plan tagged:

Blog Challenge 29: Gotta Have a Plan

Posted by in 31DBBB, Blogging


This post is part of my ongoing series based upon the eBook 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. To read all of my other posts on the subject, check out the 31DBBB category. For more on the book itself, visit ProBlogger.

Nearing the end of a month’s worth of exercises to build a better blog, it’s time to plan ahead for what comes after the daily duties are done.

In today’s world of blogging, it’s no longer enough — for most of us — to stay on our own blog. Being successful means spending time on other sites, too. In some cases, that means visiting other blogs and building relationships and contributing to discussions that may draw people to your blog.

In other cases, it means employing social media like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to promote your blog to audiences that may or may not visit your blog as regularly.

But as the text points out, it’s easy to spend 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and another 20 somewhere else, then wonder what you’ve actually accomplished.

The task for today involves several steps:
1. Determine how much time you have for building your blog’s profile.
2. Define your ideal audience.
3. Figure out where that audience is gathering.
4. Brainstorm ways to be present in those locations.
5. Create a plan that accomplishes that presence.
6. Analyze what you’re currently doing.

I’ll take the last one first, Alex.

The current steps I’m taking, for example, mostly involve Facebook and Twitter. Twitter automatically gets a tweet from me when I publish a new post. In addition to that, I write custom tweets to beef that presence up.

Facebook also gets a good bit of my time. This blog has its own fan page — you have liked it, haven’t you? — and I repost many of my current posts there. Once in a while, I also post on my main Facebook profile.

I’m not on Google+ as much, but I’m hoping to change that in 2012.

Where I seem to be getting the most hits from are Facebook, Twitter and a directory of memes. The latter brings a good deal of traffic each week because of the Saturday Six and Sunday Seven.

So focusing on Facebook and Twitter seem fairly reasonable to me. I’m also searching for forums that relate to blogging where I might be able to build a presence there as well.

The real challenge in all of the tasks that involve building a blog through focusing on outside sites is to not take too much time away from the blog itself. That’s a tricky balancing act at times, and it’s important that you don’t shortchange your blog to promote it somewhere else; if you do, no amount of promotion is going to get people to make a second visit once they see what’s waiting for them.