Do You Have a Specific – Enough Game Plan For Blogging?

“Ahhh, I am just going to post something today.”

That used to be my game plan two years ago when I started blogging, and created The Profitable Business Edge 2.

But, if you asked me today what my game plan was, I would probably show you a calendar with specific actions to perform on specific dates, and specific objectives to meet by certain points each week, month, and year even.

I plan ahead now. Why?

Well, it is much easier to approach a day knowing what specific things must be done. But more importantly, because I have an action plan that I can rely on for results.

When you actually go through the steps to prepare and execute an organized plan for your blogging business, you have really set forth guaranteed success. Planets don’t have to align themselves, and you don’t have to hope that what you are doing today will get you results by tomorrow.

Here are steps to planning your blogging business that will have you ready to execute a plan that is effective and organized for each month:

• Make a list of actions to take that market you blog, and money making activities you want to pursue. Whether it be PPC, Digg, Stumbleupon, whatever actions are required that puts you and your blog “out there” for everyone to see.

• Take those marketing actions, and schedule them into your month. Fill your month, day by day with actions that market your blog (this post is not a blog-marketing course, perhaps in a future post). Each day that you work on your blogging business, you should have a minimum of one marketing action, and I recommend three minimum per day that you work on your blog.

• Schedule your money making activities. If your purpose in blogging is not to make money, skip this. This time is devoted to making joint ventures, affiliate marketing set up, ad re-location, getting new advertisers etc… More on specific money makers in another post. Just make sure you allow for enough time at certain points in a month to do these activities.

Notice the first two steps were marketing and money-making actions, and not posting. If all you do is write content, and you fail to market your blog, or set up potential advertisers, you are simply writing for yourself. Social marketing, SEO, perhaps some SEM (Search Engine Marketing) would be good to include into this first part of the plan.

Now, on to the next steps…

• Schedule your posting around your already scheduled marketing actions. Schedule enough time to come up with a post topic and write posts. Put a specific date and time for that date when you will start to research a topic. NOTE for Wordpress Users: You can actually use the post writer, and pre – write posts to appear at a later date. This is advantageous for scheduling, because you can schedule about 4 days worth of straight posting, and time all the posts to appear through out the month.

• Leave gaps in your schedule for commenting, and interaction with your readers (including email). Certain times of each blogging day should be devoted to interaction, as that is an important facet of a blogging business. You can schedule this, or use the gaps in your schedule as you see fit.

• Schedule what I call “fire time”. Fire time is time set aside each blogging day to put out fires. Perhaps there will be none, but if you have a pre-set amount of time to deal with these things, it makes your business operate much smoother.

• Finally, after everything else, schedule admin time. Admin time is for the tasks that need to be done to operate your blogging business (taxes, possible paperwork, phone calls, etc…). I save this for last, as after everything else is scheduled, you will actually have to think about where to put this time. You will focus less on the stuff that doesn’t make you money, and more on what does.

This list may not be all-inclusive, and I encourage comments below with your additional ideas for planning and organizing your blogging business. Planning and organizing your blogging venture will put you miles ahead of those that are more scattered in their approach.

Written by Joseph Ratliff from The Profitable Business Edge 2
Posted on April 20th, 2008 and filed under Blogging
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