Kimberly Turner

Welcome back for another edition of the weekly Blogosphere trends, now on its new day of the week. If you're blogging about stories, like those on the trends list, that are covered by hundreds of other bloggers across the blogosphere or in your niche, how can you make sure your post gets the attention it deserves? We've talked a bit about using effective headlines, interesting formats, and strong opening lines to draw readers to your posts. Today, along with the trends generated by Regator, we’ll look at some types of images that could be used to help posts about these popular stories stand out from the crowd.

When I sit down to write this weekly column, I have two goals: 1. To tell you what bloggers are writing about most in the past week 2. To provide advice that is useful to the ProBlogger community. The first goal is easy because it's the same every week. I fire up the super-secret algorithm at Regator and it spits out a list. The second goal is more challenging because it varies. It's not enough to say I want to provide tips, I need to consider how I want to focus my post and what I want it to achieve. You've probably got goals for your blog as a whole (e.g., reaching a certain number of readers or increasing comments by a certain percentage in the next year) but do you create goals for each post you write? You should. Goals hold you accountable and ensure that your post achieves what you want it to. Darren mentions the importance of setting goals in "Does Your Next Blog Post Matter?" He suggests writing your goal at the top of your draft (you'll delete it before publishing unless it becomes part of your introduction), which is a good habit to get into. Before you publish, ask yourself whether the post achieves the goal.

After reading this post, you'll not only know what the ten most blogged-about topics of the past week are but you'll also have at least ten great options for the opening line of your next post.

Welcome back, my blogtastic friends! As you may have gathered by now: Every week, we use Regator's blog trends to show you what the blogosphere has been writing about during the previous seven days (click any trend to see posts about that story) and I give you a few blogging tips to go along with the trends. Speaking of which, I just finished watching the first, second, and third groups of videos that Darren gathered from readers who had tips to share, and I'm both impressed and inspired.

This column is written by Kimberly Turner from Regator (a great tool that gathers and organizes the world’s best blog posts). – Darren Happy Monday, bloggers! Every week, we use Regator's blog trends to show you what the blogosphere has been buzzing about during the previous seven days. (As always, click any trend to see posts about that story.) Because so many people are blogging about each of these stories, it becomes more important than ever to find a way to set your post apart. This week, we'll be taking a look at a few posts from bloggers who used interest-adding formats to approach these widely covered stories. So many of us tend to think in terms of text and paragraphs when we sit down to blog, but there are dozens of options you can use to add variety to your blog, find new ways of looking at a story, and present an oft-covered topic in a fresh and engaging way.

Every week, we're using the trending topics from Regator to show you what bloggers are writing about most during the previous seven days. Click any trend to see posts about that story. So far, we've used the trends to illustrate how you can break out of the echo chamber and solve problems for your readers. This week, we'll focus on crafting effective post titles/headlines. You can delve into the ProBlogger archives to find some great posts by Darren on this topic

What were bloggers writing about last week? We used Regator’s trending topics to generate a top ten list that shows you exactly that (click any trend to see posts on that story). In the first installment of this column, we looked at how a few bloggers had used unique approaches to cover the week's hot topics in ways that added to the conversation and created more interesting, worthwhile content. This week, I was inspired by Darren's recent post "Here's What You Should Do to Improve Your Blog Today." In it, he suggests that you "identify a reader's problem (or that of a potential reader) and produce a post that will solve it."