The Blog Improvement Checklist: Improve Your Blog Now

Welcome to the Blog Improvement Checklist by Visionary Blogging.

Use this 130-point checklist to help you improve your blog faster and more effectively than ever before.

After rating each item, please see the bottom of this page for detailed instructions on how to create a customized blog improvement plan.

This checklist covers nine blog improvement areas:

  1. Blog content improvement
  2. Blog design improvement
  3. Blog community improvement
  4. Blog traffic improvement
  5. Blog RSS feed / Atom feed / email subscribers improvement
  6. Blog search engine optimization (SEO) improvement
  7. Blog social media optimization (SMO) improvement
  8. Blog monetization improvement
  9. Blog value / return on investment (ROI) improvement

1. Improve Your Blog Content

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

  1. Number of published articles (posts + pages)
  2. Age of first published article
  3. Age of latest published article
  4. Posts published per month
  5. Comments by blog visitors per month
  6. Trackbacks/pingbacks per month
  7. Words per article
  8. Images/audio/videos per article
  9. Internal links per article
  10. External links per article
  11. Compelling headlines
  12. Descriptive headlines
  13. Concise headlines
  14. Appropriate writing style
  15. Useful content
  16. Remarkable content
  17. Targeted content
  18. Accurate content
  19. Unique content
  20. Viral content
  21. Effective use of multiple media formats
  22. Appropriate anchor text in hyperlinks
  23. Appropriate number of hyperlinks
  24. Relevant hyperlinks
  25. Descriptive use of categories/tags
  26. Concise use of categories/tags
  27. Relevant use of categories/tags
  28. Visible policies
  29. Useful policies

2. Improve Your Blog Design

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

  1. Eye-pleasing
  2. Unique
  3. Simple
  4. Organized
  5. Appropriate
  6. Easy to read
  7. Easy to navigate
  8. Easy to distinguish links from text
  9. Looks same in various browsers
  10. Looks same at different resolutions
  11. Mobile version looks good
  12. No broken links
  13. No code errors
  14. No missing alt text/placeholders
  15. Memorable favicon
  16. Appropriately-sized masthead
  17. Eye-pleasing masthead
  18. Relevant masthead
  19. Appropriately-sized logo
  20. Resizable logo
  21. Eye-pleasing logo
  22. Relevant logo
  23. Logo works without color
  24. Blog works without images
  25. Blog works without CSS
  26. Appropriately-sized blog title
  27. Memorable blog title
  28. Descriptive blog title
  29. Memorable tagline
  30. Descriptive tagline
  31. Visible search box
  32. Obvious search box
  33. Useful search box
  34. Visible feed/email subscription options
  35. Visible article headlines
  36. Appropriate number/size of article excerpts on homepage
  37. Appropriate number/size of article excerpts on archive pages
  38. Visible social media sharing options
  39. Relevant social media sharing options
  40. Appealing social media sharing options
  41. Visible blog comment area
  42. Easy to publish a comment
  43. Easy to browse comments/trackbacks/pingbacks/tweetbacks
  44. Organized sidebar(s)
  45. Useful sidebar elements
  46. Organized footer
  47. Useful footer elements
  48. Feed displays correctly
  49. Useful feed elements

3. Improve Your Blog Community

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

  1. Visible author information
  2. Compelling author information
  3. Visible contact information
  4. Compelling contact information
  5. Blog comments encouraged
  6. Useful blog comments

4. Improve Your Blog Traffic

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

  1. Monthly visitors
  2. Monthly unique visits
  3. Monthly page views
  4. Average visit duration

5. Improve Your Blog Feed/Email Subscriber Count

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

  1. Feed subscribers
  2. Email subscribers
  3. Newsletter subscribers
  4. Autoresponder subscribers

6. Improve Your Blog Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

  1. Number of backlinks
  2. Quality of backlinks
  3. Search engine rankings/SERPs
  4. Google PageRank
  5. Domain age
  6. Pages indexed in search engines
  7. Page load time
  8. Homepage URL memorability
  9. Homepage URL relevance
  10. URL structure
  11. Descriptive blog title/tagline
  12. Descriptive article headlines/subheadings

7. Improve Your Blog Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

  1. Social media referral traffic as percentage of all referral traffic
  2. BlogCatalog presence
  3. Delicious.com presence
  4. Digg.com presence
  5. Mixx.com presence
  6. LinkedIn.com presence
  7. Propeller.com presence
  8. StumbleUpon.com presence
  9. Technorati.com presence
  10. Twitter.com presence
  11. Yahoo! Buzz presence
  12. YouTube presence

8. Improve Your Blog Monetization

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

  1. Appropriate amount of advertising/sales copy
  2. Appropriate placement of advertising/sales copy
  3. Relevant advertising/sales copy
  4. Compelling advertising/sales copy
  5. Appropriately-priced products/services
  6. Valuable products/services

9. Improve Your Blog Value / Return On Investment (ROI)

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

  1. Discernible purpose
  2. Discernible target audience
  3. Addictive
  4. Remarkable
  5. Irresistible
  6. Irreplaceable
  7. Valuable
  8. Makes a difference

Create a Visionary Blog Improvement Plan

Now that you’ve evaluated each aspect of your blog, it’s time to make a plan to improve it. Use the Visionary Blogging method to help you go through these steps.

Step 1: Evaluate

1.1 Complete each section of the Blog Improvement Checklist that corresponds to an aspect of your blog that you want to improve. (It’s okay to skip items or sections. Some bloggers do not care about monetization, for example.)

1.2 For each item, assign a score from 1-5 according to how well your blog is doing and write down any ideas or questions that come to mind.

1.3 For each section, add up the scores and divide by the number of items to get an average score. e.g. The blog content section has 29 questions; if your total score for that section is 87, then your average score is 87/29 =3.00.

1.4 Add up the section averages and divide by the number of sections you evaluated to get an overall blog score (e.g. 3.67).

Step 2: Decide

2.1 For each checklist item, rate on a scale from 1 to 5:

  1. How important it is to improve (1 = not important; 5 = extremely important)
  2. How urgent it is to improve (1 = not urgent; 5 = extremely urgent)
  3. How easy it is to improve (1 = not easy; 5 = extremely easy)
  4. How quick it is to improve (1 = extremely time-consuming; 5 = extremely quick)
  5. How inexpensive it is to improve (1 = extremely expensive; 5 = extremely inexpensive)

2.2 Add the scores together and divide by 5 to get a priority score for each item.

e.g. eye-pleasing logo = 1 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 5 = 15/5 = 3.00

2.3 Sort the items in descending order of priority.

You may wish to ignore items below a certain priority score (such as 2.00).

2.4 For each item, write a specific goal to improve your checklist score over the next month.

e.g. I will publish at least one blog post per weekday in the month of October.

You may also wish to set section-specific goals (e.g. a general blog content improvement goal) or overall blog goals.

Step 3: Act

This part’s easy. Just force yourself to carry out your plan. :)

Step 4: Review

4.1 Daily: Keep track of how much time, energy and/or money you spend trying to improve each aspect of your blog. Evaluate yourself as an improver. Ask, “What could I do to speed up my blog improvement efforts and make them more effective?

4.2 Monthly: Repeat steps 1-3 to track the improvement of your blog and review/set blog improvement goals. Some things may improve or worsen without your intervention (for example, the number and quality of blog comments may fluctuate without any effort on your part).

If you’d like professional help inspecting or improving your blog, please contact Easton Ellsworth.

Thanks for using this free Visionary Blogging resource. Don’t forget to share it with a friend!