Advice about Sex Blogging

I got an email today that said:

Dearest Catalina,

I am a huge fan of Your blogs. After reading Your series on starting, monetizing, and managing your own blog, I decided to start my own sex blog! I just added You as my first link in my blogroll (did You already know that?) I have a question for You and I hope You have some time to answer it: Is there anything that stands out in Your mind as “I wish I had known that a long time ago!”?

Cheers!
g

Dear g:

I made time for it by making it a blog post. That’s maybe lesson number one? I don’t know. Also notice that when I copied and pasted your email into this post, I linked to My own blogs so that our curious reader can see what other blogs we’re talking about. I also linked to the series posts so that the lucky soul who just found my blog for the first time today can go back and get caught up.

One of my blogging regrets so far is not linking better in the beginning. Some of the early posts were linked in a sort of moronic manner. I’ve since gone back through them (I think all of them) on Catalina Loves and re-linked and tagged them, but that was a bitch to do.

Another is that I didn’t always use tags. I only have a category cloud in my sidebar and so I figured using tags also was a waste of time.  I was wrong. And just like re-linking, re-tagging was a tremendous pain-in-the-ass. Not only did I have to check the links in those posts, but really carefully read through each one looking for keywords (tags). Now, as a result, I write tags when I write the post and I do it every time I write a post. There are a number of people who skip from blog to blog via tag surfing. Those things matter! Do it.

I think my best advice to you looking forward is to think about your blog not now, but a year from now. Maybe it doesn’t need its own category now, but after a few months will you have to go back and re-tag it after you add the category? Ugh, that’s a pain. So try to get all your categories established early. Also consistent tagging is useful. Unfortunately, Wordpress doesn’t have a checkbox or dropdown box for tags, so you have to type them in. My reach around on this one is to go to Manage-Posts and then Copy-Paste the tags from a similar post. You can then delete the ones you don’t want to use easily (click the x) or add some if there are more that are needed. I do that for Sugasm, for example. I have a basic template like sex, sex blog, best sex blogs of the week, best posts of the week, BDSM, D/s, erotic fiction, hnt (etc. etc.) and then I can modify it easily after copying/pasting that string. (Always look for the easy way).

I hope this gives you somewhere to start. Find your tribe. A tight network of bloggers can help each other out a lot.

Best Wishes,
Catalina

If you have a question about blogging or Wordpress or… I suppose if you just want to know what the weather is like… email me by clicking on the grumpy kitty. I’ll post your question here and answer it just like this. You’ll be famous (and I’ll add you to my blogrolll even).