Before I launch into my April 1st Blogging mission to help you make your blog profitable in 365 days, I thought I would like to outline some stuff for those of you who are a little more into blogging, and perhaps already have a blog. It’ll also give you a better idea of what I will be covering during the next year.

One thing I have always obsessed about was making my blogs better. And I think the reason for that is, because I look at it all day long. So I’m always thinking how I can change it or make it better.

I quickly learnt that just becasue I am tiered of the look, doesn’t mean anyone else is, but there are still things I can do to make it better.

Here is a list of 10 things you can do to make your blog better:

1. Make it easy to read for Humans. If you read enough SEO stuff you eventually forget that the people on your site are human beings, and they need to read your blog. It’s easy to get caught up in keyword density and placement, and focus your writing for a bot that crawls your site, rather than the human that reads it. I cover this in-depth later in the series. It’s actually not hard to write an article that’s easy for people to read, understand, enjoy and share, while at the same time getting the maximum benefit out of the search engines. (This is one those really simple but effective strategies).

2. Unclutter your blog. I’ve seen some shockers. Some blogs have so much stuff on them, I don’t know where the content starts and ends, and if people need to spend more than a few seconds trying to find your content, you’ve lost them. Don’t install too many widgets and advertising programs, you confuse the reader, and chase him away. Blogging is truely one area where less is more. Your focus is your blog and your content. Anything that distracts from this should be removed. The rule of thumb for adding anything to your blog is, “Does this add to my content or subtract from it”?

3. Get your URL’s right. Wordpress has the ability to display friendly URL’s. This means that if a human read the URL they would know what the page was about. Have a look at the URL of this page for instance. I’ll show you exactly how to handle this later, so make sure you have the RSS feed. Besides the human aspect it’s also a great SEO tactic that allows search engines to find your content better. So it’s an all round winner.

4. Make sure you know your topic. If you’ve just setup a blog for the first time, please don’t make it about blogging or making money. If you’ve been building mode airplanes since you were 5, then that might be a good place to start. I’ll go into more detail later on finding the best niche for you to use. Once you’ve found your niche, make sure you know it well, and that you keep up with any changes or new developments. You’ll be surprised how swiched on some of your readers are, and you want to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

5. Use a good headline. Most people skim through a list of posts, either on a site like digg or technorati or in their feed reader. If your subject isn’t better that the one above or below it, it won’t get picked. I know what some of you might be thinking, but it’s not that hard. There are a few golden rules to subject lines that are easy to apply, and very very effective.

6. Be nice. If your blog isn’t about bad customer service, then don’t moan too much. The occasional rant is fine, but if all you do it moan and rant then eventually people will get sick of your blog and move on. Also try not to slate people in public or use your blog as a place to try and “get back at people”.

7. Know your audience. Find out who is reading your site, who is following it, and what they want and are looking for. This is often a great way to grow your blog. You’re blogs stats can be very very handy here. If you get a lot of traffic from search engines then have a good look at the search terms people are using. This can often lead to a better understading of what people want, and might show you a niche you never knew existed.

8. Don’t be a copy cat. If someone else has already said it, then don’t repeat the same old content. Think of new and fresh content. The easy way out it to re-write other peoples content. I fully support this (for other reasons I’ll explain later). But in the long term being an unoriginal copy cat won’t get you anywhere. I subscibe a many many RSS feeds. If I find a trend where one blog is always saying the same as another blog, then I’m inclined to give up on following the copy cat (and it’s usually quite easy to tell who’s copying who).

9. Focus. Every stage of your blogs little life will have a different area to focus on. Focus on the area that needs attention now. When you start a blog your focus is on getting some decent content on the site (even before getting trafic). Once you have the content you move onto getting traffic. But if you spend all your time trying to test your ad spots you’ll never get round to the content, and traffic and you’ll end up giving up on blogging ’cause I never made any money’.

10. Check everything, and then Check it again. Before you post something, check it twice. Read and re-read it. Get someone else to read it. If you have implimented some changes to your site, then check them over and over, and get someone else to check them, to make sure they work properly. It’s a far better investment of your time to make sure that when you do something you do it properly the first time. You don’t want emails and comments from readers telling you that something doesn’t work. One thing you can check is browser compatibility. Make sure your site works in Firefox, Safari, and IE. It’s well worth the effort invested.

Of course there is a lot more that could be said about making your blog better, but I find that just by focusing on some of the basics you can achieve a lot.