It’s Monday—the start of a new week on your blog—and I wonder what challenges you’re facing.
Image courtesy stock.xchng user Jan Willem Geertsma
If you’ve neglected your RSS or social media feeds over the weekend, you’ll likely find plenty of good advice there—advice that you feel you really should try out if you want your blog to be its best.
But before you become overwhelmed by all the things on your weekly To-Do list, let me tell you what we have planned for the week ahead.
This week, we’re focusing not on promotion or social networking or reaching the right readers or affiliate programs or SEO.
We’re focusing on you and your blog. Entirely.
A week on your blog
Imagine if you could put aside all the other, external things you usually do to keep your blog humming along for a whole week.
Imagine if you could instead spend the next five days really honing your approach to blog design, content, and your own productivity.
If you’re anything like me, you rarely spend this much time focused exclusively on your own online presence. I know I normally slot the tasks of content and design around other things, mainly to do with product development, reader engagement, and promotion.
While I don’t think any of these elements exists in a vacuum—they all interplay thought our blogs and our lives as bloggers—I do feel that sometimes it’s good to take a break and really home in on our blogs themselves.
Stepping back
Blogs evolve over time. Each day we learn new ideas to try, and we want to see what the produce.
But ongoing blog tweaks can be a curse as well as an aid. If we never step back, the tweaks we make to our designs, our interfaces, our content, our structure, and our brands overall can slowly erode the sharp focus we began with. That can be more than unfortunate—that can undermine your ability to maintain and grow reader loyalty.
So if you’ve spent the past months in the trenches, head down, backside up, working hard at a tactical level, then this week’s posts will hopefully help you step back and look critically at some key elements of your blog.
We’ll have posts on landing pages and logos, on voice and audience, and on making the most of the time you dedicate to your blog. We’ll mix writing and design tips with productivity advice.
The aim? To help you focus on the thing that matters most—the thing that keeps you attracting readers, converting subscribers, and selling products: your blog itself. And to help you take stock of where you’re at, and where you can improve to make your brand more coherent and powerful.
We’ll kick off later today with a post by the Web Marketing Ninja which is designed to help those with bigger blogs whose growth has stalled. He’ll show you how to look closely at your online presence and face up to the tough questions: why has your blog stalled, and what do you need to do to get it going again?
Before we get to that post, I’d love to hear about the challenges you’re facing in building an online presence on your blog. Share them with us in the comments.
