I went out for a long long loooong walk today. It felt good to stretch out myself as I haven’t done it for a long long loooong time. I then thought about how it would be good to do something different for one’s own blog out of normal routine – to give it a stretch, do something different, think outside the box…that sort of thing.

Design

If you are thinking about getting a new design for your blog and cannot afford a designer as yet, here’s a few steps you can take to completely change the way your blog looks. At least until you decide to hire someone, like me -

• Change the header image or colors
• If you know any CSS, just experiment with the width and height of a few things. Perhaps change the font that you use on your blog, give your outgoing links a different color. You never know, maybe with a few tweaks you can score a winning color combination.
• There are many open source design ideas out there – from icons, CSS styles, to custom graphics. Try to incorporate them into your blog for a new spin on things.
• Sometimes taking off elements, like overt advertising, or adding a new one, like a widget, can make things a bit different. Just don’t change it everyday, then it’s annoying.

Go ahead, and mess around. You can always upload the original files back up again, you did save the originals separately right?

Content

If you are bored and stupefied by your daily routine of posts, hang it in for a day. Better yet, go for a long long…walk and you’ll be raring to go with fresh enthusiasm. Some other things you can do to give your content a stretch -

• If you feel like your blog is getting a bit impersonal take a break and maybe write about your cat, or your pizza dinner? Who knows, it might even end up on digg!
• Instead of writing a post, why not just post an image or a video and be done with it.
• Write extremely long narrative posts with a distinct point of view, or witty one liners.
• Write about something that you have never posted about before. Like arithmetical equations you quite never understood?

Monetization

Some quick tips to stretch your monetization methods -

• Write a review of an affiliate program you promote.
• Have an ad free day. Make it an event, readers can give you donations based on the quality of your content for that day {hmm…I might just try this out myself}
• If your ad inventory is not being sold, look outside the internet to sign up advertisers. Not everybody needs to have a website to advertise online.

So there you go some of the ways you can give your blog a stretch for the aspects mentioned above.

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About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.