Blog Improvement: Do You Know These 9 Key Areas?

June 9th, 2009 by Easton Ellsworth

Blog improvement is a tree whose trunk is vision.

Emerging from the trunk are nine main branches:

1. Blog content improvement – Making your articles, photos, podcasts, videos, etc. better at grabbing your audience’s attention and leaving them constantly satisfied yet hungry for more
2. Blog design improvement – Making your blog look, feel and work better for the people who visit and engage with it
3. Blog community improvement - Building a more vibrant community around your blog
4. Blog traffic improvement – Getting more of the right kind of people to discover your blog, and helping them become its greatest supporters
5. Blog subscribers improvement – Increasing the number and fanaticism of folks who subscribe to your blog’s updates via feeds or email
6. Blog search engine optimization (SEO) improvement – Strengthening your search presence – that is, getting better rankings in major search engines and moving more people through Google/Yahoo!/Bing/etc. searches to your blog
7. Blog social media optimization (SMO) improvement – Working to improve your blog’s presence on various social media, social networking and URL sharing websites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
8. Blog conversion improvement – Moving more blog visitors through the process of becoming customers, ad clickers, or even just avid readers
9. Blog value / return on investment (ROI) improvement – Making your blog more worth the time, money, sweat, tears, etc. for yourself and for those who come to it

No matter what kind of blog it is, it’s got these nine areas to possibly improve. Trust me on that one.

Why You Should Care About the 9 Areas of Blog Improvement

When you take time on a regular basis to evaluate your blog and look for ways to make it more successful, I want these nine items to run automatically through your mind. Helps you focus, you know?

Whenever I take a close look at a client’s blog, one or two of these branches almost always stand out as needing immediate attention.

The more know about how blog improvement works and how to think about it, the faster you’ll be able to prevent problems and make positive changes to your blog and in your blogging.

You can learn more about the twigs and leaves growing on each branch by using my free Blog Improvement Checklist. I’ve also got an assortment of blog improvement tips.

Coming Soon: Blog Improvement Advice Galore

Tomorrow we’ll start look at the first (and foremost) branch: improving your blog’s content.

Over the next few months we’ll go through each branch in more detail here on the blog. Please subscribe to Visionary Blogging now if you haven’t taken the 15 seconds to do that yet. You’ll love it.

If you want really intense help with one or more aspects of your blog – whether it’s a personal blog, non-profit organization blog or some kind of business blog or professional blog – please let me know. I’d love to help.

Coming very soon, I’ll have a big update to my Iris blog consulting service, Visionary Blogging courses, events and guides. I’m staying busy, no doubt about that!

So … which of the nine branches of blog improvement is the most important? Which one are you struggling with most right now? I’d love to get a comment thread going on this topic.

image by kencam1

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2. Help Me Create the Ultimate Blog Improvement Resource List
3. Over 100 Blog Improvement Resources Added to Our List
4. Vision as the Core of Blog Improvement: 3 Clarifying Metaphors