31 Days to Building a Better Blog

Last updated on March 30th, 2021 at 09:04 am

Hey guys, hope you’re all enjoying your Thursday morning so far! Here in Toronto, we’re enjoying a solid 4-5 days of rain, since the weather systems seem to have gotten our geo-location confused, believing that we’re London, England. I know that we still show respect to the monarchy, but come on.

But weather isn’t what I wanted to write about—it’s about improving the blog. I’ve signed up for ProBlogger’s 31 Days to Building a Better Blog, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to learn a ton from it. I’ve called on the help of my friend Simone from skinnydip.ca to keep me accountable so that I don’t fall too far off of the rails. But with everything going on in life right now, I might’ve been able to have picked a better time to do this; but I thought it would be better to work the kinks out of how I do blog posts earlier into the game.

So here I am with the automated mind of Darren Rowse telling me what I need to do in order to make my blog better. Fortunately, he’s lightened my workload (a little) by telling me to do some of the things I’ve already done:

• Install a metrics program—yup, I’m a big fan of Google Analytics. I need to learn how to use it better; I’m tempted to read up on Avinash Kaushik’s books on Web Analytics to get a firm grasp of it all, but my reading list is already ridiculous
• Invite a friend to join you—already on it, as stated above (thanks, Simone!)
• Write a list post—I’ve done this, either with lists in posts or posts based on lists; examples: The 11 Things You Didn’t Learn in School (but Probably Should’ve); What Have the Prior Generations Taught You Today?; and Some Rules for Being a Half-Decent Human Being
• Promote your list post—I use some of the techniques Darren listed already: social mentions on Facebook, LiveJournal and Twitter; internal links to past posts; commenting on other bloggers’ posts with inputs from my blog; follow-up posts

But, of course, becoming an amazing blogger isn’t anywhere near that easy. There’s a lot of hard work and dedication that goes into becoming awesome at blogging. Plus, listening to advice from those who’ve already been in the trenches and done well for themselves isn’t a bad idea, either.

Here’re the things that Darren listed that I haven’t gotten around to as of yet:

• Doing a SWOT analysis of the blog
• Putting together an elevator pitch for the blog (which is funny, since @JeffreyHayzlett was talking all about putting together one of these, or our 118 [8 seconds to hook the listener, 110 to explain] on Monday at The Art of Marketing)
• Promoting posts through pitching to other bloggers, social bookmarking (i.e. Digg), newsletters, putting links in my email signatures, paid advertising for the post, pitching articles to mainstream media, and article marketing
• Analyzing other blogs in my niche to see what they do well and what I could learn from them

So I’ve got my work cut out for me, but at least I’m willing to do it!

Now there’s the entire question of a redesign and either changing the URL for the blog or figuring out how to retool what I’ve built already… but Darren hasn’t gotten to there yet, so I have some time 😉

If you’re a blogger, I hope this post was a bit helpful to you—if not, I hope you have a slightly better appreciation for what kind of preparatory work needs to go into building a blog before you make that plunge!

Until tomorrow, my friends! Enjoy your day!

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