So You’ve Found You Struggle With Blog Hopping? Here Are Some Tips To Help Fix That

AHHH GUYS I’M SORRY THAT I HAVE ABANDONED YOU FOR… *looks at calendar nervously* THE LAST TWO WEEKS… But I’m back now and I’m ready to get back into the blogging game with a fun post about *pause for dramatic effect* well why I’m such a failure as a blogger.

More specifically, I’m here to talk about why I find it hard to blog hop, and what you, and also myself, can do if you struggle making time to blog hop.

But firsttttttttt! Let us establish this crazy thing I call “blog hopping”. Blog hopping is pretty simple, it’s when a blogger goes visit other similar blogs to leave some comments and engage in conversation.

This of course doesn’t seem like anything that takes too much effort, so I can see you wondering why I have such a hard time keeping up with it, well honestly, blog hopping just isn’t something that’s usually on my mind. Gosh I feel so bad saying that because there are so many wonderful people with amazing blogs that I want to read and interact with, but I just have such a hard time remembering to actually click through all of these blogs. Blog hopping is such a big part of creating a community around blogging, so I really want to strive to interact with more bloggers this summer then hopefully I can keep it up into the fall once school starts again.

Now that we’ve established why I have trouble blog hopping as well as why it’s important for bloggers, let’s look at ways that one make an effort to blog hop as often as possible.

Let’s start with the method that I’ve recently started using, keeping a blogging tracker in my bullet journal! I’ve recently started a bullet journal so that’s how I’m keeping up with it, but for others this could be as simple as keeping a log of the times that you blog hop in a notebook or your phone. It’s a great method since it gives a blogger the motivation of wanting to blog hop, so they can write it down at the end of the day and feel as if they’ve accomplished something. Personally, I hate when I feel like I’ve wasted a day, so this is the perfect for of motivation for me.

Tip number two: create a routine. The times I’ve been most successful with blog hopping is when I’ve kept to schedule of looking through posts at the same time every day. This gets me in a pattern so that, at the same time every day, I’ll automatically start thinking about looking blogs. This isn’t something I’m doing at the moment, but hopefully I can implement this tip soon.

Option number three: build great friendships on sites such as twitter so you have these amazing blogger friends already on your mind, and you actively want to go see what they’re saying and comment on it. This can be great motivation for you to want to scroll through blogs, so you can participate in the community on other’s blogs and grow a community around your own as well. (Also making friends who share you love for books is a major plus!)

Suggestion four: become active on goodreads! This is similar to what I mentioned above but Goodreads is a community in and of itself and can act as its own simpler form of blog hopping. It’s a great way to just scroll through your own little feed to see what everyone is reading as well as their thoughts on things. Commenting isn’t the best on Goodreads (it’s gotten better tho), but my issues with Goodreads (*cough* it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2009) is a topic for a separate discussion.

I hope these tips helped someone out (but we’ve already established that I suck at blog hopping so why you would listen to me, I have no idea…). If you are somehow a master that knows the secret of blog hopping, let me know because I would love to understand your mysterious ways.