Chapter 23

Ten Things All Bloggers Should Do

The 22 chapters before this one cover every blogging topic that you might imagine, from choosing your site's URL to monetizing your writing. Now you may be asking, what else is there? Beyond the topics covered in depth throughout this book, you can tap into a vast variety of tips and tricks that can take you to the next level or even help you settle in happily where you are right now. In the interest of space and time, I cover ten of these pointers in this chapter and leave you with your blogging career to discover and enjoy the rest.

Discover Your Voice

Are you the life of every party? When people describe you, do they begin with the word “funny”? Or do you consider yourself to be quiet and reflective? Perhaps you're known within your circle of friends or family as the go-to person for useful information or helpful tips.

Your blog is an extension of you, and discovering your blog voice is a bit like discovering yourself. Many bloggers struggle in the first weeks (or months or years!) to find their blogging voice. It's also quite common for bloggers to travel far down their blogging path before deciding to change their writing style.

As you begin thinking about your blogging voice, ask yourself what you want your readers to know and feel about you. Do you want your blog to mimic an informational website, perhaps sharing product reviews or the latest news? Or would you like to treat your site as an online journal, sharing every bit of yourself?

It is not at all uncommon for bloggers to struggle as they find their blogging voice and gain the courage to write freely. However, after you've discovered your voice, blogging will become magically easier and suddenly more enjoyable.

Stoke Your Muse

When I began my personal blog, Resourceful Mommy (www.resourcefulmommy.com), I was a full time stay-at-home mom parenting a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old. My days were filled with playdates and diaper changes. Much of my early writing focused on the products that got us through our days, the questions I had as a young mother, and the concerns I had about life after full-time mothering as my oldest headed off to kindergarten.

Five years later, my life is radically different, and naturally, my writing is as well. For example, we spend far more time traveling with our now easy-breezy elementary kids, so you're likely to find more traveling tips and tricks than ways to get your little one down for a nap. Also, rather than write about what I want to be when I grow up — or at least as my kids begin to — I now own a full-time business and write for a living.

Even though much has changed in my life, what hasn't changed completely is my blogging muse. My children have always been a main inspiration to me and a source of much of my content fodder. Similarly, as my husband and I journey through our second decade of marriage, our relationship inspires many post ideas. Finally, time for introspection remains a primary muse as I set out to write honestly and thoughtfully about my life.

Were I to focus only on my blog and not remember to take time for my family and myself, my muses would be neglected and, consequently, my content would suffer. As you work hard to bring your blog to the place you want it to be, don't forget to take time to stoke the muse that inspired you to write in the first place.

Survey Your Readers

Although I touch on this topic briefly in Chapter 22, it is worth revisiting the idea of surveying your readers from time to time. Unless you are blogging solely for you and care nothing about growing or fostering your readership — which is absolutely fine, by the way — you should take time periodically to connect with your readers to get their thoughts on your blog.

Some bloggers like to keep an open, ongoing survey that is always available, not unlike a feedback box in a place of business. A link to such a survey can be included at the end of posts, within your RSS feed (see Chapter 16 for more about RSS), or even as a widget in your sidebar. You may choose to check in with your bloggers once or twice a year instead, devoting an entire post to reader outreach.

Typical reader questions may include:

• Age
• Location
• Education level
• Gender
• Favorite post topics
• Interest in blog giveaways and contests
• Preferences for blog subscription method

Creating such a survey is a rather easy pursuit, with tons of free surveying tools available. One popular tool is Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com), which allows users to create basic surveys at no cost. For those of you with a Google account, you may want to consider creating a simple questions form on your Google Drive (www.drive.google.com). Each new form allows you to embed a link for your readers to complete the form, and your Google Drive keeps track of your readers' responses.

Find Your Tribe

You've likely caught on by now that the blogging world not only requires participants to learn a new technological skill set but also introduces them to a whole new language. One of these fun terms is tribe, or simply put, the readers and fellow bloggers to whom you most relate.

I was very fortunate and found my personal tribe on Twitter very early in my blogging career. Although we've gone from using Twitter as our main form of communication to checking in with each other daily in our closed Facebook Group, we continue to be there for one another as a source of everything from helpful hints to a safe place to vent.

Finding your tribe can be a tough and lonely road, but after you've plugged in to the online community that is right for you, it will take your blogging experience to a new, more enjoyable level. Take your time finding the community that is best for you, and be sure to look both inside and outside your content area while on your journey. Whereas I consider myself a journaling blogger, some of my closest blogging friends are frugal-living bloggers. It may be that finding the bloggers who share similar thoughts about blogging, social media, or life in general leads you to your tribe.

Don't count your readers out when searching for your tribe! What are some of the other blogs that your most frequent readers also enjoy? (This is where a reader survey comes in handy!) Do your readers participate in online forums? Do they also blog? Don't be afraid to think outside the box when trying to join the right tribe for you.

Know Your Traffic Sources

If you're interested in tracking your website statistics, you've likely spent some time reading Chapter 19. There are many reasons to know how many visitors your blog receives, from being able to report to advertisers to simply knowing that you're not sending your content out into the abyss. However, even if you truly don't care about the number of readers your blog draws, you still may want to know your traffic sources.

I don't spend much time monitoring how many page views I receive on my personal blog, but I do love to take a look periodically at my traffic sources. For starters, it's nice to know whether that sidebar ad you've placed on a friend's blog is actually driving new readers to your site, or whether that free guest posting you've been doing is truly building your audience.

It's also useful to your future content creation to know whether some content is drawing more readers than other posts. For example, did you write a deeply personal post and later find that the post was included in an around-the-web post on another blog? When you take a look at what terms are driving search engine-related traffic, are you surprised by what is bringing readers to your site?

This information may inspire future editorial calendar (where you schedule future blog posts) ideas! You may also want to go back to old posts that are still receiving search engine traffic and update these posts with links to more recent posts. Using tracking programs (described in Chapter 19) to look thoughtfully at your traffic sources may give your blog — and you — a needed boost, even if traffic is the least of your blogging goals.

Set Goals

Speaking of blogging goals . . . have you set yours?

Joining the blogosphere can be an overwhelming experience. You have a laundry list of decisions to make, from your blog name to your site platform to your interest in making money from blogging. The idea of sitting down and listing specific goals for a pursuit that is still relatively new may feel like the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

When I first entered the world of blogging, I found myself looking at each new opportunity through the lens of what that opportunity would do to get me where I was going. This helped me decide what guest blogging opportunities to take, for example, and focus my limited time.

Blogging goals don't have to be complicated, and they're certainly open to revision as your blog grows and changes. Some simple goals may include:

• Grow readership: Would you like someone other than your mother and spouse to read your blog? Set a specific goal such as 50 new readers in the first month.
• Follow a blogging schedule: How often do you hope to post? Once a week? Once a day? More? Less?
• Utilize social media: Yes, social media use may fall under your goals for your blog!
• Find a guest blogging opportunity: Do you have a favorite blog that also happens to allow guest posts? Becoming a guest blogger on that site is a worthy goal!
• Monetize: If you are simply blogging for yourself or as a hobby, making money from your blog may not even be on your radar. However, for many bloggers, it is a main goal for their blog to provide at least enough income to offset the costs of the hobby or part-time job of blogging.

Define Success

Setting goals for your blog is an important task for all bloggers — even veteran bloggers like myself — but that doesn't mean that this step should be skipped. All bloggers should take the time to define their version of success.

Even as my personal blog met a series of goals that were important to me, I continued to receive feedback from those around me regarding ways I could do more or be better. The problem with that input is that it ignored my personal definition of success. It turns out that my sometimes modest traffic was meeting my goals, and the amount of sponsored posts I wrote actually exceeded my plans for my blog.

By taking the time to define your version of success for your blog, not only will you know when you've achieved success, you'll also build a shield against that green-eyed monster, jealousy, as you look at the blogs around you.

Create a Monetization Plan . . . or Not

My initial monetization goal at the launch of my blog five years ago was to eventually find freelance writing assignments to supplement my family's primary income. I never could have imagined that my blog would lead to writing books such as this or working with global brands in social media.

With that said, it was still important for me to think critically about blog monetization before getting too far along my own blogging path. Despite the unexpected twists and turns — most of them positive — my blog's monetization plan guided me through decisions at every step along this journey.

Some questions to consider when creating your own monetization plan may include:

• Do you plan to seek ads for your blog? What type of ads will you allow?
• Would you like to work with individuals and companies to place ads or do you prefer to apply to an ad network? For more information about advertising on blogs, visit Chapter 20.
• How do you feel about accepting money to post content on your blog?
• Do you hope to use your blog as a platform to seek other jobs such as paid writing or speaking opportunities?

Prepare to Grow

The first time someone asked me to write somewhere other than my own blog, I turned to my husband for help with making the decision. He asked, “What will that do to get you where you hope to go?” and the truth is, I had no idea at that point where I was hoping to go. As with many things in life, blogs often grow and change in spite of rather than because of the goals we set.

A blogger who begins with a journaling blog on a free platform such as Blogger (for more on Blogger, stop by Chapter 4) may end up choosing to move to a self-hosted platform with a dedicated server due to amount of traffic or depth of content. In fact, some blogs that began with a single writer have grown over the years to become multiple-writer sites, with the original author acting more as an editor-in-chief than a lone author.

If massive growth falls under your definition of success, you should certainly decide now how you want that to occur. But even if you don't anticipate blog growth, it is still a worthwhile use of your time to think about what you'd like a growing and expanding blog to look like should that day come.

Know When You're Done

I recently read a great blog post — naturally! — about life after blogging. Although blogging has been around in one form or another for quite some time now, in the expansive timeline of the world of communication, blogging is still a baby. It will be quite a while before there are as many former bloggers as there are active bloggers.

Even so, the day will likely come when the cons of blogging outweigh the pros. Perhaps your blog chronicles your battle against cancer and you've reached remission. It may be time to thank your readers for joining you on your journey and then no longer post. Or maybe you're a parenting blogger whose children no longer allow you to write about their lives. It may even be that you've made blogging a profession and the time to retire has arrived.

Whatever the reason, it's important for bloggers to know when they're done, even if that means that they're just done with that particular blog. After all, blogging, at its core, is meant to be enjoyable, and when it isn't anymore, you might need to reevaluate or move along to new pursuits.