I have been speaking with Elizabeth from Table for Five about her blog the last few days. Elizabeth is hoping to increase her pagerank to 5 in the next few months. One of the first things I noticed about her blog was the amount of clutter in the blog design, infact I’ve noticed this on a number of blogs recently.

What is clutter?
I define blog clutter as something that :

• Does not offer any value to your reader (eg. pagerank button)
• Distracts your readers from your content.

Some examples of blog clutter

Blog clutter is…

Most bloggers know the importance of writing, but, to actually write as much as we would like can be difficult. It is not just about writing for our own blog; we should also try to occasionally write for other blogs or ezines. The more we can write, the more we can help our blog to grow.

These are some of the common Stumbling blocks to writing and what we can do to overcome them:

1. Procrastination.

Procrastination is easy on the internet. We have countless RSS feeds to read, forums to visit, blogs…

A common graphic I see on a new bloggers sidebar is the PageRank button, a simple graphic which displays the pagerank of the blog. I’ve even noticed this on blogs who have a pagerank of 0!

Here are two examples of these buttons :

I don’t think theres any need to display your pagerank on your blog sidebar. The reason is simple, there are only two people who care about your blogs pagerank, you and your blog sponsors. Your readers do not care if your blog has a pagerank of 0 or…

Some will say links are the ultimate currency, others (like me) will say it’s about comments and conversations, but there is another type of blogger who is more into traffic and stats. So let’s try to help those a little.

Most of you, who read and visit Blogging Tips on a regular basis, probably already know a lot about social networking and community sites, and how to get traffic from StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg and others.

Let’s see what else you, incredible writers, can do to get more traffic to your blog.

Because every…

If you recently upgraded to wordpress 2.2+ from earlier versions you may have found your posts have been all messed up with lots of Â, †and ™ characters dotted everywhere. This happened to Blogging Tips posts, I quickly removed them from all of the affected posts but I didn’t spend any time looking into what caused this to happen.

Last week I helped out Elina from My Lil Venture by upgrading her blog to wordpress 2.2.1. Elina emailed be back telling me that all of her posts were now filled with…