Are you implementing these 7 simple steps for successful blogging into your strategy for this year?

Being strategic and intentional about how you do blogging is a great way to achieve success with your blog. It is what separates successful bloggers from struggling bloggers.

At the beginning of the year, it’s a great idea to sit down as a blogger and do all 7 of these steps so that you can set yourself up for success this year, not next year or the year after.

Whatever time of the year you are reading this, its not too late to put some if not all of these strategies into place so that you can have a successful rest of the year.

So here is a 7 Step Checklist you can implement for your blog every single year, whatever niche you are in.

1. Set achievable goals

  a) Write them down

A great mistake you can make as a blogger or business owner is to not set goals. Goals give you a sense of direction and point you towards a destination when putting any form of work.

Statistics show that people who write down their goals are 20% more likely to achieve them than people who do not. 

–Gail Mathews’ Goal Research Summary

Give a timeframe to your goals. What do you want to achieve in this year? Write it down!

b) Write them down into achievable tasks

Setting and writing goals is only the first step, but the next step is just as important if not more, and that is to follow through on your goals in order to make them a reality. 

This is best done when you actually break down your goals into shorter time periods and smaller, realistic and practical tasks. These need to be doable and achievable goals that can be tracked.

Have goals for the year, break them down into quarterly goals and then into monthly goals.

Each month sit down and break your monthly goals into weekly tasks and then a daily to-do-list at the end of each day for the following day.

Statistics show that people who set actionable tasks for their goals and track their progress weekly, achieve 40% more than those who don’t.

–Gail Mathews’ Goal Research Summary

Here is an example to illustrate how a yearly goal can be broken down to an actionable task;

Goal for the year: Grow my Pinterest account to 100,000 views by the end of the year.

Actionable task: Create 10 eye-catching Pinterest Graphics and post each of them to 10 group boards.

successful blogging

2. Update your blog’s design 

When I started my very first blog, I didn’t put much attention to the theme I picked and that affected how inspired I was to work on my blog and take it to the next level.

I realized that sometimes having a design and theme you are not satisfied and proud of may affect your enthusiasm to work on your blog and put in the effort you need to put into it.

Getting into the new year, you may want to review your website’s theme and design and decide whether you want to continue into the new year with that design or not.

You may need to update small things like the Copyright footer, or bigger things like the entire theme of the website.

Whichever changes you decide to make, this is a good time to make the change and start with an updated design that you are happy with.

3. Update the backend

Apart from your frontend design needing to be updated, your backend also needs to be up to date for the new year. Your plugins, widgets and other software that you are using need to be updated. 

Along with these settings, this is also a good time to update your SEO settings and make sure they are optimized for your blog so that you can rank well in the new year ahead. 

4. Update old posts

As you’re going into the new year this is a good time update old posts and make sure that they are up to date for your audience to still consume your content even when the posts are from a long time ago.

Having your old posts updated can bring in continuous traffic and new visitors to your blog. This also works best when you have recyclable content that is also known as evergreen content.

To learn more about how to create evergreen content, as well as some strategies and tips, click here.

successful blogging
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5. Plan posts for the year ahead

This is something I learnt a lot later in my blogging career and a tip I always share with new bloggers who are just starting out. When you are just starting out with blogging you are much more motivated to create content and have many more ideas and inspiration for content.

I always tell new bloggers to maximize on this by creating what I call a “content bank”. This a collection of pre-written content that keep for later when you are going through a writer slump.

This is also advice I offer “older” and more experienced bloggers as well – to have a content bank, and to plan your content for the year in advance. It will make it much easier to remain consistent when you have a set plan in place.

If possible take this plan a step further by creating the content you’ve planned out so it’s ready and scheduled throughout the year. This will allow you to focus more on the marketing, branding and other technical sides of your blog.

Imagine having your content for the year already written and only needing to push publish throughout the year. This is how you can remove the burden of having to constantly sit down and create new content. 

6. Plan and schedule your social media content

Keeping up with social media can be very exhausting. It can take up a lot of time and can be even more dreadful when it has to be done on a daily basis. 

One hack to avoid getting tired of your own social media posting is planning content in advance. In the same manner you need to have blog post content planned in advance, you should have content for your social media planned in advance. 

To be a step ahead, create content for the next 3 months and schedule it to post automatically. This way you can focus more of your time on other things your blog need. 

If you’re not sure which ones to use, Tailwind is a great tool that is well known and popular with bloggers for Pinterest but it recently added Instagram and Facebook scheduling features which are also great for social media management. Other tools are Buffer, Hootsuite, Later, and Planoly.

One of the best things you can do for yourself and your blog/brand is to do continuous research about your industry and keep up with the latest trends.

It’s the most effective way to remain relevant in whatever industry you are in and make sure you remain a trusted voice in your industry.

As a blogger, it’s important to stay informed about things like algorithm changes on social media platforms, Google’s search engine algorithm changes, which content is most popular and the type of  content people are responding well to so that you can also tap into wave while it lasts.

Click here to see an example of content you can read to help you stay up to date with trends in the blogging industry. 

One of the main goals on this blog is to update people about the latest trends in the blogging industry, so if you are a blogger and you haven’t subscribed to our email list, make sure you do so in the box below so you don’t miss out on latest blogging tips and insights. 

Did you implement all 7 of these steps in your strategy this year? Which ones did you forget to do? Let me know in the comments!