If a couple of days ago Bill Ives shared a weblog post to a recent entry that Seth Godin created around the subject of how to get more traffic for your weblog (Thanks, Bill, for sharing the link!), here is something that really caught me by surprise yesterday and which I thought I would return the favour today. It is the least I could do. Indeed, yesterday Easton Ellsworth, over at Business Blogwire, one of the weblogs on business weblogging that I have been reading for quite some time now and which I can certainly recommend subscribing to, decided to take elsua for a ride and use it for his Blogtipping day and I must say that after reading through it I think it is a great idea to help create different connections between multiple webloggers by mentioning things we like about a particular weblog and also a tip on how things could be improved further as far as the weblog setup is concerned. Yes, that, indeed, folks, is what Blogtipping is all about. Only thing to mention is perhaps that this weblogging activity to boost other people’s weblogs takes place once a month and for any other weblogs that may be out there and which not necessarily would match with your reading audience but that you would want to introduce as a potentially refreshing change.
Isn’t that an interesting concept to put into practice to help increase your weblog readership discovering some other different weblogs on a more or less regular basis and at the same time sharing some more link love? I must say that I really like this innovative way of bridging together several weblogs with one another so that other weblogging relationships could come out and mature over time. Four in total. So while I was reading through Easton’s weblog post yesterday I decided to incorporate such great tip in upcoming blogtipping dates here in my own weblog. Remember, first day of the month. Thus I would be prepared for the one in September.
Now, let’s have a look at Easton’s comments on what he thought about elsua and, much more interestingly, let’s see what tips he was suggesting I could look into to improve the overall weblogging experience while you are here:
"Blogtipping Victim/Beneficiary #1: Luis Suarez at ELSUA
Compliment 1: Your blog is very meaty. That is, there’s lots of good content being served up regularly. You also offer plenty of resources in your sidebars.
Compliment 2: You make it very easy for visitors to submit your posts to various social bookmarking services. It’s great that you use such friendly little icons to catch the eye.
Compliment 3: Your blog makes it very simple for first-time visitors to figure out what it’s about. Your categories, your popular posts list, and your consistent posts all remind people that you deal with all things knowledge management-related.
Blogtip: Something about your layout seems to need spicing up. Maybe you should experiment with different background colors and also shrink the width a bit, at least of the middle column, to make it easier for visitors to read your posts. Oh, and you also deserve a good masthead – check out Logopond for free ideas! … One more thing: put all that great contact info higher up on the let-hand side."
While I do really appreciate his kindly thoughts on what he thinks about my weblog I have particular found it interesting and exciting the corresponding commentary about how to improve it even further. Yes, that is right, there is always room for improvement. More than anything else because those are some areas that I knew I would want to update at some point myself although I was not really sure about it. I am now glad he has made those comments because it just indicates how it is not just me the one who thinks that some changes are ahead of us to help improve the look and feel of my weblog. This is just some terrific stuff ! So much so that I have decided that over the next couple of days I am actually going to implement all of the different suggestions he has put together and see how things would go from there.
Thus here I go with my special thanks to Easton for taking the time to blogtip me with some really good feedback and I will certainly be jumping into the blogtipping bandwagon next time around. Now it is time to head over to Seth Godin‘s How to get traffic for your blog and learn some more new tricks about the world of weblogging ! Are you ready?
Tags: Blogtipping, Blog Traffic, Metablogging, BusinessBlogwire, Seth Godin, Bill Ives, Easton Ellsworth, Blog Readership
Great thoughts, Luis, and I like what you’re doing with this blog. Very informative and you show that you care about improving it always.
Thanks a bunch, Easton, for dropping by and for the feedback input ! Greatly appreciated! Yes, that is right, I am always trying to improve the weblogging experience so that I can make it as easy as possible not only for myself but also for my readership, specially if they are not familiar with the medium. That way, they can give it a try themselves and see how far they can take things further. I have already started to look for that new, more accommodating, theme that would trigger the rest of the different changes thus stay tuned 🙂
Thanks again for the feedback !
Having just discovered your blog I noticed that there were some formatting issues – I also read Easton’s blog and he made a suggestion about the formatting. If it helps, I find that your blog displays fine in Firefox, it’s in IE 5.5 where the problems with column widths arises.
Hi Ashleigh ! Thanks a bunch for the feedback comments and for dropping by! Welcome ! Yes, indeed, this is something that I have noticed myself, too. The weblog template seems to be displaying just fine using FireFox and Flock, even in Opera it works all right. I think that the problems may be with IE not following the standards we all know should be following in order to render pages the way it should. Either way, I am searching for a new theme/template, so whenever that is ready I will also do a dry run test with IE and see how it would go and if anything else I could always add a disclaimer on recommended browsers to view the weblog. I know that this may sound a bit like in the good old 90s but still better than anything or better than having to wait for IE to catch up with the rest of the Internet.
Thanks again for the feedback !