I’ve had a lot of questions about the process my team and I go through to plan for a new year of blogging on dPS and ProBlogger, so I’ve put together a bit of an explanation of what happened at our recent planning day:
Although we didn’t have a detailed agenda to work through on the day, our review of the blogs’ current position considered four main areas:
- Content: we looked at the publication rates and types of content, the feedback we got on certain posts, and more.
- Community: including comment quality, community signups, and so on.
- Stats: here, we considered traffic quality and quantity, visitor types, traffic sources, etc.
- Monetization: how are we doing, and what other possibilities are there that we could take advantage of?
As I explain in the video, through this review some common themes developed that helped us move into brainstorming ideas for 2013. These ideas really covered a lot of things—from content and community-building to monetization strategies and plans for the brands themselves.
This helped us actually begin to schedule things into the blog calendars for the year—product launches, events, and other activities.
One great advantage of planning 12 months in advance is that it allows us to set some goals, and define the steps we’ll take toward them that will help us generate some momentum with the blogs and our readers—momentum that should, we hope, help us achieve the goals we’d identified.
Delegating responsibilities for various tasks also helped give us a sense that we could actually achieve our dreams for the next 12 months.
The planning day also let us identify gaps in the schedule that would give us the opportunity to try new things—community initiatives, monetization approaches, and so on—or plan time for breaks for our team members to recharge.
I’d love to hear how you approach a new year of blogging. So once you’ve watched the video, do let us know your how you handle planning in the comments.
