A Monthly Checklist to Keep Your Blog On Track

Give your business blog appropriate time and attention and it will reward you for your efforts. By contrast, neglect it and it may bring you nothing but bother.

The problem being that while so many business blogs start out great, their respective ‘owners’ sooner or later begin letting things slip. It becomes less of a priority, quality begins to slide and the benefits it once brought to the business slowly but surely disappear.

Which is why it’s a good idea to perform on-going health checks on your blog, just to ensure it and you are doing your jobs properly. It doesn’t have to be difficult – simply get into the habit of working with the following monthly checklist and you’ll find it much easier to keep your blog on track:

Interpret Data

First of all, owning and operating a blog – even a successful one – isn’t enough. If your blog is successful, you need to find out why and capitalise on whatever it is you are doing right. If it isn’t successful, you need to know what you are doing wrong and change things accordingly. Or if it’s ok but could certainly be improved, the same applies. Reviewing analytics and working with the data you collect should represent one of the most important core duties in the operation of your business blog. If it doesn’t, you are effectively grasping blindly in the dark and have no idea how or why your blog is performing as it is.

Rank Entries

When dealing with data, take a good look through your most successful entries for the month or year to date, in order to rank them in terms of performance. It’s crucially important to keep a log of your successes and failures in terms of entries and headlines, in order to determine what your target audience members do and do not respond well to. Focus on things like number of shares, time spent on each article, number of clicks, bounce rates and so on. This way, you’ll have yourself something of a blueprint mapping out the most successful posts/titles for your blog.

Itemize Content
Variety is the spice of life – something that applies to blog management just as much as anything else. In order to ensure that you are providing your readers with sufficient variety, it’s good to get into the habit of itemising content. For example, establish headers like video tutorials, infographics, podcasts, lists, opinion pieces and so on, checking each month that each category has been given sufficient attention.

Strategize for Next Month

Last but not least, once you have taken care of all of the above, you will have all the information you need to develop a near guaranteed winning strategy for next month. The worst thing you can do with any blog is to simply make things up as you go along. The more strategic you are and the more you base your strategies on the data you collect, the higher the likelihood of next month being even more successful for both your blog and your business.

Should I be blogging for my business?

Once upon a time, blogging was just for journalists, fashionistas, foodies and other people who though the world needed to hear what they had to say. Though bloggers became very influential, they remained within the ‘bloggosphere’ and few large corporations jumped on the blogging bandwagon.

Fast forward a few years however and things are very different. Thanks to the impact of social media and the influence of Google’s updated algorithms, blogging is now very much a tool for business. In fact, blogging is now so effective your company can no longer afford to ignore its power.

Google

If you’re trying to improve your company’s SEO and boost your URL up the Google rankings, incorporating a regular blog into your website is an absolute must. For a while now, Google has been favouring sites that keep their content fresh. Adding a weekly or monthly blog to your site shows Google that you’re maintaining and updating it. A blog is also an excellent chance to add more keywords to your site and fill it with information rich links and images.

Social media

Social media is an incredibly powerful - and affordable - marketing tool. Used properly, social media helps you to connect with your clients, build a personality for your company and create a loyal customer base. If you add a blog to your site, you can promote it on social media and show your customers that you’re an active participant in the network.

If your blog is interesting and relevant enough, the members of your social network will like and share it, boosting brand awareness and giving your business high quality marketing for free.

Growing your business

As well as being good for your company image, blogging is also great for business. A whopping 60% of companies who blog acquire more customers, a statistic that even the most cautious business owners can’t afford to ignore.

Building a relationship with customers

A blog is a great way to create a dialogue with customers and to build a solid business relationship. Through a blog, customers can get to know your company, your products and your services, ensuring that you’ll be the first name they think of next time they’re looking for anything you offer.

A blog also shows that you’re an authority in your area, giving existing and potential customers confidence in your abilities.

If you’re one of the many businesses that hasn’t yet embraced the blog, now’s the time to begin

Latest Research Revealed By Technorati Media: - Why Your Business Must Have A Blog

Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influence Report is hot off the press – and its findings might just surprise you.

The report surveyed 6000+ influencers, 1200 consumers and 150 marketing companies to produce a series of valuable insights that could assist your marketing efforts considerably.
As business owners, we are constantly reminded that building strong relationships is key to producing great outcomes in terms of sales and peer recommendations. And Technorati’s latest research confirms that more consumers are turning to blogs rather than favouring social networks like Facebook and Twitter when looking to make purchases (both online and off).

Although blogs have traditionally been considered trusted sources of information, now that level of trust has moved one step closer to the marketplace, with consumers seeking the opinions of influential blogging communities before reaching for their credit cards.

And while we’re on the subject of communities, the research team found that half of the consumers surveyed believed smaller communities to be more influential sources of recommendations than larger communities.

This is interesting, as frequently we have witnessed some of the major global brands attempting to literally explode the size of their online communities by using the influence of a ‘major player’ in blogging circles, believing this to the path to greatness.

Could it be actually, that a more direct path to greatness could involve building smaller, more exclusive communities, with a team of strong personal influencers on board whose purpose is to attract highly prized members to the clan? The point being, that the popularity of an A-list blogger, say, isn’t necessarily indicative of trust.

Equally, there may be many lesser known bloggers whose influence over their smallish communities is such that forming a good working relationship with these people could prove a real asset to your business (a mutually beneficial one naturally).

The survey showed that 86% of key influencers blog and 88% of those blog for themselves. What is also interesting is that 59% of those surveyed use blogging as virtually their only digital content platform. For these committed blogging folk, the only true indication of success comes from more and more people reading their content.

So the number one priority for business bloggers has to be winning the trust of their audience – and getting people talking about them.

Ideally this process should happen long before products and pricing get a mention.

Successful blogging has always been about providing content people want to read and engage with. Keeping this maxim front of mind when creating a marketing strategy for your blog will help you target the right influencers in the right way – and get great results too.