In order to achieve any kind of growth, you need an action plan in place. It’s no different when it comes to blogging. We’re talking about an overall growth plan of action, a strategy which will help you achieve your goals in a timely and positive manner. Having a plan means you have some momentum, define your long term goals and have something to aim for, so you can build greater and better results.
1. Determine Your Core Focus
You started your blog with some ideas. Write it down; list out your ideas, your goals and your blog’s core focus. This should be the very first section of your blog’s action plan. Everything else you plan should flow in with your blog’s main focus.
2. Determine Long Term Goals
List out your long term goals, things you want to achieve through your blog in the next few months or years. Make it precise by deciding exactly in how many months or years you want to achieve those goals. A long term plan for 12 months is the right ideal. If your long term plan is to make your blog profitable within 12 months, decide on a method to achieve financial success.
3. List Out Short Term Objectives
Once you’ve got your long term plan written down, set the short term objectives to achieve within the next few weeks and months. This must be a solid, period-defined plan, nothing hazy. Creating clearly defined short term objectives will put on the right track to achieving your long term goals.
To make your blog profitable within 12 months, you’ll need:
- to build an audience
- reach a certain number of twitter followers
- attract sponsors
- launch promotions and PR events and much more
Evaluate Skills, Assets and Strengths
Here’s where you need to evaluate your skills, your assets and the strengths that you can leverage to achieve your goals. Do you have great writing skills, marketing skills, fabulous relationship management, or perhaps friends in the right places? Are your social media skills good or do you need to improve on them?
Whom do you know who can sponsor you, or work with you? What contacts can you leverage? Can you boost the online presence of a sponsor through social media using your skills? Evaluate all these aspects minutely.
Evaluate Positives And Negatives
Take a critical look at your blog. Do you need to update your blog’s theme, style, navigation, subscriptions, landing page and so on? Get a professional to evaluate your blog for you and visit other blogs in your niche. Be very honest when you write down the improvements you need to make. These plans should go into your short term objectives.
4. Create a Financial Strategy
No matter what kind of blog you own, money is involved. You’ve definitely invested in your domain name, in the tools you had to buy, in terms of the time you’ve dedicated and so on. List out investments made, planned investments, earnings received and planned earnings quarter-wise. Your planned investments can be anything that makes your blogging easier, even if it’s a new keyboard. Time is money and if your blog is not helping you at least break even on your investment, then it’s a losing proposition for you.
5. Create A Structured Marketing Plan For Goal Achievement
A structured plan involves all the activities that go into maintaining your blog, marketing it and making it profitable for you. Tweeting your blog, or doing a giveaway on Twitter and even guest blogging – they’re all part of your marketing strategy. For example, in the upcoming quarters, how many promotional events do you want to launch? How many guest posts do you want to upload? How many twitter followers do you need to generate? You can do this month-wise or quarter-wise, as long as you keep the time periods achievable.
Plan Your Content
Make every piece of content work for you. Don’t slog away at your keyboard, churning out words that don’t bring you quantifiable results. Work out a content strategy keeping your overall goals in mind, always.
Plan Your Promotions
Plan at least one promotion every alternate month, or every quarter. Work out how to leverage the preceding months to create maximum engagement and traffic. Your content strategy should flow in with your promotional strategy.
Plan Your Networking
Don’t do random networking whenever the mood strikes you. That’s when you’ll not be able to really build relationships that bring in value. Network strategically, primarily with those bloggers who are more successful than you.
Plan Your Guest Posting
Guest posting should be done in a very strategic manner, as part of your link building and promotional activity. Be sure to evaluate blogs carefully first – check traffic stats, suitability of traffic, and readers’ interaction with the blog and so on. Create a guest posting schedule that works with your short term objectives.
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