Over the last two years I’ve increased the time I’ve spent on my blog, particularly writing posts. By spending more time here and looking at other people’s I’ve noticed there are many opportunities for me to improve my blog. But where to start?
Why I want to improve my blog
Blogging is no longer just about writing. Other activities involve promoting posts and communicating through social media, dealing with themes, plugins and spam, and taking and editing photographs and videos to include in posts. I’ve learnt a lot from spending time in the blogging community, but I’ve often applied these learnings in a random, haphazard way; responding to something I’ve seen or issues I’ve had. I feel that I’m missing some very basic things that would make my blogging time easier and smoother.
There are many different aspects of my blog and blogging technique I would like to improve. I believe I’m slow at writing posts and would like to become more efficient and focussed. My actual blog needs some serious maintenance and perhaps a complete overhaul, this theme is now four years old and probably doesn’t fit with current good practice or trends.
So to avoid continuing with this haphazard approach means making a plan, and I love making plans.
Creating the plan
My first step was to collect a list of areas I want to improve. I originally started by looking at the chapters in 31 Days to a Better Blog, a book I’ve had for several years but not finished. However, I didn’t think this list covered everything, so next I went to Pinterest and looked through the pins on my blogging board and identified several additional areas. That gave me 17 areas:
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blog design
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building communities
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business plan
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editorial calendar
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goals
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maintenance
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media kit
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monetisation
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niche
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organisation / productivity / efficiency
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pages
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photographs
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promotion
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social media
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stats
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video
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writing posts
Initially, I thought it would be possible to work on the areas in any order, but once I started to think about what actions I may do for each area I realised it would be more efficient to focus on some areas before others. So time to turn the list into a process.
The plan
These are the steps in my plan. Of course, I know it is not as simplistic as it appears and there are going to be repeating loops that aren’t shown as I expect I’ll want to spend time improving some areas more than once. Plus I accept there are probably more interlinkages between the different steps than I’ve shown, but I’m happy with the diagram for now because it provides a much clearer overview on how to approach my blog than I’ve been able to visualise until now.
Implementing the plan
My idea is to focus on one step at a time, probably for a month. I’m going to read different views on the topic, work out what works for me and then start implementing ideas.
I’m also hoping other people will want to join in and we will be able to support each other by providing advice and bouncing ideas around. Therefore I’ve created a community on Google+ where I hope the discussions will become a useful resource for other bloggers. Of course not everyone will want to follow my diagram, so I’ve added a poll for the different themes so we can choose the most popular each month. I also intend to create group boards on Pinterest so we can collate and share the best information we’ve found (hopefully acting as an encouragement for us to actually read what we’ve pinned).
Of course, I’m better at creating plans then following them… but I seriously hope there will be a noticeable improvement here over the next few months.
Do you want to join me? If so, come and visit the Better blog support group.
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