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Today’s task could be a simple one or a daunting one. It is all about pruning the number of feeds that you subscribe to. As someone that just started using feeds ( I know, shame on me) I only have 11 blogs that I subscribe too. It has save me quite a bit of time in figuring out who has new posts, so I highly recommend using a feed reader. I use the one built into IE.

This is a great task as it could help add quite a bit of time to your day to be more productive. And you may actually end up reading the feeds if you don’t have so many to wade through.

Kind of a to do list, an Editorial Calendar can be a great tool to planning out future posts on your blog. Becoming a Better Blogger says using a calendar will help your blog maintain a rhythm and help you to become more productive.

Lynn Terry found a great resource for an editorial calendar on Andy Wibbel’s blog. It includes a free spreadsheet download that you can use. It is a very simple and easy to use spreadsheet.

Day 12 of Becoming a Better Blogger is also a simple one. It is participate with your readers in the comments. This is a great way to let your readers feel like you care what they have to say.

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.