10 Things to Develop For Your Blog Other Than Just Content

Most people that fail to monetize their blog(s) do so because they lack both the high quality content that is needed to attract readers and a strong overall plan for the blogs direction.

There is plenty of discussion around the web for how to create better blog content. But what I wanted to bring up in this article is the importance of having a Game Plan for your blog. It’s this “game plan” I believe that helps bloggers visualize their goals and actually achieve them. It’s the game plan that serves as a foundation for your blog and helps you build one day’s momentum on top of the next.

Why the Bill Belichick Game Plan?

If you are a sports fan than you are aware of Coach Belichicks’ ability to lead his New England Patriot football team to victory year after year. Bill Belichick is notorious for his ability to create specialized game plans for each opponent, especially for big game situations. This has led him to become the most successful football coach of this generation winning 3 Super Bowls in 4 tries.

Fact: In order to truly monetize your blog you need to treat your blog like it’s a business. I’m not saying you need to create a formal business plan for your blog. But there are some strategic things you need to do in order to ensure your success. Here are 10 Belichick like tactics you can do to help you reach your financial goals with your blog(s).

1. Setup Your Goals and Objectives

How can you know how well your blog is doing without setting any specific goals for yourself? Take a couple hours each month and plan out your next month’s goals. Here are a few ideas of goals you can set for yourself…

• How many blog posts will be written?
• How many visits?
• How many page views?
• How many comments will my posts receive?
• How many new RSS Subscriptions?
• How many affiliate sales? Etc.

All you gotta do is slightly increase your goals each month. And work like hell to make sure you achieve them.

2. The Financials:  Setup a Spreadsheet for Tracking

Using Google Docs or Excel/Open Office create a spreadsheet that tracks all of your expenses and all of your earnings. Even if you are dealing with cents early on instead of dollars this is still worth doing. Set a $ number up as a goal for earnings in a month that you eventually want to achieve. And until then everything up to that will be reinvested back into your blog.

3. Pick out Your Affiliate Programs

One of the things I like to do is visit other blogs in my niche and see what Affiliate offers they are promoting. Then I’ll typically do a little research to see if that company’s products or services align with my needs and then sign up for those programs. Think outside of the box. What type of offers could I have on my blog? What other verticals might my readers be interested in?

I recommend keeping track of all your affiliate relationships in a spreadsheet so that you have 1 place to reference them all.

4. Develop a Flagship SEO Content Strategy

I wrote up an article called the Flagship Content Strategy that you can read up on for more details. Basically you want to create a link building strategy where you can funnel links to some major pages that will then pass on link juice to individual blog posts. Read my article for more details on this.

5. Setup Your Analytics Goals and Filters

Once you have your goals in place, you need to be able to actually track them. If you are using Google Analytics you can setup specific goals to help you track specific events. Here is an article from SixRevisions.com that walks you through how to setup some of these goals.

Filters are also important. One of the first filters you want to setup is one that will filter out your personal IP Address so that Google Analytics doesn’t track “you” as a visit. Here are a few more ideas of Filters you can setup.

6. Indentify the Best Social Media Sites

Everyone loves to use Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, and Digg to promote their content. But often times it’s the smaller more niche social media sites that can push you more visits and more importantly more readers.

For example I can tell you from experience that if you are running a sports related blog than YardBarker.com will send you more traffic than any of the before mentioned social media outlets. The same can be said of Tipd.com in the financial world. The point here is, spend some time doing some research and find those niche social networks to promote your content through.

7. Build Your Network

This one is crucial. Build a list of experts in your industry, even if they are your competitors. Then begin to contact and communicate with these experts through comments on their blogs, tweets on Twitter etc. This network is where the gold is for your blogging efforts for 4 main reasons:

1. You can guest post on their blog and get readers/visits in return
2. They can guest post on your blog to provide your readers with more high quality content
3. You can trade links with their blog to build up your SEO link value
4. They can recommend your content (blog posts) to their friends in the Social Media world

Building a network takes time and effort. But if you can develop a strategy and be patient you can ensure yourself long term blogging success because of the connections you make in your niche.

8. To Outsource or Not To Outsource

Outsourcing can be some serious leverage for you if you use it right. But understand that some things are good to outsource and others are not. For example you wouldn’t want to actually outsource the majority of your blog writing, as that would create a blog that would lack your voice. At the same time a little outsourcing of content creation isn’t a bad thing if it’s outsource to high quality experts in your niche.

With that said here are a few ideas of things you could outsource to help you focus more on the content and strategy of your blog:

• Writing of new (guest) blog posts
• Link building
• Programming of a tool and/or application
• Web Design

Make sure you run the numbers and don’t invest too much $ initially. You want to make sure you invest $ wisely into your blog so you don’t go bankrupt. Again back to #2 in this article, I would reinvest a certain amount of your earnings back into your blog in this area of outsourcing.

9. Your Blogging Education Schedule

We never “know it all!” There is always so much for us to learn as bloggers. Whether it be on the topic we blog about, or pertaining to things that make bloggers successful there is much we can all learn. Make sure to dedicate an allotted amount of time each week to your own personal education. This is critical to blog success. Here are a few sources I like to use to “get my learn on.”

• RSS Feeds of other blogs
• Books from Amazon
• Audiobooks from Audible
• Magazines (Wired is my favorite)
• Stumbleupon (a great way to find content you otherwise might not have found)
• And many many more.

10. Create Business Cards

If you were to start a business today, wouldn’t you have some business cards created? The answer is probably yes. Why then would you not do this for your new blog? If you want to treat your blog like a business than this is a perfect thing for you to do to help you begin to think of it as one.

Have a logo professionally designed for you and then get some cards printed. You can pass these on to your friends, at conferences, meetings etc. You’ll be surprised how fast your blog will grow by doing this.

Conclusion: Spending Money & Creating the Average/Immediate Plan

Sometimes you need to spend some money on your blog in order to take it more seriously. I know that has been true with me and this blog. The more money and time I invest the more serious I take it and the more success that follows.

And as a last word of advice, don’t worry about creating the perfect plan. As the great General Patton once said “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” You can revise your plan later on. Don’t worry about it being perfect. Start instituting these things in today and improve upon them as you go. Cheers and good luck and check out my blog post on Content Strategy for your blog.