5 Blogging Goals

Do you blog to market your practice? To be successful in that regard you must have some plan of action, without a plan your blog is a ship without a rudder, and you are never going to hit your target. Grant Griffiths runs a great blog called Blog For Profit. Recently he posted an action plan for success in blogging. Here are his 5 blogging actions:

1. Posting Frequency: Perhaps one of the most overlooked and most important actions bloggers need to do is to remember to post regularly to their blogs. If I had my wish, every business that is blogging, would post daily. However, I know this is not possible. You need to pick a weekly schedule which works for you. Whether that is daily or 2 to 3 times a week. The important thing to do is to pick a frequency of posting and stick to it. What you need to remember is your readers are going to come to expect some type of frequency. And once you establish this, you need to stick with it.

   If there is one area that might just affect your blogs success more than another, it just might be consistent posting. Set a schedule, stick to it and you will be well on your way to reaching those blogging goals.

2. Blog Design and Brand: Have you considered if your blog’s design and layout will help or hurt you as you strive to reach those blogging benchmarks you have set for yourself? This might just be the summer you need to get that new design done. Whether you decide to hire a firm to do this for you or you look at getting a new theme, take a step back and look at your blog. Even better yet, ask some of those individuals you trust to give you an opinion of your blog’s design and layout. Is it easy on the eye and easy to read? By getting a fresh set of eyes to look at your blog, you will get a clearer picture of whether you need to get that redesign ASAP.Additionally, is this a good time to not only get a new design, do you need to get a whole new brand. If a new design is in order, now is the best time to get a new, fresh brand. Get something unique to you and what you are trying to project to your target audience. Does the blog’s appearance match up to what you are trying to project with your business? If not, get it done and get it done before the end of February so you can hit the road running.

   If you are struggling with the whole process of hiring a designer, get Michael Martine’s great book, How to Start a Business Website and Hire a Web Designer.

3. F.L.E.E.: Ask yourself if you are doing those activities you need to be doing which will make your blog successful. Revisit our ongoing series on Building a Successful Blog. Re-evaluate whether you are following the F.L.E.E. process of blogging.
   • Find the conversations
   • Listen to the conversation
   • Engage in the conversation
   • Enpower or Eable your readers to get involved in the conversation too

   Make sure you are doing all of those activities and providing the means for your readers to do the same. The F.L.E.E. actions will help you get your blog noticed too, which is also important to your blog’s success.

4. Start a Newsletter: If you are not using an opt-in on your blog to build a mailing list, do it. And in the process, start a newsletter to provide additional information to your target audience. You need to make sure you are providing value to your readers. Value that will keep them coming back for more. Additionally, setting up and starting to collect a mailing list is a great way to build a list of people who know and follow you. A list you can even market to and best of all, they actually expect you to. One of the best tools I have found for setting up and sending out an email newsletter is MailChimp. MailChimp is very cost effective and it works great.
5. Use Social Media: I started to use twitter roughly 6 months ago. And I can honestly say my traffic to this blog has more than doubled. In fact, twitter is now the top referrer of traffic, even before Google. Don’t overlook the effectiveness of social media tools like twitter. Twitter is certainly one of the tools you can use to grow your blog and get just one more step closer to meeting those blogging goals you have set. You should also be looking at the other social media tools like, FaceBook and LinkedIn. Neither of these take a huge amount of your time and you can even take advantage of the tools they offer to streamline your efforts. You can feed your blog post to both of them. Which will expand your sphere of influence even more. Not only that, you can set up a “group” or a specific page to promote your blog and your business. Social media is a powerful tool, use it.

These are just some of the actions you can take to make sure you blog reaches the goals you have set for it. If you have others you are using or know of others, please leave a comment with your suggestions. Lets keep the conversation going and lets all make sure we reach our blogging goals.

Please click here for Grant's original article.

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