Why You Need To Add Hashtags To Your Blog Posts If You Use Bloglovin'

I actually wasn't going to post anything today (today being Sunday) because last week I weekend blogged and I already posted something yesterday - I've got the bug for blogging right now! However I wanted to share this piece of information with you that I only noticed fully last week. 

Plus I realised it would be easy enough to do, as I have my free stock images so I can knock-up an image in seconds!

Basically when you now add 'labels' in Blogger (under 'post settings' when you are writing a new blog post) or 'categories' in Wordpress, they appear as hashtags in your Bloglovin' post thumbnail - you can see an example of this with one of my own blog posts on Bloglovin' below! 

You need to be aware of this for two reasons  

(one good, one bad!) 

1. This means when someone searches for something on Bloglovin' that matches one of your hashtags that blog post will appear (however old it is!) amongst others in the results, titled Top posts in "whatever-they-searched-for", meaning it's got a much better chance of being read and enjoyed - you may even get new followers/readers out of it! So the next time you're blogging about an upcoming holiday for example, tag it as "travel" and maybe even "wanderlust", or say you're writing a personal post about anxiety, label is "anxiety" and "mental health". 

2. There's annoyingly a but, and it's a big but. But there's a problem with Bloglovin's new hashtag feature. It shows up all the labels you choose to categorise your blog posts with (often privately) as hashtags on the site, which you may not want to share with everyone on Bloglovin'. For example I label all my blogging tips posts (well I did up until last week) with "Blogging Tips Series" because that's how I group blog tip posts together so they appear in my categories bar, up there just under my blog header. But now it will appear as #bloggingtipsseries on Bloglovin', which -  A. Doesn't make much sense to my anyone seeing my post on Bloglovin' and it won't ever be a search term, and B. What if I like to use a sh*t ton of labels to categorise my blog but now I'm ending up looking spammy on Bloglovin' with 20 hashtags under each blog post?! 

My Bloglovin' Hashtag Tips

•  If you don't already, start adding labels to every blog post you write
• Only use 3-4 labels/categories if you can help it (no one likes hashtag spam)
• Use keywords that you think someone would search for if they wanted to read a post like yours 
• Try out the updated Bloglovin' search bar to find new content to read - it's so much better! 

As I'm aware Bloglovin' haven't mentioned the fact they have implemented this as a new thang, so I keep seeing lots of blog posts from bloggers with zero hashtags, ones with just the one... clearly what they use to categorise their blog posts with or ones that go label crazy, which now looks like # every-word-they-could-think-of! Not great - another reason why I wanted to write this blog post really to make you all aware!

Overall if used correctly, your blog posts can be found by anyone on Bloglovin' much more easily, which is great news! So get using them labels/categories... just more mindfully from now on! 

Fee xo.