The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer @ Crazy-For-Books in March 2010 and ended on December 31, 2012. With Jennifer’s permission, Coffee Addicted Writer relaunched the hop on February 15, 2013. Each week the hop will start on a Friday and end the following Thursday. There will be a weekly prompt featuring a book related question. The hop’s purpose is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog.
The Book Blogger Hop post image was created by Coffee Addicted Writer.
This Week’s Question
What’s the best investment you’ve made for your blog?
I suppose there are a number of ways to approach this question. From a financial investment standpoint, I am glad I decided to pay for my own domain and self host this website outside of WordPress.com’s servers. One of the biggest benefits, at least for me, is that so far I haven’t run into any storage issues. I also have access to a lot of free WP plugins. The downside, though, is the learning curve is much higher. Thankfully, most of that startup stuff I don’t have to tinker with much anymore.
Financial aspect aside, there are two big investments that I spend time on for my blog’s subjective “success.” One is taking the time to blog hop. I resisted this for a while because yes, it takes time. But I learned that it’s worth it. It helps build that community in your personal blogosphere, which is honestly hard because it’s a slower form of social media that doesn’t have as dominant of an algorithm. Taking the time to comment on others’ posts makes them feel appreciated, builds rapport, and often times they’ll return the love on your own blog.
The second investment is optimizing my posts for search engines. This worked really well for a few years and I saw a lot of growth. However, lately that’s all gone to shit with AI taking over and fucking up how internet searches work. At least, that’s my theory coming from someone who doesn’t know a lot about this stuff. My views have tanked and I also now get a lot of views from China as opposed to the US, where I live. I also refuse to optimize my posts for AI searches, which I learned recently is something I can do with my WP Yoast plugin. No thanks. But in normal times, SEO works well.
Did this turn into a little bit of a rant? Yea, maybe! But it is what it is. If there’s anything to take away from my ramblings, remember to blog hop!
