In the development world, we create plans for pretty much every thing we write, but when it comes to the blogging world I’ve found that a number of people don’t think of creating a plan for their blog. As bloggers, we can increase our blogs success by developing plans for our blogs. Here are a few tips for creating your own blog plan.
Have a Goal
The most important part of the plan is having reasonable and attainable goals. Obviously most new blogs won’t be able to increase their subscriber count by 1000 in one week, so why put yourself up for failure. Goals should make you work hard to achieve them and even take you out of your blogs comfort zone. If your goals aren’t making you try new things to achieve them, you’re not making them hard enough.
Know your Audience
Knowing your audience is extremely important for creating your goals. If your in a niche where most of the people have an RSS reader, your goals about subscribers may be easier to reach than a goal about traffic. Knowing your audience also gives you an idea about what kind of content will work well and what won’t.
Getting to know your audience can be fairly hard. I’ve found emailing commentators and asking them questions, or having a poll are the two best ways to get to know your readers. Once you’ve gotten to know them, releasing content they’ll like, throwing contests that they’re interested in and reaching out to them will help you reach your goals quicker.
What’s your Purpose?
Before you write any of your goals, you should have a basic idea of what your purpose is for blogging. Some people want to become authority voices in their niche, others blog for money, and some just blog for the fun of it. No matter what your reason is, you need to realize what it is because it’ll make a difference in your goals.
If you’re blogging for money, goals about click-through rates and number of impressions will probably be more important than number of subscribers or number of comments. If you want to be an authority, the length of visits or bounce rate will be very important. Know your purpose and you’ll know what you have to plan for.
Once you’ve created your plan, the next step is sticking to it. Sticking to your goals can be hard but in the end, very rewarding. Here at devjargon, we recently completed our first blog plan and already we’ve surpassed some of the goals we set forth. We have a number of things coming in the future and are always excited about what’s next.
We want to know what your blog’s plans are. What do you have planned and how did you get those plans?