Blogging Tips

Once in a while it’s good to do a self evaluation to your blog. It’s good to take a look back and check what happened, where did yo go wrong and what did you miss, if at all any. It’s a boring thing to do I know, but believe me, it’s a good thing to do. Even thought it’s drudgery, it helps you to do a cross check of where you are and how well you are going to do in the future, if you remain this way. It also helps you to find areas where you need to give more importance to.
Few things that might be worth checking are –

1. Subscribers
   Count the total number of subscribers and check for the subscribers frequency. count the number of posts you made, and divide it by the number of subscribers. So per post, how many subscribers have you been able to make? This should give you an idea of your convincing power. If you have not been able to gain a healthy number of subscribers, then you might want to check it.
2. Posting frequency
   Very important stuff. Your posting frequency has a lot of other metrics attached to it. Your authority on google, the number of incoming links etc. I’d recommend anyone to make a habit of posting at least a post daily. If you look at all the popular blogs, one of the most evident factors in their success is the posting frequency.
3. Comments
   Comments are yet another area that will give you an idea of how successful your blog is if you’d count popularity as one of the success factors. Count the number of posts you have and see how many comments you are getting on average on a single post. If you have a healthy number that means you have been successful in getting your readers engaged.
4. Incoming links
   SEO huh? Well, not just SEO, but incoming links can give you an idea of how successful a writer you are , how successful have you been in convincing others and how viral your articles were. The more the links the better.
5. Outgoing links
   A count on the number of outgoing links from your site can also be done. It can give you an idea of how frequently you are pointing to resources. I wouldn’t recommend a too large number here, but yes an optimum or average number is cool.
6. Categories
   Another big one here. Many of us have a long category list on the blogs. This isn’t really good because, of course there is the duplicate content issue. Moreover many of them might be unnecessary. You never know until you check. You might have added categories spontaneously while writing a post and it might not be relevant to any other article on the blog. So one category just for a post. Definitely not good. Crop down all those un necessary ones and keep it minimal. If you need more, use the tagging feature.
7. 404 Errors
   Check your Google Webmaster account. They will give you an idea of how many broken links and 404 error pages you have. I was alarme to see mine. It makes sense to take them off or offer a custom 404 error page on the blog so that you retain that much traffic.
8. Broken outgoing links
   Broken outgoing links are not good for your site. It affects the usability as well as your Google credibility. Too many broken outgoing links are bad so chop them and keep it to a minimal level.

There could be many factors more, but guess I’ve covered the bare essentials here and they will help you find problem areas and make yours a better blog.