he releases it

No more sidebar Clutter

I’m not a big fan of clutter on sidebars but over the last few months I have allowed the BT sidebar to get cluttered up with ads such as EntreCard and Scratchback and other links. I removed EntreCard the other day and tonight I removed the ScratchBack widget*. The new design’s sidebar is very tidy so more emphasis will be placed on the content here.

* If you have left a tip in the BT scratchback widget within the last month contact me and I’ll give you a full refund.

Changes to Staff Team

Amanda Fazani wrote a post last week telling her readers that she writes at BloggingTips. In this post a commentator by the name of Laura stated that ‘most of the articles are fluff’ at BloggingTips. This really concerned me. The reason, I agreed with her. It was something I had been thinking over for a while. When this comment was made two weeks ago there were around 16 bloggers writing here every week.

In my opinion the quality of all writers posts were good however it was a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. The problem was that many of these bloggers were writing about similar subjects and some posts were similar to topics which had already been covered in the blog, either by myself or by other writers.

This was not the fault of their writers, it was me who created this problem. Obviously, with more writers the chances that some will cover similar topics increases however the main cause of this was me not giving more feedback to writers. From the start I have always gave bloggers complete freedom with regards to what they can write on the blog. Whilst I still believe that giving writers the freedom to write what they want is a good thing, it’s painfully clear that in order to steer your blog the direction you want it, you need to point your writers in the right direction (they aren’t mind readers after all!).

In the last few weeks I have tried to do just that. I have asked Amanda to write about the Blogger blogging platform, John Leschinski to keep concentrating on design articles and Sarah has joined the team to write about WordPress. As you can see, I am trying to increase the number of technical type posts at BloggingTips. This is something I have tried to do for ages and I have mentioned it many times however I have found that it is incredibly hard to find good bloggers who are also good at coding and design. The last time I advertised for technical writers I took on writers without any coding skills. This was a mistake as I didn’t need any more blogging about blogging type authors on the blog but they were really good writers and I found it difficult to let them pass by

So I would like to wish all the best to former BT bloggers Elaine from Good Recruits, Kelby from Type a Mom, Susan from Women on Business, Angela from Dollars 2 Blog, Jason from Success For Your Blog and Rob from Perfect Web Content. I really appreciate the contributions you have all made in the last 6 months

The future of BloggingTips

Blogging advice is a very popular niche and there are lots of really good established blogs like ProBlogger, Daily Blog Tips, Performancing and Blog Herald. David Peralty made a great point in his podcast last week when he said that it doesn’t matter how saturated your niche is, if you can build your brand up then you can make it successful. That is what I am trying to do just now. I am hoping to add a few new faces to the staff team in the next month so that there is more variety in the topics covered on BloggingTips.

Also, I would love to hear from regular readers about how they think they could improve the blog.

• Are there topics not covered which you would like to see more of? If so, I’ll do my best to get hire a writer to cover that subject exclusively
• Is there a type of blog design you would like us to get developed?
• Can you think of tools BT could develop to help you with your blog?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

Also, don’t forget, next week we will be releasing our 3rd wordpress theme for free to readers. The theme will be released in a blue, red and green colour scheme. Check out a preview of the blue theme below :

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