When setting up your blog, there are a couple key items that you should have so that readers can be introduced to you, find a way to contact you and ways to navigate through your blog to find things they are looking for. You may not know it, but even if you are writing a personal journal of your submissive life, people are looking for things that you do or thoughts you have that might help them get insight into their own relationship. So, make it easy on them to travel throughout your site and pick up what they need, and you just might earn yourself a loyal visitor.

About Page

One of the more frustrating things that I've come across when browsing blogs is that they lack much in the way of information about the blogger. Sure, you can read their recent posts about frustration and opinion and what's going on in their lives, but what's really nice is when there is a page dedicated to introducing you to the person behind the blog. For some blogs this is more important than others (and its a personal preference thing about how much authors choose to reveal of who they are) but I find pages without an About page can be quite frustrating. Don’t hide your About Page away. Put it high on your sidebar, menu or in your header. People won’t use it if they don’t see it.

So what should an About Page include?

This is really a matter of personal preference and something I’d like to hear your opinions on but here are a few things I include on some of my blog’s about pages:

• Photo: I like to see some sort of picture of the person I’m reading. I know a lot of you are writing "in the shadows" so a photo isn't always an option, but even if it isn't, some kind of image that speaks to you is nice too.
• Blog objectives: Succinctly sum up the point of your blog. What is it about?
• Introduce Yourself: You probably want to keep your introduction down to a short one – but particularly talk about your experience and why you are writing in this blog.
• Contact Details: Consider giving your readers a way of getting in touch with you. It doesn't have to be your email address, and if it is, try to use one you made specifically for blog contact, a kink profile or a specific page on your blog for direct comments are ways you can connect with people.

Categories and/or Tags

The best way to organize your journal posts is to index them, and for an online blog you do that through either categories or tags (or a combination of the two). But what are they? How do you use them? Let me break it down for you.

Categories are best imagined as a paper filing system. Each page in the system must be filed away in the appropriate drawer. There are only a set number of drawers, and so each must cover a rather wide blanket. The number of categories should be small and each posts should go in only one or two categories.

Think of tags as the colorful little page markers you might use to flick back to your favorite pages in a book. The tags don’t describe the book as a whole, instead, they describe individual sections of the book. The tagging system is useless when the tags you use vary. For instance, if you have a series of posts on writing articles, you could tag them as “journalism,” “writing,” “copywriting,” or a hundred other variations. The important thing is that you choose one of them, and then reuse it on every post you ever write on the topic. The good thing with tags on a personal blog is you can create tags for each person you talk about, so Sir would have a tag, and puppysub will have another tag and so forth. I also tend to tag for punishment and playtime as well as when rules are discussed or some ritual is shown.

When you add these components to your blog, it makes it much friendlier to anyone who reads it and also helps people explore your life through your words. If you have a blog, what other items do you think are important to have?