If you think effective blogging is just about writing what you think and hitting the publish button, think again!
If you want blogging success for yourself or your business, you need to understand what it takes to run a blog that can generate benefits for your business.
There are many moving parts to consider, but for blogs to be an effective means of communication, they must be read. And for blogs to be discovered and read, there needs to be basic blog management in place. The best way to ensure that all of these benchmarks are met is to practice effective blog management.
Let’s take a look at what you need to be successful.
1. Make sure your blog goal is always aligned with your marketing strategy
If you’re serious about blogging, it all starts with planning.
YOU do have a marketing strategy, okay? While hobbyist bloggers may think it’s okay to post things, readership will always be low without a strategy. After all, the best way to keep readers is to make your blog a go-to website for people in your niche. It doesn’t matter what your niche is: it could be anything from business-related topics to hobbies. Either way, there needs to be an incentive for potential readers to spend their valuable time on your website and then spend their valuable money with you.
To that end, you need to have a strategy for increasing traffic. For many bloggers, this includes making their posts search engine friendly enough to be found by people looking to learn about their topic. Another way you can do this is with email marketing, where interested people can join a newsletter that announces what you’ve posted at certain intervals. Finally, never underestimate the power of social networks to promote your blog. This can include paid advertising, self-promotion through organic posts, or a combination of these.
Read on for specific advice on some of these ideas.
Further reading: Why your content marketing strategy isn’t working (and how to fix it)
2. Keyword Research for Your Content Library
Next, it’s important that you know what keywords to use in your blog posts. The best way to do this is by using keyword research tools, such as Ahrefs, MOZ, or SEMRush. Some of the options are paid, while others are free. With each of these tools, you can determine which keywords are hot and which ones might be a good opportunity to compete with less popular ones. However, each keyword you choose should be appropriate for your blog and your niche. Keyword stuffing is poor blog management that may prove irrelevant.
No matter how effective your first set of keywords may be, an established blog still needs an update. After all, search trends change. Who had heard of COVID-19 in 2019? Only a few scientists had done it. Now, the virus is on everyone’s mind. While drastic, this is a good example of why you need to keep up with keyword trends.
Finally, you’ll need to change your keywords as your products and services change. For example, in my own area of expertise we talk a lot about influencer marketing. However, this is a new form of marketing that has emerged in the last five years. When most of us started working in the marketing space, it wasn’t a major option, if it even existed.
3. Editorial Calendar
While it’s great to simply write down your thoughts and post them, this is not an effective way to attract and keep readers. Instead, proper blog management should include developing an editorial calendar. If you’re not familiar with this term, an editorial calendar is a list of topics and content plans, along with when and where you intend to publish them. To that end, I have a host of blog topics that will be written and published as appropriate.
What should be included in an editorial calendar? Topics that address your keyword research and should appeal to many people searching for related keywords. At the same time, you want to target topics with somewhat lower keyword competition. Otherwise, you might be tempted to stuff keywords or other writing “sins.”
Further reading: 12 Free Tools to Create an Effective Editorial Calendar
4. Ideation
One of the biggest problems bloggers face is writer’s block. You know, that moment when writers stare into space because they can’t decide what to write about or how to say what they want to say. Fortunately, there are ways to overcome this problem. As a blogger, you need to be proactive about preventing writer’s block.The easiest way to do this is through ideation. To do this, look around you and see what people are looking for in your space. Once you find some great ideas, add them to your editorial calendar.
Further reading: Are you stumped by blog post topics? This is what your brand should blog about
5. Creating Blog Post Content
Now that you know what you’re going to write about, it’s time to write something. However, you shouldn’t “just write”. Instead, posts should contain an SEO-optimized headline, headline, and description. Also, you’ll want to make sure the content itself is engaging and grammatically correct. Finally, make sure your posts reach your audience where they are.
Further reading: 12 “secrets” to writing quality content for your blog
6. SEO Alignment of Your Blog Post
Of course, SEO doesn’t stop with the preliminaries of your blog post. Rather, effective SEO and blog management involves using SEO tools that ensure that your entire post is easy to read. One of the most common SEO tools is Yoast, which not only takes into account basic SEO concerns, but also readability. Another thing to include is an NLP or AI based tool, like Phrase. With Sentence, you’ll get an idea of how well you’re responding to a reader’s question. Together these tools are highly effective.
Further Reading: Top 10 Tips To Boost Your Blog Post SEO
7. Source or Image Creation
Even the most engaging blog copy needs some images to make it visually appealing. We as humans prefer our world to be colourful. And the images convey a lot of meaning without saying a word. To add images, consider using a free photo and imaging site. However, you will need to make sure that the license allows you to repost the photo. Do you prefer to do something? Try an image editor like Canva. Many of these tools are free, while others are cheap.
8. Publishing and Post Scheduling
As the saying goes, you can’t be everywhere at once. This includes the ability to post your content at the right time of day, especially if you need to consider multiple time zones. Fortunately, some website builders and content managers will allow you to delay publishing. If you use WordPress, then there is an automatic option to publish immediately or later. This choice is made after everything has been added to the post. Other applications may do this differently.
9. Social Media Promotion
An easy way to promote your content is on social media. While everyone has the ability to post links on their profiles, there are other options. One of them is to get a Facebook author page, which allows people to follow your content without exposing personal information. Another way is through paid social networks. Each of the networks allows you to buy ads on people’s feeds, and they are typically shown to people based on keywords. Web cookies also help decide what people see. Finally, encourage people to link to your content and refer people to your website.
Further reading: 10 Ways to Promote Your Blog
10. Outreach and Link Building
There are definitely limits to the “if you build it, they will come” statement. Proper blog management involves getting backlinks from other people, and this takes work. One way to do this is to contact other bloggers and let them know that you featured them on your blog. Another way to do this is by linking to your articles. Over time, these online conversations produce a large number of backlinks.
Further reading: 12 Subject Lines to Improve Blogger Outreach Campaigns
11. Comment Moderation
One thing the most effective blogs have in common is that they invite comments. In this case, I’m referring specifically to the tendency for readers to post their responses to your material in the comments section, not “ask for” them. Unfortunately, there are also many spam comments and other poor quality comments.
Effective blog management is necessary here as well. To prevent these spam comments from taking over your blog, I and many other experts recommend using content moderation. This can be done with a built-in feature on your blog or using a plugin. Either way, be sure to monitor what ultimately gets posted on your blog.
12.Social Media Management
If you’ve read this far, you already know that blogging requires promoting your content on social media. However, do you know what to do when people respond to this promotion? In summary, it is essential that you manage your reputation on social networks. One way to do this is by using social media management programs like Hootsuite or Agorapulse. These will not only help you with publishing, but also help manage traffic through robust analytics.
13. Ranking Tracking
Another thing that will help with blog management is a ranking tracking method. This is a subset of website analytics that will tell you how well your posts are doing in Google rankings. Here, you’ll want to know the rankings of each post, based on the target keyword. In addition to giving you a current ranking, this tracking method will allow you to modify your strategy over time.
14. Performance Analytics
I can’t say this enough: tracking analytics is critical to any blogger’s success. To that end, you should check Google Analytics for your blog regularly. Also, you may want to add other analytics tools to your website. Some of these options will vary depending on whether you blog on your own site or use free tools like Blogger. Your stats to watch include post views, leads, and bounce rate (how many people leave right away).
15. Guest Post Reach
As important as the content you personally write can be, it’s not enough if you want to increase traffic. Instead, part of running your blog should be reaching out to other bloggers in your industry or niche. You should not only compliment what they write, but also talk to them about guest posting. Often bloggers do themselves a favor by posting on opposing blogs. Others have different policies. Either way, you’ll want to make the pitch compelling.
Further reading: How to Invite Influencers to Guest Post on Your Blog
16 . Paid Advertising
Sure, it’s hard to pay for advertising even though you spend a lot of time writing and moderating your blog. However, if you want to grow your blog, paid advertising is usually the way to go. One of the easiest ways to do this is by paying social networks to push your blog posts where people see them. With this approach, a thumbnail of your blog and your image will be placed in one of the ad slots on people’s feeds. By doing this, you can increase the number of views and leads generated by your blog post. Even better, you can get additional leads if people repost the links.
17. Software Updates and Maintenance
No matter which blogging platform you use, it’s important to keep your software up to date. This can be as simple as “accepting” the suggested changes on a platform like Blogger, which updates your blog. Or, if you run a WordPress site, it’s important to run the updates manually. In many cases, the software will notify you if an update is needed for blog management. If not, run an update check on a regular basis, such as monthly.
Further reading: 11 Leading WordPress Maintenance Services to Consider
Especially If you’re just starting out as a blogger, it can be easy to make blogging mistakes. After all, there are many things that you will not think of right away. Feedback and software updates happen without even thinking about it. However, if you don’t stay on top of blog maintenance, you risk having a messy website that people don’t like to hang out on. Worse yet, you could end up with an “empty” site if you don’t have an editorial calendar. Fortunately, growing your website and making it successful is easy if you follow these basic blog management tips.
Did I miss something here? Are any of these tips challenging and need help? Leave me a comment below.
Further reading: What is blog marketing? How can it work for your business?
Featured photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
Blog Management FAQ
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