Realm of the Sapphired Dragon: 31 days to better blogging 2015

Showing posts with label 31 days to better blogging 2015. Show all posts

Sunday, 11 January 2015

Day 10: Email Signatures - 31 Days of better Blogging Challenge from Parajunkee.com

Your Task Today:
Your task today is to revamp your email signature.

So given I work in an administration role in real life where I am constantly on email and it is important to have a professional looking signature, this is one particular task that wasn't too hard. That being said, while I know to have a professional looking signature when I send an email, I have always just adjusted it as I sent the email depending on who I was emailing.

So today's task has given me good reason to finally make an actual saved default signature in Gmail that will now automatically be put on all emails I send. Unfortunately however I have not quite worked out how to save multiple signatures so I may still have to adjust every now and then depending on who I am sending to.

I would welcome any suiggestions or tips on how I can set up multiple signatures in Gmail

Do you have a default signature on your emails and for your blog emails?

Want to join the challenge? Check out Parajunkee's View for all 31 days of this challenge :-)

Monday, 5 January 2015

Day 4 - Top Commenters: 31 Days to Better Blogging

Welcome to Day 4 of Parajunkee's 31 days to Better Blogging. So technically for me it is Day 1 however as I have started late, I am starting from day 4 and will catch up on days 1,2 & 3 before the end of the month.

Day 4 Task:

Your task today is to target who your top commenters are and reciprocate by sending a thank you email and commenting on their blogs.

This task makes me realise how much I can improve in this area. I don't always take the time to visit my commenters blogs which is really is poor blog etiquette and one of the things I am striving to improve on.

Using a Top Commenters Widget I got from here, I have placed this into my Side bar and it has come up with my top commenters being:

A big thanks to the above and anyone else who has commented on my posts as it is great to get feedback about my posts and I guess evidence that people are actually reading them.

Anyhew to say thank you, I have placed a Blog list in the left side bar of my blog with the blogs of the all the above commenters and my aim is each month to change the list to highlight the top commenters on the blog.

I am also currently working through all blogs and making sure to comment in at least one post (but sometimes more) on each blog and this also I plan to try to make at least a weekly occurrence.

So that is day 4 done, How did I do?

Sunday, 4 January 2015

Setting my 2015 Blogging Goals & 31 ways to Better Blogging 2015

Welcome to 2015 on Realm of the Sapphired Dragon. After a fairly inconsistent last 12 months, both in reading and blogging, I am back and ready to focus on building this blog over the next 12 months to make it bigger and better as well as getting my reading mojo back.

So I have set myself a few blogging goals (so far) for this year:

Focus more on reading both for review and for pleasure and better balance between the two. Last year between work and looking after my two year old, I found myself struggling to get any quality reading time and feeling guilty when i read for pleasure as I had a number of review books to get through. This year I hope to plan my time better so as to be able to read review books and also read according to mood in between them when they don't necessarily correlate.

More organised with regards to blog posts. Last year I tended to leave posts to the last minute so there were weeks where even simple meme posts did not go up as I left it too late. My aim this year is to plan out at least a week or two in advance and take advantage of the scheduler in Blogger so as to be able to post more consistently

Try and be involved in at least one blog tour every couple of months. Depending on how this goes, I may up it to at least one per month.

Get more involved (re-involved) in the Blogging Community. Again, due to real life taking over, I have found myself not as involved in the blogging community as I had been previously. I plan do this by participating in challenges on other blogs as well as frequently visiting, reading and commenting at other Blogs.

In an effort to start 2015 on the right foot, I have decided to participate in Parajunkee's 31 Days to Better Blogging 2015

The aim of this challenge is to help develop and improve our blogs overall which in turn could potentially increase traffic, keep that traffic as followers or at least frequent visitors as well as making us (hopefully) more organised bloggers. While I am a little late to the party given it is already 3rd January, I plan to start tomorrow, 4th January but will definitely tackle days 1,2 & 3 sometime before the end of the month.

Each Day is as follows and I will try and post a short post each day updating my progress with each daily task: