Welcome to our series on taking blogging to the next level. By now, many of you are no longer blogging beginners, and if you are, there are a ton of resources out there on how to get started and at this stage we won't add to them. Instead, we are going to cover five different areas of advanced blogging. It isn't just about setting it up and writing. If you really want your blog to work for yourself, your reputation and your personal or professional brand, you are probably going to want to start to get serious.
Your blogging strategy
No matter what venture we undertake, there is generally a strategy behind what we do. In business, often the difference between success and failure is whether you have developed a business plan or not and whether you continue to refer to and modify that business plan as time goes on. The number of people who embark on business without a strategy and then float around like Marco Polo, hoping like mad that they actually arrive somewhere but not really knowing where that somewhere might be. It could be the Americas. It could be the edge of the world.
In other ventures, you generally have a strategy also, albeit less structured or formal. If you are going out with friends, your aim may be to have a great night out, or to look for a date, or to really enjoy the new restaurant. If you are making an appearance at a charity ball, your strategy may be to get noticed, or to talk to the organisers or to promote your involvement. You may not be aware that you have a strategy, but I bet more often than not you do.
You may have had a loose strategy when you started your blog. If that's the case, then now is probably the time to smarten that up, formalise things in your own mind and set yourself some measurable goals with steps on how you could get there.
Starting on your strategy
Your blogging strategy needs to answer the following questions:
- How many readers do you want to be regularly subscribing to your blog?
- What industries, demographic, background, influence or interests do you specifically want the majority of your readers to have?
- What do these people really want to know? What information will they find valuable?
- What kind of voice should you be speaking to them in? Is it different to the voice you are using currently?
- How regularly should you be posting? Are your target audience busy executives who may only have time to read one exceptionally well crafted post a week? Or are they lapping up information four times a day?
- What other online mediums do you need to be engaging with to enhance your blog, your expertise, and your reputation?
- What kind of interaction do you want to achieve with your readers? We will be covering how to engage in conversation later in this series, as it is an important part of your strategy
- Would your target audience benefit from guest posts or more regular authors? If so, how are you going to find them?
- Where do you want your blog to be in 12 months time?
Managing your blogging strategy
If you haven't already created a document outlining the answers to these questions, then that is the next step. The reason it is important to have it written down, as with any plan, is that it allows you to check it regularly and see whether you are on track. Let's say, for argument's sake, that you determined that you wanted 10000 regular subscribers in 12 months and you wanted them to be professional women who are juggling work and family. If you monitor your subscriber feeds, you can very rapidly see whether that number is achievable as time goes on. If it isn't, or if the demographic isn't being met, you can adjust your plan or adjust several of your other steps - for instance your marketing, your engagement or your expansion out to other sites.
Reaching the Americas
Ultimately, you are blogging for a reason. It is good to know whether you have succeeded in that purpose or not. Just like a business which goes under due to lack of direction, many blogs disappear or are abandoned due to a lack of direction also. Once the initial excitement of writing it has worn off, without that sense of purpose, it is pretty difficult to keep that momentum going.
The next post in this series is going to be covering Advanced Blogging: Constructive Conversation with your Readers.