I have taken a few days off from the challenge. Everyone in the house got the flu and we had my daughter’s fourth birthday to celebrate…so blogging had to take a back seat. This went for my main blog at Naturemoms too and I haven’t posted since Thursday…but the beauty of passive income is that the money doesn’t stop coming in because I couldn’t work. In fact, I had some record breaking days and stats.

So I need to do 5 days of challenges to keep up. They were pretty easy.

Day 10. Pitch a link to one of your blog posts to three other blogs in your niche.Take the most popular post on your blog and pass along the link to the bloggers behind three popular blogs in your niche. If they like it, they may link to it in their next link round-up.

Well….I don’t really do this anymore. I don’t need to. I get oodles of backlinks for my most popular posts already but if my blog were newer I would definitely do that.

Day 11. Add social media links to the bottom of your posts and to your feed.While most people will vote for your posts via the toolbar, social media links or icons can remind people to vote for your post if they liked it. It’s even more essential to add these buttons to your feed, because there’s no easy way for people to vote straight out of their feed reader. Using a FeedFlare to put an ‘Add a Comment’ link at the bottom of your feed items is also a good idea. FeedFlares are available under the ‘Publicize’ tab in your Feedburner control panel.

I have the “Share This” plugin on my blog so there are social media buttons on the actual blog posts but NOT in the feed. So I did need to take advantage of that missed opportunity. I added several FeedFlares and I added them to some other blogs too while I was at it.

Day 12. Participate in the comments on one of your own blog posts. Readers will feel as if you’re interested in what they have to say, you might learn something, and you’ll also increase the comment count on your post.

Do this already. 

Day 13. Work out an editorial calendar for your blog. It’s a lot harder to put off writing a post when you know exactly when your blog is due for an update. Working out an editorial calendar can help give your blog a sense of rhythm. It can also make you more productive through setting firm deadlines for new posts.

Generally I post Monday thru Friday for the Naturemoms blog. I take the weekends off. So I think it has a sense of rhythm already.

Day 14. Prune your feed subscriptions.I suspect some bloggers spend as much time reading feeds as they do writing posts. Pruning your feed collection can help you save quite a bit of time. If you find yourself regularly skipping feed items from a particular blog, or if you can’t think of one thing you’ve learned from reading a particular blog’s posts, it’s probably best if you unsubscribe.

LOL. I needed this bit of advice. My feed subscription list has gotten quite massive. So I spent some time today pruning and removing some of the blogs I read as an after thought really. Many of my subscriptions are actually recon work…I am scoping out my niche and some are blogger friends but TONS are political (liberalism, libertarianism, etc), personal interest (frugality, crafting), and faith or faith/politics. I read entirely too many blogs. I pruned…probably 100 blogs from my reader…sorry guys.

Mission accomplished….

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