Thursday 24 January 2013

The Complete To-Do List for Bloggers



Without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most important tasks for any blogger is the creation of quality content. Quality content remains priority number 1, numero uno!

But here’s the thing about blogging: there’s a lot more involved in blogging than just creating quality content! Yes, content creation is priority-one, it is by far the biggest responsibility of any blogger. And quality content is the hallmark of a good blog, what will eventually make or break it. However the simple fact is that it doesn’t stop there, and there’s a whole lot more involved in creating and having a successful blog!

So what is that makes a blog successful? What is it that defines a successful blog? What do you need to do, apart from creating excellent content in order to ensure that your blog stand out?

Create Quality Content

Let’s start off with the basics: Creating quality content remains your priority, and should be your primary focus as well. Your content is the single-biggest reason why people come to your blog, and in order to be able to get direct and organic traffic to your blog on a continuous basis, you need to be able to produce and put up content that is: (a) valuable, (b) of extremely high-quality, (c) well-researched, (d) well-thought-out, (e) informational, (f) relevant to your niche, and (g) unique.

Marketing your Posts

The thing about content is that it creating quality content (as defined using the parameters listed above) is only half the story. The other half entails actually getting the word out, and marketing the content! What you’re looking for is organic (search engine traffic), traffic from campaigns (such as email subscription), traffic from backlinks, and of course, direct traffic. Getting traffic from different sources involves marketing your posts, creating backlinks on different sources, working on increasing your exposure as well as building your authority. This will be an essential part of your ‘to-do’ list!

Working on Blog Design

One of the things that you’ll need to look at from time to time, is how you can improve and enhance the design of your blog, and tweak some of its design elements in order to improve things. Most bloggers, from what I’ve seen, get a basic design up when they create a new blog, and continue to tweak certain elements of the blog and improve certain design-related elements – without making any big changes too frequently. Try finding a good theme or design layout for your blog, and stick with it. It doesn’t need to be flashy; in fact, minimalist is often the best way to go! As a photography enthusiast, I often frequent the popular website Ken Rockwell, and this website is the best-possible example of what a good ‘minimalist’ website looks like!

Establish a Strong Social Media Profile

When you’re not working on writing posts or producing excellent content for your blog, you should consider establishing a strong social media presence for yourself, or strengthening your social media authority. Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest and LinkedIn, to name a few, are proven to bring massive amounts of traffic to blogs and websites, and especially targeted traffic. Social media provides you with a fantastic opportunity to build backlinks to your blog, and it can be very productive if you can harness the power of this platform!

Update and Republish Old Posts with New Info

Look at some of your old posts from time to time. See if some of them can be updated or not. Chances are that new information can probably be added to the old post, and you could probably add that update and republish that post. Or perhaps you could build upon that post by writing a ‘Part II’ for it. Or maybe you did an old post that suddenly became relevant again (such as a Christmas post, for instance) which could be republished for your new viewers and readers.

Improve your SEO

Search Engine Optimization – the practice of optimizing your blog/website for search engines such as Google – is an essential part of any blogger’s responsibilities. If you want more exposure, more traffic, more sales, better revenues, better visibility and a better blog, you need to invest time to learn SEO, implement some of the SEO best-practices to your blog, and strengthen certain elements of your blog on a continuous basis. Spend time to learn about what SEO is (if you don’t already know), how SEO affects blogs and websites, and look at some of the ‘SEO-best-practices’ which you could implement on your blog.

Guest Blogging

Have you looked at guest blogging opportunities in your niche? If you haven’t not only should you do so, but you should also schedule your time and set aside a certain amount of your blogging time for writing featured/guest posts on other authority and high-PR blogs. Personally, I’m a big proponent of guest blogging, and I’ve spoken about some of its advantages on numerous occasions on this blog. Guest blogging on authority blogs provides you with exposure, high-PR backlinks, and helps build your authority in your niche, to name just a few of its benefits.

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