Blogging Tips

I’m not much for making empty resolutions. I prefer to make plans and concrete goals and I prefer to back these up with good research. That’s why I spent some time at the end of 2009 analysing my blogging business. Kristen Nicole gave some good advice on preparing for a prediction post and some of what she suggests can be used to help you prepare for the next phase of your blogging business. Here are the steps I took and what I learned about my blogging business.

Blogging Income Sources

First of all I had a look at where blogging work was coming from. I made a list of all my clients and looked at those for whom I had done a single post as well as those for whom I blogged regularly. I then went through my income spreadsheet to see how much money I made in each instance. (There were some posts which I did for marketing where I was not paid but where the traffic from the blog was well worth the hour I spent preparing the post.) Once I had those figures I was able to see which clients were the most important in income terms. I also found out which clients hired me regularly throughout the year.

Additional Blogging Income

The second thing I looked at was additional income from blogging. This included money that came from promoting affiliate products and advertising. Again I looked at the figures to see which products were worth the time I spent promoting them — and which were not.

Who Liked What

Finally, I looked at all the blogs I wrote for to see which posts attracted the most attention in terms of comments or traffic. PostRank is a good tool for assessing this. It’s also worth using an analytics tool or WP-Stats to find out which posts people linked to and visited most.

What I Learned

I learned a lot from this exercise which has helped me to firm up of my plans and goals for 2010. Knowing what is really worthwhile in income terms provides a good wake-up call. This is not the only thing that’s important, but if blogging is one way in which you earn your living then you need to pay attention to those figures.

2010 Plans

So here’s what I plan to do as a result of my blog analysis. I will:

• continue to do my best work for my valued blogging clients
• phase out work that does not provide good value
• continue to guest blog both to explore new areas and for self-promotion
• write more posts on themes similar to the ones that got attention from readers
• create some information products related to those themes which I will promote on my blog
• look for additional products that might interest my readers to promote and will stop promoting products that obviously leave them cold

Have you analyzed your blog recently? What have you learned?