This is a guest post by Tom Walker of CreativeCloud.

There are tens of thousands of blogs out there, many of which will never make it past the initial stages of early bloghood. Sometimes this is just due to bad luck, harsh competition, and poor planning, but equally as likely is that the decline of these blogs is due to their owners’ poor management or inability to effectively maintain the site and communicate with their followers. To help ensure that you keep your blog active and popular, here are a few tips to make yourself a better blogger.

1. Go in with a Game Plan

So many bloggers begin with ideas of grandeur, but soon find that they have no real structure or organization for pushing their ideas forward. If you want to be a better blogger, go into blog ownership with a game plan. Lay out what you want to accomplish with your blog, where you want it to go, and what you want it to become, and then do it.

2. Follow the Golden Rule of Blogging

The Golden Rule of blogging is to “treat the visitors to your blog as you would want to be treated.” It’s as simple as that. Being respectful to your visitors, replying to their posts in a timely fashion, and making their visit as easy and effective as possible are important aspects to winning loyal followers. Unless your site is devoted to being rude and disrespectful, or acting this way is a part of your site’s mantra, it is important to remember the old adage, “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

This is a guest post by Duncan, a digital marketing expert.

Last week, I wrote a guest post here on duplicate content, detailing some of the ways Google determines the original source of content, and which versions have been scraped or syndicated. Whilst it is often the case that you don’t want your content appearing all other the web due to duplicate content issues, someone raised an interesting point in the comments about the positives of having your content out there, duplicate or not. He said that not only did he like the fact his content was everywhere, but also that he often didn’t mind when the original was outranked by the copies and even filtered out of Google’s index. It was a very good point, and so I thought I would elaborate on it and explore some more reasons why dupe content might not always be a bad thing.

Better Visibility

If you’re sending out your content marketing to the right places, you can often find that the sites it appears on are more powerful and receive more traffic than your own. It’s easy to become over-proud of your content and of your site, sometimes losing focus on what your goals for the content are. Often it is the message contained within a blog post or article that is the important thing, and the more people who get to read this message the better. You are covering a much larger expanse of the web by having your content in many different places, not only because people stand a better chance of finding it by just browsing around, but also because the other sites might have large number of followers and subscribers.

Furthermore, there is even potential benefit to being outranked in the SERPS by syndicated content versions. If the content is on a powerful and respected site, it not only stands a better chance of ranking above other similar content, but it could receive a higher click though rate than your more ‘unknown’ site might have received.