This past week I’ve been going through my old posts, specifically the ones imported from my old Blogger blog, and cleaning up the formatting. In doing that, I’ve been skimming pretty much every single post from the past 4 years, and it got me to thinking about my writing, the way I blog, and how that’s changed since then.

When I started out, I wrote a lot about the mundane aspects of my life, what I ate, my crazy work schedule, and other boring crap. I’m not quite sure how people get readers by posting about that stuff, but they do. I maxed out around 25-30 subscribers on Blogger. When I switched to WordPress, my subscriber numbers nearly doubled almost overnight, and stayed steady for a long time. Now, in the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that my numbers are even higher – 74 at the moment, give or take a few based on FeedBurner’s bizarre algorithms. I don’t post much about my daily life anymore, because I’d bore you all to tears. Just trust me on that. In lieu of sedating the world with my blog, I’ve been trying to put more feeling into my posts with more profound thoughts and insights, interspersed with posts about (what else) blogging.

All of this thinking has got me wondering: what makes a personal blogger worth reading? What is it about peering into someone’s life and thoughts that is so enticing? What makes a personal blog worth coming back to over and over again?

In my quest to try to answer these questions, I subscribed to two of most popular personal blogs out there – Dooce and Pioneer Woman. I’ve been seeing Heather and Ree on people’s blogrolls almost since my very first day in the blogosphere, but it took me a long time to subscribe, mostly because I resist doing things just because everyone else is doing it. I need to find other reasons to justify doing things, and blog betterment research provided me with that reason.

At first I wasn’t sure what the appeal was with Pioneer Woman – I figured at first that she was just another mommy blogger who cooks. But I found more and more that I kept going to her site for her food porn (even if it was just to drool all over my keyboard, because I can’t cook ). Her photography is amazing, and the more I read her the more I think that she must be some kind of superwoman in the body of a modest ranch wife and mother. Seriously – this woman cooks amazing meals and takes about a hundred photos of each dish throughout the cooking process so we can all cook like her. As I said, her photos are amazing and she has some great Photoshop actions and photography tips so everyone can take pictures like her. She posts quizzes so we can show off our smarts like her kids get to do, and once in awhile she cleans out her closet so we can dress like her too. How she does all that and runs an incredibly popular personal blog at the same time is beyond me, but the main point is that everyone wants to be Pioneer Woman. Well that and she keeps posting pictures of her cowboy husband’s Wrangler-clad posterior, nicely framed by a pair of cheek chillers. What’s not to love about her?

Dooce, on the other hand, I have to admit I don’t like so much. I think a lot of her popularity has to do with her back story, in which she was famously fired from her job because of the blog, then went on to post all the details of her struggle with postpartum depression. She’s wildly famous with mommy bloggers, but I don’t see her on too many blogrolls otherwise. I don’t think her writing is as eloquent as Pioneer Woman’s, and she flaunts the “My blog got so popular that I can support my family with it” a bit too much for my taste. I don’t think she has all that much to offer new readers. The only reason I subscribe to her blog is for research purposes. She’s not the kind of person I can imagine being friends with, and for me that’s a big part of why I keep reading a lot of the blogs I read. A huge appeal and benefit of blogging is the community, right?

What are things that appeal to you in the personal blogs that you read regularly? Is there anything that’s a turn-off? And if I may be so bold as to ask, what makes you want to read MY blog? What do you want to see more of and less of around here?

When I was writing my Seven Links post, I spent an obscene amount of time going through my archives looking for the right posts to link. A lot of what I write gets posted and quickly forgotten once it makes it off the front page. In this case, however, I came across the post Searching for Inspiration, in which I posted about not being able to find anything to post about. It’s a common issue with personal bloggers, especially those of us who have day jobs. Life gets mundane and it’s hard to find something worth writing about that anyone will want to read, least of all yourself.

After reading that post again, I decided to write some ways in which personal bloggers can get inspired and find something worth posting about.

1. Go through your archives – This is exactly how I came up with the idea for this post. It takes time, but every single time I’ve gone through my old posts, I had a lot of fun reading about what I thought was blogworthy.
2. Keep a notebook – A lot of my best ideas come to me when I’m not at my computer. I keep a notebook in my purse to jot down ideas. Alternatively, you can use the voice record feature on your cell phone if a pen and paper isn’t handy. (I still need to figure out how to capture the ideas that come to me in the shower. Any thoughts?)
3. Link lists – I’m always interested in what other bloggers are reading, and link surfing has led to new online friends. Don’t be afraid to use this as a filler, because no matter what you link to, it’s a peek inside the mind of a blogger. Use the tips I use to keep track of ideas for link round-ups.
4. Your blogroll – Often times reading what other bloggers are saying will spark my own ideas. Explore the blogosphere and you will be inspired!
5. Old photos – Photos can tell a story, so use your blog to tell it.
6. Outside interests – Don’t let the fact that you have a personal blog limit what you talk about. For example, my blog is about me, but that doesn’t mean that I’m off topic if I blog about blogging or something else. It’s all from my fantastically warped mind, therefore keeping my blog on the topic of ME.
7. Write for yourself – Chances are, you started a personal blog as an outlet for yourself. But you got hooked on comments and started thinking about your audience. Stop that! Write for yourself and no one else, and things will flow much better.
8. Read your comments – Even though you’re writing for yourself, you will get comments. Sometimes one of those comments will give you ideas that you can spin into a whole post. The pros do it all the time, and it’s how I got the ideas for this post.
9. Go searching – Search the internet for how to overcome blogger’s block and you’ll find posts like Top Ten Blog Tips’ 10 Ways to Think up New Post Ideas. There’s lots of good advice out there, so put some of it into practice.
10. Wait – When all else fails, take a break for a few days. Don’t feel like you have to post something every day. Self-imposed pressures can be a creative block.

Thank you to everyone who helped me come up with ideas for this post! What other ideas do you ave to get inspired?

One thing that bloggers like to do is tell everyone when they have a new post up. There are a few ways to do this. You can run through the streets announcing it, hire a skywriter, put flyers on all the car windows at the mall, or take out an ad in the newspaper. Those might get people’s attention, but it’s probably best to target people who are already online. A lot of bloggers turn to Facebook and/or Twitter.

A few months ago, I found that Feedburner (a Google app that lets people subscribe to your blog) lets you publish new blog post announcements to Twitter. This is great, because all I had to do was turn on that setting and forget about it. But there was a bit of a problem – I get more readers from Facebook than from Twitter, and I wanted to put a notice there as well. Feedburner doesn’t have that option.

Enter Selective Tweets. It’s a Facebook app that lets you publish selected tweets to Facebook by including #fb anywhere in the tweet. A bit of work to remember to do this, but it also lets you choose what goes where and avoid complete duplication between the two social networks. So, I set up my Feedburner thing to include #fb every time a new tweet went out, ensuring that it would also be posted to my Facebook wall.

It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done. While it was better on Twitter, I was limited to how I could phrase my new post because I had to include #fb in it, which I didn’t like the look of. I lived with it until I happened upon a blog article with instructions on setting up Networked Blogs, a Facebook app that helps publicize your blog. Now, I usually stay away from Facebook apps and actually block most of them so they don’t clutter up my feed, but this could be useful. And prettier.

I spent some time the other night setting it up and getting my blog to show up on Facebook properly. Now people can follow my blog with Networked Blogs and they even have the option of liking my blog on Facebook. I still have some work to do on this, mainly figuring out how to put a “Like” button on my blog itself so people can like it from there or the individual posts, but I’m getting there. It’s also a lot prettier:

The top one is what a Facebook post would look like when I did the roundabout route – Feedburner to Twitter to Facebook. Not pretty. The bottom one, however, is from Networked Blogs. So much prettier! It even has an air of professionalism about it!

Now here’s the Twitter version:

In this case, the top one is the Networked Blogs tweet, and the bottom one is the Feedburner one. For tweets, I think I prefer the Feedburner one instead, because with that I have the option of additional text. Instead of just a post title, I can specifically tell everyone that it’s a new blog post, which is what I’d rather do. Either way, I like the option of it happening automatically, because it’s less work that I have to do.

What about you guys – how do you publicize your latest blog posts?