Here’s an awesome little hint for you that I’m going to have to try a bit more often myself.

Next time you go to do a blog post, count the number of sentences in your paragraph.  If you often have more than three sentences in a paragraph, consider breaking your paragraphs down into smaller chunks of text.

What this does, is it increases the amount of white space in your blog, and thus increases the reader’s perception that it’s harder to read, even if you say the same thing.  See, the human eye is essentially lazy, and is drawn to empty space.  The more empty space you have, the “simpler” the blog post appears to read.

It’s always a great idea to take advantage of the natural human element in your blog posts.  If you can work with normal human psychology or physiology to your advantage then you’ve done something you know can’t fail to help your blog.  All human beings react the same way to empty space; it’s a universal trait.  Gaining that edge will give you plenty of help.

You’ll see from above, however, that it isn’t always possible to get that ideal three-sentence paragraph.  Don’t worry too much about that–as long as the majority of your work is in that simple block format you should get more readers, and more engaged readers.

You might wonder what a “blog carnival” is–well, on the surface, you’d think it’s self-explanatory.  A carnival is a gathering of booths and rides and other attractions all in one place for easy access by large numbers of people who then select what they want to see and do from the many available options.

In general, you’d be right.  And this gives you a great opportunity to help your blog’s traffic.

When you enroll your blog in a blog carnival, you basically become a booth in that carnival, allowing people with interests in finance or engineering or movies or celebrity gossip or whatever it is you’re writing about to have a better chance of finding your blog.

If you’re counting on people to find you via Google, you’re going to have a tough run.  Let’s say you wrote a review of the recent Rob Zombie movie, Halloween 2.  you join seven hundred and fifteen thousand others who’ve done the same thing, and that assumes people are searching for the exact phrase “Halloween 2 movie review”.  Leave out the quotes and the number skyrockets to over thirteen million.

Your readers aren’t looking for a needle in a haystack any more–they’re looking for a needle in a stack of needles.  And the chances of them finding YOUR needle…well…one in thirteen million if you leave out the quotes.

So if you want a better chance at being found in the great seething mass of needles that is the blogosphere, consider joining a carnival!

One of the best ways to increase your blogs visibility is to have a link to it from an extremely popular blog. There are two problems with this, firstly, how do you know a blog is really popular and secondly how do you get the link?

First the popularity question. There is a big difference between popularity and traffic. A blog might be very popular amongst a certain niche but not really get that much traffic. Similarly a blog might get a lot of traffic without being known everywhere. So how do you find the right blog for you?

The BlogRank website is a great place to start. It is run by Invsep and allows you to search by category for the blogs that get a lot of traffic. It also allows you to sort those results by other criteria, for example, by number of RSS subscribers. Take a look at these results for Blogging, if you were looking to get a link from a blog in the blogging category this list would be a great place to start.

So having identified the blog or blogs you want to get a link from how do you achieve it. There are two simple ways to do this, the first and easiest is leave a comment. Whilst links in comments are generally “no-follow” links, it will get you a lot of visibility, especially if your comment is well thought out. The second is to really read the blog(s) get a sense of style and writing and then pitch the blog owner a guest post. This will of course get you a lot more visibility but it takes longer.