Someone made a great analogy that privacy on the internet is like ketchup in a bottle: once you let it out, you can’t stuff it back in.

Decide early how much privacy you want to maintain. Do you want to share what city you live in? Your name? Your family member’s names? These are important considerations. Many people choose to err on the side of caution and keep all this information private at first, revealing bits and pieces later as they deem necessary and okay.

There are a number of great articles on blogging and privacy to help you. Here are two:

• Mommy bloggers balance writing and privacy @ SheKnows (by me!)
• Chewing on a blogger’s privacy @ Food Blog S’cool (read the comments)

And FINALLY! Congrats to Viktoria, winner of the Advice for New Bloggers contest – Viktoria, use the contact tab to send me your addy so I can get the book out to you.

What’s your best tip for new bloggers?

Submit your best tip between now and April 5, 2008 April 12, 2008 to sarahDOTcaronATgmailDOTcom and it will appear here on Sarah’s Cucina Bella with a link back to your site.

The entrant with the best tip will receive a copy of Sweet Melissa Baking Book.

Looking for inspiration? Check out my roundup of past tips here.

Blogging is a community, so I opened up Advice for New Bloggers to all of my readers. See below for details and the cool prize you could win by submitting a tip.

Our first tip comes from Vikoria of Cool Swede:

Nothing is too stupid to write about.

Sometimes it is the little things that people want to hear about, the things people can connect to. You don’t have to think about a topic for a week before you blog about it. The randomness can make it more fun. Think about the sitcom “Seinfeld.” It’s supposed to be a show about “nothing,” and it turned into one of the most popular shows around in the 1990s.

With this comes another advice: Don’t be scared to make fun of yourself. It shows that you don’t take life too seriously. Pick some of your silly mistakes and put a happy spin on them. (It is easiest if they happened some time ago).

It’s YOUR Turn!

What’s your best tip for new bloggers?

Submit your best tip between now and April 5, 2008 to sarahDOTcaronATgmailDOTcom and it will appear here on Sarah’s Cucina Bella with a link back to your site.

The entrant with the best tip will receive a copy of Sweet Melissa Baking Book.

A comment on a previous addition of Advice for New Bloggers sparked this little tidbit. Johanna mentioned that one of the advantages of writing on the internet is that you can pop in and edit the post if you find an error (for instance, if you used the wrong word or missed a misspelling).

She is absolutely right.

Unlike in my day job as a magazine editor, there is no such thing as “final finals” — the last, end-all, be-all proofs before we go to press. The internet is a fluid place where you can edit and reedit and edit again to your heart’s content. It’s a beautiful thing. I do it myself – and on older posts (when I was new to the whole blogging thing) as well.

It’s YOUR Turn!

What’s your best tip for new bloggers?

Submit your best tip between now and April 5, 2008 to sarahDOTcaronATgmailDOTcom and it will appear here on Sarah’s Cucina Bella with a link back to your site.
The entrant with the best tip will receive a copy of Sweet Melissa Baking Book. Check back here tomorrow for a Q&A with author Melissa Murphy.

Enter now!

I’ve posted several tips over the last few months. In case you missed any, here they are:

• Define Your Goals
• Be Comment Happy
• Use Spell Check
• Photos Matter
• Quality Over Quantity
• Join In!
• It’s Okay to Take A Break
• Don’t Stress It
• Remember the Edit Function
• Nothing is Too Trivial

I’ve told you many ways to work on delivering a high-quality, high-demand blog. What I haven’t done much of is encourage the other side of blogging, but I really should.

What’s the other side? Having fun. And more importantly, enjoying what you are doing. These things are so, so important too.

Now, I will admit that it’s easy to get caught up in blog stats and increasing traffic. Don’t stress the numbers so much though. First off, free stat programs will often not give you a very clear picture of how many visitors you’re getting or who’s reading. Second, and more importantly, these things rarely happen overnight. Be patient, enjoy your writing, and the numbers will increase.

Sometimes you just have too much going on to focus on blogging along with everything else. Work, family, and other home responsibilities can be stressful and time-consuming. When life gets too busy, it’s okay to take a break. Your readers want the best of you . . . so taking a break can be advantageous to everyone.

Recharge and then return.

And you don’t always need to tell your readers about the break (though I would recommend doing so if it’s going to be an extended break). Use your discretion and avoid making promises (I’ll be back by . . . ) because you can never be 100 percent sure that you can follow through with them.

And yes, I just needed a bit of a break the past few days. See? It happens to everyone.

One of the best things about the food blogosphere is the sense of community that has developed between food bloggers from all over the world. It’s almost like being in one great big global neighborhood of people with like interests. But as a new blogger, how do you get to know your new “neighbors”?

When I started blogging I wasn’t sure. But then I learned about food events hosted by different blogs. Intrigued, I entered a dish in a Sugar High Friday event. Then I learned about Weekend Herb Blogging and ARF/5-A-Day Tuesdays. I joined in for both. Since then, I have taken part in countless events and virtually met a good deal of great food bloggers.

So, if you want to be a part of the community, start joining in events. You never know who’ll you’ll meet.

There are two great resources for finding them: Is My Blog Burning? and Sticky Date.

This one is pretty simple.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to produce a lot of content for the sake of doing so. Maybe you think it will drive more traffic to your site or perhaps you think that it will help you to gain credibility in the blogosphere faster. Lots of bloggers, myself included, have fallen into that trap at one time or another. But when I looked back at the breadth of quantity content I created, it was no where near as good as the quality content I created before and after that point.

Posting every day is great, but it can drain you — especially if you have 50 million other things going on in your life. Take it slow, write every piece with thought and care (and don’t forget those photos!) and your blog will be something to be proud of.

See? Simple.

I was stumped about what to talk about next. Fortunately Cate from Sweetnicks came to the rescue with a great idea: photos.

So, you are just starting out and trying to figure out this whole blogging thing, right? Figuring out what to post about and when to post and what to say is hard enough, but you need to take pictures too? Come on!

No, you really do need photos, particularly if you are a food blogger. People want to see your food. And they want to know what to expect when they make it. And, if nothing else, there are a lot of us out there who love food porn (heads out of the gutters, please. That means tasty looking pictures of food. Geez.).

It’s no secret that I am still learning the ropes of food photography myself. I’ve learned the hard way that the best photos happen during the day in natural sunlight and that at night, it’s very important to make sure you have enough lighting. Keeping the camera still helps, and the darker it is, the more important that becomes.

Do you need a fancy camera? No. It helps, but you don’t have to have one. The first trick is to learn to use the camera you have. No matter how many pixels it is, figure out how to take the best photos with the equipment you have. (And it’s a good idea to read that pesky manual. It actually does help.) And when you are ready, upgrade.

So what do I shoot with? I have a very handy and tiny Sony Cybershot that is great for taking inconspicuous photos (like in public). Until recently though, my main camera was an 8 megapixel Canon ProShot Pro1. Although it isn’t made anymore, the PowerShot Pro1 is a powerful camera that takes great pictures when used correctly. It was really great for getting the hang of taking still life photos.

For Christmas this year, I upgraded. I was ready for more. And gosh, I love my new camera. It’s a (squeak of excitement) 10 megapixel Canon Digital Rebel XTi. Talk about power. But this is a camera that you need to spend time learning how to use right (thank you, Sonja, for helping me!). When used properly, the photos come out in exquisite detail (see above). There are better camera bodies, but this is right for me now. It’s like learning to ride a bike – you don’t go from training wheels on a Huffy to a giant Harley, so why would you do that with your camera?

If you are really serious about taking great photos, you may also want to invest in a Photo Studio in a Box. This handy, dandy box and lighting helps to make your photos look more professional with the perfect amount of shadow and highlights and a non-competing background. Cate tells me that they fold nice and flat so it won’t overtake a room in your house or anything. (This is next on my upgrade list.)

For photo editing, I used to use Microsoft Picture It! Premium 10, but really it wasn’t powerful enough for my needs. These days I have upgraded to Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, which is plenty powerful enough for beginner to intermediate photographers.

Need some more advice? Here are some good resources:

• The Food Photo 101 series from Nika’s Culinaria
• Still Life With …’s 2007 Guide to Food Photography Gear
• Matt Bites’ Notes About Photography