My Top 5 Tips for Bloggers

Listography is a linky with a new top 5 list every week.  This time it's your top 5 blogging tips, and I wanted to get in on this one, even though I am by no means an "expert" blogger.

1. Tag your posts.  Especially anything that's weekly or monthly.  You may have a blog where you talk about gardening, parenting, and poetry.  The people who are interested in one topic may not be interested in another, and this lets them browse what they want to blog not what they don't.  It also lets you send links to just those topics on your blog.
   
   
2. Forget About Right Click Blocker!  And this is coming from someone who makes money off her art (see my other blog, Scribbleprints.)  It's annoying to your readers, who can't open your links in other tabs, or who are trying to use right click to bookmark your link or send your link to a friend.  What's worse is if they get a rude "Don't steal from me!" pop up message when they try (great way to offend your followers).  And people can steal everything you're trying to protect very easily by some alternative methods (the simplest is highlighting and copying your whole post, pictures and all, right into blogger...so you are basically pissing off the honest readers while not doing much to stop the real theives).  It's better to put copyright info on your blog or to watermark your images.
   
   
3. Learn Some HTML.  (Or CSS).  Yes, blogger does a lot of it for you...but I can't tell you how many times it's come in useful for me to tweak the HTML blogger provides.  With just some basic html I can make pictures linkable, resize pictures, lay out my sidebar like I want, add code for people to copy paste to post my buttons, fix bad copy-paste code from other people's sites, etc. 
   
   
4. Add Pictures!  But don't break copyright.  You can take your own pictures, or find Creative Commons or Public Domain images online.  (Here's a list of my favorite places to find free graphics and photos to use).  DON'T just grab anything off the web.  That's stealing, and is both illegal and rude!  If you want your photos to look really pretty, I also suggest downloading the Gimp or another good graphics program.  It's helpful to be able to crop things at the very least, and you can use color correct to make dull photos really pop.  (This comes into play more on my blog Texifornia then here).
   
   
5. Join Linky Parties or Blog Hops!  I've gained more followers from this than anything else I've tried.  You can get a more detailed description of what a linky party is here.  They can be weekly, monthly, or one time events.  There's a good list of giveaway linkies here (if you have giveaways on your site).  I've started a list of one time linkies here.