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Blog feeds are a great way to organize and keep up to date with the blogs that you read. Some people never even visit the actualy website anymore and just read the feed. Because of that it is very important that your feed includes social bookmarking links. I spent about 20 minutes tonight getting my feed set up through Feedburner, a free service. I set up a few FeedFlares under the Optimize tab on my account to add links to del.icio.us, StumbledUpon, and Digg This. This was an easy task to accomplish with possibly big returns.

The author of Becoming a Better Blogger says for Day 10 you should take one of your best articles and send the link to 3 other bloggers in your niche. The hope is they will find the information there useful and write about it on their blog. For someone that is new to blogging this is a great opportunity to write something with this in mind. I’m not sure I have enough useful content here yet, but it is something to add to my to do list.

Today’s task deals with offering a free service to your readers and not expect anything in return. You could offer to critique their website, give them a free logo design, or give them social media votes. This is a great way to offer a thank you back to the people who read your blog. What have you offered to your readers? Let’s brainstorm!

Day 8 of Become a Better Blogger is about creating a free resource list for your readers. This sounds like a huge take, but it can be a very simple one. It is collecting a list of websites or links to articles about a specific topic. You would place them on a page with a brief description of each. This can be an invaluable tool for your readers and a great way to bring traffic to your site. I still need to work on mine. I think it will focus on the best work at home mom resources out there.

I am continuing the series on Becoming a Better Blogger. Day 7 is about getting exposure by being a guest blogger on someone else’s blog. The author suggests finding a blog in your niche and offering to write a post for them. This gives unique content to that blog and you will gain traffic into your blog. I have a few friends that I could pitch this idea to and I am sure they would love to do it.

31 Days to Becoming a Better Blogger suggests using a tool that I have not really explored myself and that is Social Media Networking. It suggests becoming members at places such as StumbledUpon and Digg in order to get traffic to your blog. Visiting StumbledUpon I discovered that no one has discovered my blog yet. I don’t even have an account there, so I spent a few minutes setting one up. I updated my profile a bit and I need to find out if I have any friends there. You can view my profile here: http://marketingelf.stumbleupon.com/public/ I am interested in learning a bit more about this method and will probably spend a few days exploring.

The Becoming a Better Blogger Challenge recommends highlighting your Popular Posts on the sidebar. It suggests doing so for new visitors to have a clear path to the most helpful advice and articles on your blog. This is a great way to add incoming links to the content on your blog as well.

I added a Text Widget to my sidebar and I will be manually adding posts that I think offer the best content to my readers.

My family is contemplating moving in a few months, if we can sell our house in this market and we are currently decluttering in order to make our house more open. Day 4 of the Becoming a Better Blogger Challenge is all about Decluttering your blog’s sidebars. The author recommends reserving your sidebar to the things that really matter such as your feed link, categories and popular posts. Your blog roll and archives should be on their own pages.

It is a bit scary to move everything off the main page of your blog, but I can see the point that you just don’t want to throw a bunch of things up there. Makes it hard to show what is really important about your blog. I need to take some time today and clean things up. It does seem a bit cluttered and I know I can streamline things a bit.

Normally I write a whole bunch of posts at one time (such as this BABB series) but they are normally post-dated. The author of the Becoming a Better Blogger recommends writing posts ahead of time so that you always have posts ready to go and your blog is kept up-to-date.

This is a great idea as you can be creative in one block of time. Some days I only have snippets of time here and there to work and others, such as the days my daughter is in preschool, I have hours. Getting all of my blogging done for the week in a those large chunks of time will allow my posts to be more thought out and provide better content for you readers. Starting today I hope to get into the habit of writing ahead of time.

On Day 2 of Becoming a Better Blogger, the author asserts that using pictures in your blog post is much more interesting than a plain old post. I decided to check out iStockphoto to see what kind of pictures I could find there. You can purchase 10 credits for about $13 which gets you approximately 10 x-small pictures. I found this little gem that reminds me of the weather right here in Michigan and the hope I have that spring is right around the corner.

That sure does look nice and I think pictures will become a staple around here.