No matter how good a blogger you are, there is always room for improvement. The best bloggers understand this and make it their business to establish habits that keep their content marketing efforts strong and lucrative. If you follow these steps, you will be setting your blog up for increased engagement and long-term success, and that success will actually spill over into other areas of your business. How? Read on and find out.
1. The Best Bloggers Optimize Their Productivity
It’s difficult to maintain a good blog when your day is filled with distractions that keep you from getting the job done. When most people start feeling pinched for time in their business, their blog is often one of the first things that get neglected. This is strange considering just how much of an impression your blog makes on site visitors and potential customers.
If you find yourself constantly putting your blog on the back burner, the first thing you need to do is identify where the roadblocks are originating and eliminate them. Start utilizing some good productivity software or productivity apps to help you get things more organized.
2. The Best Bloggers Have a Content Strategy
It’s not about “what do I feel like writing about this week?” It’s about, “what’s next on the agenda for the blog?” For some business people, this is the biggest sticking point. If you take the time to develop a content strategy, it might not even be necessary to maintain the blog on your own. You might even consider outsourcing some or all of the content development work from images and other media to the actual writing of the blog posts.
3. The Best Bloggers Stick to Their Routines
Having a routine really is the foundation of optimizing productivity. Without that, you can’t predict when or how often your blog is going to be updated. It’s also very difficult to adhere to a content strategy without a routine.
Once you commit to habit #1 and #2, #3 is where those plans will take root. If you’re writing your blog yourself, set aside time to do it and do it when it’s time. If you’re working with a copywriter, work with the same one for as long as possible, get your topics/titles to him or her consistently, and be sure you’re working with someone who takes deadlines seriously.
4. The Best Bloggers Know When They Are Most Creative and Productive
If you are writing your own blog, figure out when during your day the creative juices are flowing most freely then capitalize on that time. If you’re outsourcing the writing, you still need to come up with topics or titles, and that, too, requires being at a creative advantage if you want to come up with good ones. This principle holds true for everything that makes up your day.
Part of optimizing productivity is recognizing the best times during your day to do everything related to your business, so pay attention to how you’re doing things, when you’re doing them, and the overall quality of your work at different times during the day. Your entire business will thank you for it.
5. The Best Bloggers Care About Audience Feedback
Don’t be afraid to enable and solicit comments from your readers. You can gauge the effectiveness of your blog with a much finer point through reader feedback than you can through monitoring your analytics or gauging it by monetization. Even a terrible blog can make money, but a great blog can make lots of money. If you want to know which parts are keeping you from maximizing your monetization efforts, ask your readers. They will tell you.
6. The Best Bloggers Are Their Own Biggest Critics
A good blogger takes all the elements of each of the previous five habits and uses them to create or reinvent his or her objectives whenever necessary. No matter what the topic of your blog might be, there is always more than one way to approach it and present it to your readers. Don’t be afraid of change. In fact, a willingness to make adjustments is necessary if you want your blog to be successful.
The Final Takeaway
If you noticed, all six of these habits form a cohesive unit. They are all gears in an intricate machine. Take one of them away, and the rest come to a halt. It is important to realize that blogging isn’t just about words on a page. It’s about representing your brand the best way possible. Being committed to maximizing your productivity, having a good plan and sticking to it, knowing when you’re at the top of your game creatively, and constantly striving to be better are all vital elements to creating a successful blog.