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69 Questions to Ask to Review Your Blog Posted: 30 Dec 2008 06:02 AM PST With the end of 2008 hurtling towards us many bloggers are beginning to cast our minds forward into the new year ahead to set goals, make resolutions and come up with strategies and plans to grow their blogs in 2009. While looking forward and planning to improve your blog is something well worth putting time aside for - I’ve found that you can drastically enhance the forward thinking that you do by doing another step first - reflecting upon the past. The mistake that many bloggers make in only looking forward is that they often fail to capitalize upon and build upon lessons that they’ve already learned. An ExampleI spoke with one blogger this morning who I think illustrates this perfectly. I won’t name him as I don’t want to cause embarrassment but he emailed me to tell me about how he was about to completely relaunch his blog in the coming days. He’d put up a holding page where his old blog had been, was going to launch a completely new design with new branding, he was changing the name and tag line of the blog, was going to change his posting frequency from 3 posts a day to 2-3 posts a week and most strikingly was changing the topic of his blog quite significantly. When I emailed the blogger back to ask his reasoning for the drastic change of his blog he responded by saying that ‘it’s time for a change’. He reflected that he thought his readers might be bored and he himself wanted a change. His reasons didn’t go much beyond this. Now don’t get me wrong - there’s nothing wrong with reinvention and changing course with your blog - what this blogger is doing could be a very smart move - but a smarter move would be to do a little reflection on how his blog had been going, identifying what was working and what wasn’t and building upon the good stuff - instead of effectively knocking it all down and rebuilding on the rubble. How to Reflect on the Progress of your BlogSo how does one reflect upon the past experience of their blog in order to work out how to evolve it and build upon its strengths to go forward? Below I’ve begun to develop a list of questions that a blogger wanting to do some reflection upon their blog might use to undertake such an exercise. By no means is this list exhaustive and by no means am I suggesting that bloggers ask each one - some will be more relevant than others depending upon the blog, its stage in the life cycle and the goals of the blogger. I would recommend bloggers wanting to do this type of reflection set aside at least a few hours to do this exercise (or a series of hour long sessions over a few days). That might sound like a lot of time but the lessons that you learn by doing this could make any planning you might do for 2009 and beyond much more effective. For some of these questions you will probably need access to your blogs metrics/stats package but for many you might find it less distracting if you were offline with a pen and paper. General Questions
Traffic
Content
Community
Your Niche
Design
Monetization (if this is a goal for you)
Technical
OK - as I say above - these questions just scratch the surface as to the type of reflections that a blogger might do on their blog. I’d love to hear other questions that you’d also ask. Next week, after you’ve had a little time to do some of this reflecting, I want to follow this post up by outlining a process that I use for planning and coming up with strategies for a blog. Stay tuned to the ProBlogger RSS feed to get this update. |
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