There are so many positive reasons for blogging as a business, whether you have your own small business or are part of a larger organisation, and often it is so simple to set up a blog technically, that when immediate success doesn’t come to a newly-launched blog, people get easily dispirited. Blogs fail for many reasons, below are three areas you can look at which should make failure less likely.
Setting up a blog isn’t the tricky part, the real challenges come from sustaining and growing your blog to be what you were aiming for when you started out. Keep these issues in mind as you develop your blog, and always be ready to amend your plans in response to your audience – they will let you know what is working for them.
Know What Success Looks Like for You
If you went into blogging with a clear view of what you are trying to achieve, you will have set meaningful goals and objectives which you can track to monitor how well you are doing. If you haven’t yet met a goal, then look at why that might be – have you given yourself enough time, has the relevance of the goal changed over time, do you need to set a different goal – and amend your objectives in order to see success? By knowing what success looks like for you, and tracking your progress regularly along the way, you will be able to steer your efforts in a more successful direction.
Don’t Run Out of Steam
In order to sustain your successful blog activities, you will need planning, stamina and commitment. Plan your blog at least one month ahead so that you can meet regular content deadlines, and have a skeleton editorial calendar that can be filled out as the year progresses. Regularly review what you have produced and ensure your posts remain relevant and interesting to your audience, look at the most successful posts for inspiration on new topics, and look around for wider developments in your area that could be discussed from your angle with your audience.
Reach out to other bloggers via comments and sharing; they will reach back to you.
One of the best things about the blogging community that I have seen is the incredible generosity and kindness shown to other bloggers, and tapping into this network will help you to extend your readership as well as allowing you to learn from others as to what works well. Looking at how other bloggers run their blogs, and offering meaningful comments on interesting posts will help to extend your reach and should contribute to driving you more traffic. Respect what others are doing and spend the time to show your interest before expecting anything in return – act as you would for any ‘real-world’ networking opportunity. You do need to commit to regular blogging, once your readers expect posts from you they will look for them – if you didn’t post on a regular day, they may lose interest quickly.
There are no meaningful shortcuts – build your blog and reputation one blog post, one comment, one retweet at a time, follow advice from the generous blogging community, celebrate your progress along the way and understand what your blog is doing for you and your business’s success. All these in hand, you should have a blog that doesn’t fail, but thrives.
Leave a Reply