Enterprise Nation

Yes you guessed it - seven things means one a day. Doing these things just once every week will help you send your blog into orbit. So says friend of Enterprise Nation, Ian Blackford. Follow his ‘things to do’ and get ready for take off!

Get Rumbled? No. Get Stumbled

You will notice that ‘Promote your Blog’ isn’t one of the items in the list. Why? Well, you should be doing that anyway, get your site Stumbled and Dugg, visit other blogs and leave sensible well constructed comments, join in with blog carnivals and all the other things to get your blogging name out there.

1. Write at least two posts

Promoting your site is a given, no promotion, no traffic. But the traffic will only flow one way and never return if all your readers see is stale content. You need to write at least two articles a week, more if you can (if you can’t, try and get guest articles from your peers) and post them a day or so apart. TIP: better traffic spikes will come from posts that appear at the beginning of the week - there is an assumption that news is ‘freshest’ at the start of the week. A great resource of tips and how to’s to help you improve your writing is www.copyblogger.com

2. Check for broken links

Links that end in a 404 page will lose you traffic so fix any incoming or internal links that are broken. A good plugin for checking your posts is Broken Link Checker. An awesome plugin for managing incoming broken links is Redirection it allows you to take an incoming URL and map it to a new post via 301 redirects. It’s the only way to preserve traffic to your posts when you change a site structure.

3. Check your Webstats

You know in the movies where you see the big macho hero choosing his weapons before he goes off and does something amazing, and he picks up a big gun, looks at it lovingly… then puts it back and picks up an enormous gun, snorts a laugh and nods his head in approval? Well your website statistics are that enormous gun. Your site stats are where you find out who is linking to you, how much traffic you are getting and what pages your visitors are looking at. The stats can tell you your most popular pages and therefore you will know what kind of content your audience is hungry for. There are many stats packages around, your hosting will come with some and there is of course Google Analytics. I’m currently using WordPress.com Stats which is a great plugin because it causes no extra load on your server and hey, who else but WP knows enough about WordPress to produce good accurate stats? A word of warning: only check your stats once a week, checking stats is like weighing yourself when you are on a diet, check too often and you don’t see any progression. Check once on a regular basis and you get to see the movement.

4. Plan future posts

Doing step three will make this step a breeze. While you are checking your stats, look out for your busiest pages or notice when your busiest times are (and note what you did to produce the extra traffic) and plan your next posts to extend your popular content. If you find your popular posts aren’t really where you thought your blog was going, don’t dismiss them and blindly push on, be sensible about it and let the market lead you, as they are the only experts in all this.

5. Don’t give up!

In every bloggers life there are moments of despair, moments where you think “Argh This is going nowhere” if you are like this then you are probably checking your stats too often! Everyone is in the same boat here, don’t assume that others are getting more success than you, some might be, but others definitely won’t be. Just keep going and don’t give up. If you feel isolated then join a community, I’m in the Blog MasterMind coaching program and there are forums and communities to help keep me going - you can join too and I strongly recommend that you check it out.

6. Do Back up!

I will continue to harp on about this for probably the life of this blog, and even beyond. Get a back-up plugin, set it on a schedule to back up at least once a week and then forget it - job done. A great plugin for this is WordPress Database Backup.

7. Take a break!

There is a lot to blogging, a lot more than people realise and if you do all the above every week along with your blog promotion and digesting information from others you are going to need a break. So don’t beat yourself up for a taking a little time off, switch off your computer turn on the TV - go on, I bet there is a good film on!

• Ian Blackford, Blogging Rocket