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Seven Areas on How to Conduct a Half Yearly Blog Review Many bloggers do an end of year review. It’s a logical time to do an audit of your blog and set goals. I also think that periodically checking in on those goals and setting new ones is a good idea. This being halfway through the year it is a logical time to do just that. This is a good time to just stop blogging for a day or just spend a few hours and do some analysis of your blog. How have you been traveling as a blogger? I’m going to run through one method I use to do a blog review, but I also have a second suggestion that ProBlogger Editor Stacey Roberts wrote in 2015 that a lot of readers found helpful. I was also thinking about the best way to conduct a blog review and I came up with seven different areas to focus on. In each of these seven areas there are four questions you need to ask. Questions to Ask in Each of the Seven Blogging Areas What were my successes? What are the opportunities that come from those successes? What were the failures? What is my plan? I’ve also developed a worksheet that is a bit of a matrix that you can use to find the seven areas and ask the four questions within each one. In Today’s Episode: Seven Areas on How to Conduct a Half Yearly Blog Review Listen to this episode in the player above or on iTunes here. Content What did well? Posts, categories, topics, lengths, mediums etc. Did I meet deadlines? Plan – set an editorial plan – CoSchedule or Spreadsheet Traffic Traffic spikes and why – social network, blogs, seasonal Promote seasonal spikes and look for opportunities Dips and ways to minimize those dips Trending traffic – up, down, plateaus Promotional activities – guests posts, social, SEO, how did it go? Reader Engagement Health of your readership Are they engaging Comment numbers, share numbers, bounce rate Open rates on email newsletters Social media engagement What are you hearing from your readers? Have you delivered value? Giving more than taking Reader Survey – ask questions Run a community project or challenge to get engagement Monetization How is income trending? What has performed well? Where is income coming from – launches or long tail sales? Other monetization methods Plan What products to develop What sponsors to approach What affiliates Review media kit for sponsors Promotional calendar for products to launch or develop Set aside time to build a product or reach out to sponsors Tech Servers, outages, downtime Security, updates, plugins, vulnerabilities Broken features, new tools or plugins Design – Overhaul, review, is it dated or need tweaking Mobile responsive Tools – email, landing pages, do my tools still serve my needs? Do I need and get value from paid tools? Productivity How do you use your time? Workflows What takes the most time? Time tool like RescueTime You How are you traveling? How are you going? Do we ask ourselves this question? How are you going with your blogging, but your life as well? Physical, spiritual, mental, your energy levels and passion Do you need a break or to change direction? It’s important to ask deeper more personal questions Are you filling your cup? Professional development – solo entrepreneurs need to do this for themselves If you are not learning and developing your blog may suffer Further Resources on How to Conduct a Half Yearly Blog Review How to Do an End of 2015 Blog Audit: Take Stock of What You’ve Achieved and Where You’re Headed by Stacey Roberts Download the Worksheet Create Content – Content is the cornerstone of your blog. Here you’ll find everything to help you create great blog content. CoSchedule Promotion – How to Get More Eyeballs on Your Blog Find Readers – If you need to know how to find readers for your blog, check out all the resources below for our best tutorials and tips. Why You Should Make Building Community a Priority in Your Blogging How to Build a Culture of Community on Your Blog Build Community – An engaged community of readers is a valuable asset. Learn below how to build community for a more profitable blog. Make Money Blogging Make Money – Our most frequently asked question is how to make money blogging? Whilst it is possible there are no get rich quick promises. The resources below will get you started in the right direction. Recommended Blogging Resources & Tools Blogging Tools and Services RescueTime 8 Tips for Busy Bloggers – How to Make the Most of the Time You Have 7 Productivity Tips For Bloggers How to Work Out What To Focus Upon with Your Time Be Productive – If you feel like you never have enough time, or don’t know which blogging task to tackle next, learn how to be a productive blogger with the resources below. The Biggest Lesson I Learned About Building a Profitable Blog in 2015 Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to Episode 131 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today, I want to walk you through doing a half yearly review of your blog. It’s just past the halfway point of 2016 and so it’s a great time to do a bit of a review to help you understand how you’ve been traveling as a blogger but more importantly to tweak and change the cause for the next six months to make them the most productive and useful six months that you possibly can. You can find today’s show notes including a little download that I’ve got for you that I’ll talk about during the podcast over at problogger.com/podcast/131. Many bloggers do an end of year review at the end of a year or at the beginning of the year. It’s a logical time to do review and set some goals. I think it’s really useful to periodically check back in on those goals that we set. If we haven’t got any goals, to set some new ones. I think as I just mentioned being halfway through the year, this is a great time to just stop your blogging maybe for an extra day or two. Don’t post anything and spend a day—even if it’s just a few hours—doing an analysis of how you’ve been traveling as a blogger. There’s many ways to do a review like this. I’m going to run through one suggestion of it but I also do have another one for you that I linked to in today’s show notes. A review on order process that Stacy Roberts, the editor of ProBlogger wrote at the end of 2015. I’ll link to that because it gives you some really great questions to ask on a number of different areas for your blog. While I was out at my walk today, something that I do most days around mid-day to break out my day, I was thinking about how I would do a review on my blogs in the next week. I came up with seven different areas that I want to do some analysis on for my own blogs in the coming weeks. The seven areas that I think any successful blogger needs to be kicking some goals in, they need to be achieving in these seven areas if they want to build a profitable blog. If profit’s not for you, there’s six of the areas because one of them is monetization. Whatever your goals are, these are areas that I think you need to be asking the questions in. For each of these areas, I’m going to suggest that you ask yourself four questions. We’ve got seven different areas of your blog and then we’re going to ask four questions about each one. The four questions that you’re going to ask about each one, I’ve summarized in a little download that I’ve got for you over at problogger.com/podcast/131. It’s a worksheet that I’ve developed that’s got the seven areas and the four questions sort of set out in a matrix that you can print off and then use to answer the questions. Let me tell you the four questions and then I’ll tell you the seven areas. The four questions are pretty simple, really. They are: “What were my successes? What did I achieve over the last six months of my blog?” “What are the opportunities that come from those successes?” And then we want to look at the flip side, “What were the failures over the last six months? Where were the weaknesses, where were the things that I didn’t quite achieve what I was hoping to.” Lastly, “What’s my plan for the next six months?” Successes, opportunities, failures, and plans. If you want an acronym, it’s SOFP. As I’ve said, to help you visualize these four questions with the seven different areas that I want you to do some analysis in, I do have this worksheet that you can go and download right now at problogger.com/podcast/131. You don’t have to give your email address, it’s just a simple PDF that you can download. Very simple, I just whipped it up in five minutes. Don’t go expecting too much in terms of design. There are the four questions that you’re going to ask and I want you to ask those four questions about seven different areas of your blog. It might sound like a lot but you can whip through this fairly quickly if you’d like to or you can spend more time on each one as well. Let me present to you the seven different areas that I think are really seven areas that any blogger should be working on at any point in time on their blog. Area number one is content, pretty obvious. Without content, you don’t have a blog. Area number two is traffic. The eyeballs, the amount of people seeing your content which is something that as bloggers we hopefully are all fairly interested in. Number three is reader engagement. It’s the health of your readers whether they’re engaging with you, connecting with you, the feeling of community, the reader’s sentiment. I guess we’re not just looking at the numbers which is traffic but we’re actually trying to understand who is reading, how are they feeling towards you and your blog, and how they’re engaging with it. Area number four is monetization. Are you making money? Are you sustaining your blog? This is probably the optional one, I know some of you are not interested in monetizing. That’s totally fine, you might want to skip this particular one. Area number five is the tech, your blog running, service, tools, some of those types of things. Area number six is productivity, how are you using your time, what are your workflows like, what are your systems like, what tools are you using? The last area is one that I’ve thrown in there because I think it really is important. It’s you, how are you going? You as a blogger, your health of you is going to impact the health of your blog. I’ve got some things for you to think about in that as well. There are the seven areas; content, traffic, reader engagement, monetization, tech, productivity, and you. You may choose to stop this podcast now, go download that worksheet problogger.com/podcast/131, and then just do it. You can totally do that, there’s four questions there for each of those seven different areas. If you would like a little bit more, what I’m going to do next is just go through each of those seven areas again and just ask you a few other questions that you might want to ask to help you unpack that particular area. This overlaps a little bit with that post I mentioned earlier that Stacy wrote but there’s a few other questions that I want to share with you as well. All of this is in the transcript of this podcast which is over on the show notes as well. We’ve had transcripts on our podcast now for the last three episodes, so if you have been waiting for that, they’re now there over on the show notes. Let’s dig into each of these areas. You should be asking successes, opportunities, failures, and your plan but here are some extra things that you might want to ask and consider to help you work through these seven areas. Firstly, we’re talking about content. What type of posts did well for you over the last six months, that’s one of the questions I’m asking. By types of posts, I’m talking about the topic, the category of posts, but also the format of post. Was it a list type post, was it essay type post, was it rant, were they opinion pieces, were they interviews. What types of posts did well? You might also as part of that ask yourself what type of mediums worked well. Were you experimenting with video, live streaming, audio, podcasts, or was it all text, were there infographics, what type of mediums did well for you? Was it curated or was it original content as well. You might also want to look at the length of posts. Did you notice any trends as you look at the most popular posts over the last six months in terms of the length? I just did this recently, looked at my Google Analytics and realized that some of our longer posts did really well over the last six months for us. Again, that informs the plan that I’m going to make going forward, some of that longer form content is doing really well for us. Did the length of post seem to have any impact on traffic, comments, engagements, shares, those types of things. The last thing I would encourage you to think about was the frequency of your posting. What frequency were you aiming for? Did you meet the deadlines that you set yourself? Did you exceed them? How did your readers seem to respond whether you did a lot of posts or not many as well. These are some of the areas I’d be thinking about in terms of content. As you’re thinking about your plan, I really would encourage you to take this opportunity as you’re doing this analysis to set yourself a bit of an editorial plan going forwards. You may actually want to get a tool like coschedule.com which is what we use over at ProBlogger. I’ll link to that in today’s show notes. Or, you may choose to just get a spreadsheet and plug in the post that you want to be publishing, the types of posts maybe, the frequency of those posts. You may even want to set yourself some topics ahead of time to keep yourself on track with some of the things that you want to achieve. That’s content. I’ve got some further reading again in the show notes as well, you can check out our creating content portal on the ProBlogger blog. We’ve got a portal pretty much for each of the seven areas that I’m talking about today and I’ll also include some further reading for you in the show notes on content if that’s an area that you need to do some more work in. Now, we’re talking about traffic, area number two. Some of the questions that I ask myself as I look back on the last six months are things like did I have any spikes in traffic over that six months? Why did I have those spikes? Was it a rush of traffic from social network? Was it another blog? Was it a seasonal thing, for example in the last couple of days we just had a big spike in traffic on my photography blog all going to How to Photograph Fireworks being 4th of July in America. Sometimes, it’s a seasonal explanation. Why did those spikes happen and are there opportunities around those things? I actually noticed many years ago now, the 4th of July was a big spike in traffic for us on Digital Photography School. As a result, we now promote those posts that do really well very heavily around 4th of July, also around New Year’s Eve when people are photographing fireworks. We also have written some more content on that. When you notice spikes, you need to look for opportunities to increase the size of those spikes but also see if there are other opportunities around that. On the flip side of looking at the spikes, were there any troughs in traffic? Have you noticed that there’s been any dips, maybe weekends, maybe it’s a seasonal thing. We noticed after 4th of July, the day after, we see a bit of a lull because everyone’s having a bit of a day off after having celebrated. There again could be some seasonal explanations there and there may be some ways that you can minimize those troughs in traffic as well. Another question to ask, how is your traffic trending? Is it going up? Is it up on the last month, up on last year, or is it on the way down, or is it plateau in some way? That’s useful to understand and again to do some analysis on that. You may actually find that there are some things you can do to change those trends if they’re negative trends or to leverage them further. One of the things we noticed a couple of years ago now was…
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