How To Build a Successful Tumblr Blog
Why bother?
There are already multiple tried and tested blog platforms that people have come to trust over time. The chances are that you regularly visit several blogs hosted on blogger and wordpress (hosted, or self hosted). Both have been established for many years now and most site owners would never consider moving their site away to a different, newer hosting platform. I don't disagree. There is little reason to move an already successful blog to a platform like tumblr. However if you are thinking of starting a new blog it might be worth considering creating it there. Already countless big names have launched tumblr offshoots designed to feed into their main site (Life Magazine, Time etc.)
Tumblr is essentially part traditional blogging platform, part social network. It features all of the common blogging features you've become accustomed to and adds a strong community aspect too. This manifests itself in the ability to 'reblog' other peoples' posts, and if you feel the need, to add your own visual or text based contributions to the reblogged content. Some items are reblogged many thousands of times, and many of those viewing the reblogged post will check out the original source, resulting in more people following your blog. Many popular tumblrs have tens of thousands of followers meaning that the scope for posts going viral is significant. Tumblr is fast growing and one of the top 50 most popular web properties worldwide, so there's a big audience to tap into.
Tumblr.com Traffic Rank
Gaining Popularity
Custom Domains
I would suggest that you go the custom domain route. Most tumblr blogs are hosted on a subdomain (username.tumblr.com) so adding a memorable domain name in place of this (example here: funny pictures) can give you a distinct advantage over the competition. It looks more professional too and should you choose to move to another blogging platform in future this is easier to achieve when you own the domain the content points towards.
Followers
A surefire way to attract interest is to 'follow' similarly themed blogs. If you follow, say 50 blogs along the same lines as your own, several of those site owners are likely to follow you back. This will widen your sphere of influence, increasing reblogs in the process. Make sure you add a fair numbers of posts before you follow other blogs, else they'll be less likely to follow back. You can currently follow 5000 tumblr blogs in total and be followed by an unlimited number.
Image Posts
Tumblr is especially suited to image posts. There are lots of funny pictures blogs on the network partly due to the site demographics. Nothing stands out more on a users dashboards (the area where tumblr users see new posts) than funny or striking images. That's not to say that people don't use tumblr solely for picture free text posts, but if you want to attract a tumblr following, rather than solely those outside of tumblr, a visual perspective does help.
Descriptive Tags
When starting out on tumblr it's important to try to draw visitors in. You can add descriptive tags to each post, and users of the service can then see your posts when they're performing a search. For a politically themed news update tags like "news, breaking news, cnn, politics" might be appropriate, whereas for an image post of a cat, tags like "funny pics, funny pictures, cat, cats, funny animals" would be more appropriate. Certain tags are monitored by tumblr meaning that frequently reblogged posts are sometimes highlighted on the popular posts pages.
Themes
Aside from drawing people in with your content, it's also easy to install different themes from the official tumblr theme garden. The one click install system means that you can radically change the appearance and functionality of your blog in seconds. There are pay themes too but the vast majority are free and there are well over 1000 tumblr themes to choose from at this moment in time. Once you've installed a theme you can make alterations to it using the 'edit html' option. I find that it's useful to locally backup any changes that you make to a theme.
Quick Tips
Update Frequently - Look for fresh, funny and interesting material and reblog material that you feel is going to go viral.
Get Involved - Ask and answer questions. Becoming an active part of the community you wish to play a significant role in will improve visitor loyalty.
Show Your face - Some of the most busy tumblr blogs have a personal touch to them. Often the blog will be a hybrid of both funny and/or interesting reblogged content mixed in with personal posts..
That about covers it. Get tumblin'
Comments
Thanks for your contribution avamillicent.
Very interesting and useful information! I've never looked into Tumblr Blogs but now I might have to. I've just started blogging and a change sooner rather than later would be a good thing. Thanks for sharing!
I've never looked at tumblr either. Thanks for the info. Voted up, useful and interesting.
Thanks so much for the positive feedback.
Hey... Nicely put together, and informative. I don't use either... If i understood, the advantage of t over b is the community aspect... how does b compare in this respect, does it come close or not available period?
You can follow blogs with blogger.com too, but it's much more limited in scope. Tumblr is certainly much more social than blogger or wordpress. On the downside it can take a long time to build up a following and it might be more suitable for some types of blogs than others. There are lots of entertainment themes tumblr blogs aimed at teenagers who find it a convenient way to share funny pictures and videos.
I think I'll write another post sometime relating to how best to use tumblr to compliment an existing site or group of sites.
I have just launched my blog www.zacharyjonah.tumblr.com, and this is really helpful as I didn't really have a proper strategy
Thank you
Very interesting!
Thanks Nicky!
Thanks for this hub! I've wondered what Tumblr is for a while and how it's different from other blogging sites, and your hub gives a concise, clear explanation. Voted up, useful, and interesting!
Thanks very much for taking the time to comment :).
Hiya I have a number of Blogs on Blogger and I did set one up on Tumblr but it got suspended due to the number of re-directs ( message 404 ) and I don't know why. It was going to be good as well. Any Ideas as to what went wrong?
Glad you did this hub and is very timely for me.
Hi poshcoffeeco, can you provide me with further information? What exactly do you mean when you say it got suspended due to a number of redirects? And who suspended it? Tumblr? Hopefully when I have a better understanding of the situation, I might be able to come to some kind of conclusion as to what has happened.
This web page has a redirect loop
The web page at http://www.tumblr.com/suspended has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.
Here are some suggestions:
Reload this web page later.
Learn more about this problem.
Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects
The above message is what I see when I try to get into Tumblr.com from Google chrome
The page linked is the default page for all suspended domains. I'm not sure how this problem has come about but there is a suggestion here for how to solve the problem:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201
So is the problem currently that you can't even log into tumblr due to this redirect issue? If so, hopefully the above suggestion will help. If not, maybe you could try logging in using a different browser, just to test if that is the issue? Let me know if this helps :).
I was looking for specific information on Tumblr and you gave it to me. Good job. Voted up.
Waw, what an informative and descriptive hub about tumblr, amazing that this is your first hub my first hub was nothing near to this which incourage me to read more of your hubs. Between me and you if I knew that you have this amazing article about tumblr I wouldn't publish the half informative hub I have just don't tell anybody. Thanks for sharing and voted up.
From so much for your positive comments. I did put a lot of effort into this hub because I wanted to make sure that I got off to a good start on hubpages. I'm not really the fastest writer in the world so it took a while to put together. That makes it all the more satisfying when others leave encouraging comments like yours.
This is your first hub? Wow. Nice start. Your efforts are really showing up in this hub. You seemed very fast at producing hubs. Currently, your stats shows that you've been here for 3 weeks and you've already produced 8 hubs. Keep producing more of them.
By the way, I voted this one up.
rLcasaLme - Many thanks for your comment. I do feel that I've made a good start on hubpages. Your comment has reminded me to get working on another hub, as I haven't created one in a week or so :).
Never knew THIS was your first Hub - gotta admit, it's a great start! I'll be sure to look into Tumblr and invest some time in learning more about it! ^^
Thanks for your kind words, John. It's funny how many people are shocked that this is my first hub. I did put quite some time into it, so I'm so happy that people have found it to be useful to them.
That was your first? Wow, your're a natural. Great information and well written hub on how to build a successful tumblr blog. Keep up the good work.
Such kind words. Thanks very much for contributing. I might do a follow up hub at some point with more tumblr tips :).
Just getting started and have a lot of unanswered questions I could find no answers to on the site. It's the most confusing site to set up I've tried. One thing I'm curious about is that many people on pininterest have pinned material with a tumblr address, but when I try to pin something from my own tumblr blog, its says the images aren't large enough to pin. The are bigger than some others I've successfully pinned in other places, so I just don't get it.
Tumblr is one of those platforms that can seem difficult early on, but I find it to be very user friendly and easy to use. You can basically either write your own posts or reblog other peoples content. It's quite intuative. I say stick with it for a bit and see how you get on. If you have any specific questions I'll be happy to try to answer them here.
Unfortunately, I'm not a pinterest user so it's hard for me to know what the issue is therer. I do notice that lots of people add pages from some of my tumblr sites on pinterest though, so it must be possible.
I think I've got Tumblr figured out now and I've started three blogs there. It's a more convenient platform, since the blogs can be very short or mostly pictures. I have one general blog, and two in more specialized areas. I did manage finally to pin a picture from one of them on Pinterest, which simply may not have been working right the first time I tried.
That really is great, WannaB Writer. I wish you the greatest success with your tumblr blogs. It still seems to be growing as a platform with more and more people getting involved.
I've been using tumblr since 2009 and I must say, these are great tumblr tips! Thank you for sharing
Thanks very much for your kind words, craftycain. I'm glad you found the hub to be worth reading :).
icountthetimes 6 months ago
This is my first hub so go gentle on me :). Any advice is appreciated.