Blogging is not a simple and easy task. Every day, something changes. There’s either a new way to make money, or a new algorithm change. But have you ever wondered what kinds of changes happen to your blog?
One of the more important changes we can hope for is that our blog will be doing better than our competition. It’s always a good feeling when we find ourselves doing better than the rest, but how often do we check to see how much we’re improving?
We shouldn’t neglect the fact that our traffic or revenue has decreased, or that we’re losing rankings, even if we’re still ahead of the competition.
Every opportunity to improve should be seen as an opportunity to grow.
Blog Checklist For The First Day Each Month:
1. Blog Traffic Stats
Every blogger works day and night to get more organic traffic. They also work day and night to get social media traffic.
Traffic is almost equal to earnings; in general, the more targeted traffic you get, the more money you get.
Using your Google Analytics tool, compare last month’s traffic with this month’s traffic. Check the bounce rate, page views/visits, and countries sending that traffic.
The main thing you should check is traffic source. If you have seen any increase in search traffic, you’ll be able to see which keywords are working the most for bringing in traffic. Go through the “Keywords” tab, and make a list of all keywords responsible for getting organic traffic.
Using a rank checker, start thinking about how to increase those rankings. You can also use tools like SEMrush and SECockpit to help find keywords and increase rank.
But checking blog stats every now and then is not enough. You have to take constructive action to improve the overall stats of your blog. If a post is getting high traffic but also has a high bounce rate, try to add more internal links. For low ranking keywords, build some dofollow backlinks from blog commenting or guest posting.
Also, if you have created a time-sensitive article and it’s expired now, there is no harm in adding a noindex tag to such posts to avoid a low-quality issue.
2. Post FrequencyÂ
If you aren’t monitoring your post frequency, you should be. It’s more important to stay consistent than anything else. If you’re posting once a day, that’s great. If you’re posting once a week, that’s also great.
But if you post four times in a day, and then don’t post anything for another week, you’re going to make your readers confused.
If they see 3 new posts in one day, they might feel overwhelmed and not want to read any posts. Or if you usually post once a day, but you haven’t posted anything in a week, they may lose interest and stop reading your blog altogether.
3. Social Media Fans
Social media plays a key role in making a blog popular and successful.
Almost all of your readers are using social media. They typically prefer to enter your site via social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Check whether there is any increase/decrease in social media fans. Check your Facebook fan page likes, Twitter followers, retweets, and overall traffic from social media sites. Never neglect your social media followers.
Search engines change algorithms, but your followers will stay with you on social media as long as you as stay relevant and active.
My advice is to create a Google Docs file and update it every month with the number of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and all of the other metrics which matter to you (Alexa rank, Domain Authority, etc.). This will help you stay up to date with how popular/unpopular your blog is becoming.
4. Comments
In general, if you have a lot of comments, that means you’re getting a lot of readers.
I suggest you never accept any spam comments or short comments. Those kind comments are from spammers or from link builders. Accepting these comments will surely destroy your blog’s credibility and reputation.
- How A Blogger Should Moderate Blog Comments
5. Subscribers
Like social media fans, subscribers are loyal followers who want to see your blog succeed.
Subscribers also play a major role in earning an online income.
Your subscribers are the ones that will most likely click on your affiliate links, promote your blog on social media, and help you profit off of social proof.
Check out:
- 20 Smart Ways to Get More Subscribers on YouTube
- How I Got 5,324 Subscribers To My Blog Using Facebook Ads In Less Than 60 Days
- Top 7 Content Upgrade Ideas To Get Targeted Email Subscribers
6. Online Income Ads
Now, there are numerous online programs available which will let you make money.
AdSense is no doubt the best contextual ad network.
Especially, if you are into affiliate marketing, you should take stock of your affiliate products. Figure out what is working best for you, why it’s working, and what you can do to make everything better.
At the start of every month, make an income report.
Take note of:
- Which advertising program is working the best for you.
- Which product’s affiliate conversions are highest.
- Which product is not selling.
- Payment status of each network.
The whole idea here is to find low-paying advertisements and low-paying affiliate products. This will help you cut these programs from your blog and encourage you to use only the highest paying ads.
If you want, you can also write a monthly income report like ShoutMeLoud does.
6 Things To Check Every Month
These are just a few of the things which you should check at the beginning of every month.
Optionally, you can do this at the end of the month. The point is to do it at least once a month.
What’s something you make sure to check every month to maintain the health of your blog? Let me know in the comments below!
very good post yes Nizaam social media plays an important role if when you only focus on your work not other personal life on social media it is not for blogger to involve other spersonal discussion am i right
100% agree with you. We must control ours self from being addicted to social media
Nice tips Amar. I mostly prefer to check the user interactions on my blog (bounce rate, time on site, no.of social media shares etc). This helps me identify how my blog is performing.
Apart from 6 things mentioned above i would like to know if there are some few more steps to improve my blog.
These six steps are mandatory for any blog. Along with these 6 things, keep one eye on Earnings, Backlinks, error is Webmaster tools etc
Very informative article.
I always keep a check on no. of visitors i get on my website and I totally agree with the concept of posting one article everyday instead of 3 and being quiet on other days…
To add to this… it would be a nice idea to keep a check on no. of sites that are linked to you which will help in link building too…
Nice work Bro!!!
Cheers,
Michael
Awesome post Amar dude!
I hope to see more Posts from you on SML! 🙂
All the best 😉
Thanks Abdulsalam, Hope i post more articles here
Awesome and informative post! Well yes, social media plays an important role to make a blog popular and successful and creating a doc file using Google Docs is really a good strategy to keep monthly update of social media stats(followers). And agreed! the more comments the blog gets the more popular it is getting and one should not approve spam comments, as it will destroy the blog reputation. Thanks Amar for sharing this wonderful post 🙂
A very informative post. I keep a watch over my progress in the same manner as you have described here. Every week, I check my traffic improvements, and every month I check the number of posts I made compared to last month. Keeping a self-check improves our progress-rate.