How to: pretend that you know what you’re doing + useful resources from around the community!

Happy Saturday, everyone!

Today is my last post in this series! Thank you all so much for your support throughout the series. If there was anything I didn’t cover that you wanted me to, please let me know down below and I’ll either address it there, add it to this post, or maybe make a whole post, depending on how much I have to say.

Today we’re talking about some general tips I have for blogging! There are some things I feel like everyone should know, like how to pingback to a post, as well as some links to some of my favourite info posts.

Quick disclaimer: I’m not trying to say that I’m an expert or the best at this, by any means. These are honestly just things I’ve found work for me, and that I wanted to know when I started my blog.

How-to pingback:

When tagging someone in a post, link one of their specific posts!!!

This way they’ll get the notification!! If you just link to their main page or general page, they won’t be notified and they could miss your tag! Generally, if you have the ability to comment on a post or page, the person will get a notification if you put it in your post.

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Linking in posts

If you’re putting a link in your blog post, make sure you set it to “open link in a new window/tab”!!!!! Please!!! It makes reading the links so much easier!

WordPress sometimes gets funny if there are too many “drafted” posts

IDK what it is, but I find when I have too many “drafts”, WordPress gets really slow and freezes or randomly shuts down on me. It doesn’t do this when I have scheduled posts, though. So I generally keep drafts saved on my laptop/dropbox, and then schedule them, rather than having them sit in my drafts.

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On Twitter, please please please only respond to the person who tagged you in a tweet

On Twitter, sometimes people will tag multiple people in tweets. And if you respond to these tweets, the default is to respond to everyone in the tweet. Which means your notifications are flooded with (very lovely) tweets of people saying thank you to someone else. You can avoid this by untagging others mentioned in the tweets.

I know this seems like a dumb problem, but still. It makes everyone’s life easier.

Posts from around the community that are super useful

• May has some great tips on how to use WordPress like a pro, so definitely check out her post for more tips! (she’s infinitely better at html than I am)
• Vicky has a great post where she goes over common bookish acronyms, so you can understand what everyone is talking about! Here are some of the most common ones that I struggled with at first:
  • TBR = to be read
  • DNF = did not finish
  • ARC = advanced reader copy (an early version of a soon-to-be-published book that publishers send out to readers to get feedback/hype)
  • CW or TW = content warning or trigger warning
  • ICYMI = in case you missed it
• Kelly did a great series a while ago where she posed a bunch of questions to the blogging and bookish community, and it was super useful! Here’s her one asking how often people post on their blog. She also did one recently on how to use Trello to organize your blog!
• Kaleena also has a TON of great posts about how to use social media and different bookish websites like Edelweiss, and how to contact publishers for ARCs! Here’s her ultimate social media guide, which was 💯🔥💯🔥💯💯🔥🔥🔥🔥💯💯🔥
• Siobhan has a couple posts on blogger/author etiquette for social media, which I highly recommend.
• The always lovely Lashaan also wrote a post recently on blogging etiquette, and I agree with everything he said.
• Isabelle has a great post on using the new WordPress block editor, which is literally a lifesaver.
• Krysta wrote a post on how to schedule posts, which was super useful and had some wonderful tips!

So those are some of the things I want everyone to know! Was this helpful? Is there anything else you want me to cover? Let me know!

Thanks for reading! And thanks again for all the support throughout this series! xx