13 Ways for Bloggers to Sleep Better

July 3rd, 2009 by Easton Ellsworth

I went to bed at 4 AM last night, er, this morning. I’m still a bit bleary.

Why? I was up late working on some things for blog consulting clients.

It’s not fun but that’s what you gotta do sometimes to make sure your blogging efforts yield good fruit.

Here are 13 ideas to help you sleep better (and, I hope, longer) at night knowing your blog is doing what it should.

1. Keep your blog content churning out regularly. Miss a beat and you’ll lose some winks. Get your posts published or scheduled for publication before you’ve been awake one hour. That way you can bask the rest of the day. I’ve lost more sleep from this one than I can shake a very large stick at.
2. Set clear goals for your blog in at least the following areas: content, design, community, traffic, subscribers, search presence, social presence, conversion and value. Drill down farther if you like, but at least have long-term (say, 60-month and 12-month) goals and short-term (say, 30-day, 7-day or even daily) goals in these nine key areas. If you don’t know where you want to go, the pointlessness will drive you nuts at night.
3. Review your goals regularly. Have them continually in your mind’s eye. A goal-oriented blogger is a well-sleeping blogger.
4. When you tweak or upgrade anything, do a unit check. Otherwise you’ll toss and turn at night with that nagging feeling you forgot something.
5. When you get ideas for blog posts or static pages, for goodness sakes, write them down. Jot them on an index card you keep in your pocket like me, or write them backwards on your forehead so you can see them in the mirror. Just scratch the muse’s itch whenever it comes around and you’ll find that your muse will let you rest better.
6. Remind yourself that blog design is a journey, not a destination. It’s an ongoing quest, not a task with a checkbox. So it’s okay to close your eyes and drift away even though a <div> somewhere is creaking. No blog has a perfect look. If anything, that should excite you and become the stuff of glorious dreams about your blog’s cosmetic future.
7. Engage with at least one person in your blog community every day. This could be as simple as emailing a quick, heartfelt thank you note to someone who has left a great comment at a blog post of yours. Or mixing your blog with Twitter or with Facebook in one of at least 75 ways to enhance the conversations around your blog that can blossom into trusting relationships. Just do something to interact, or you’ll sleep like Ebenezer Scrooge sans the Christmas cheer.
8. Watch blog traffic trends more than you watch day-to-day flow. Watch both, sure, but use a telescope more than you use a magnifying glass with your blog’s traffic. That way you can sleep at night after a low traffic day or week, knowing the flow will ultimately continue to increase as long as you are doing things the right way and there are more human beings with the potential to learn about your blog.
9. Don’t worry how many subscribers you have; focus instead on making them happy campers. When in doubt, resolve to have faith. 10 RSS or email subscribers may be better than 1,000 if the 10 are passionate and the 1,000 are meh. You’ll always sleep more deeply when you’ve approached blog subscribers as though they’re people like you than when you see them only as numbers.
10. Optimize for good search engine rankings, but optimize for humans first and search second. Computers don’t make you lose sleep. People do.
11. Spend a little less time promoting your blog on social media and a little more time creating great content at your blog. You’ll sleep like a blog – sorry, like a log – knowing that there’s something to talk about before you start talking about it.
12. Decide exactly what to consider a successful conversion and don’t go to bed without tracking your blog’s conversion rate. Some blogs have several criteria for successful conversion – getting readers to subscribe, getting visitors to click through to the company website, getting people to buy a product or click an advertisement – but the principle of identifying and tracking conversion rates with the best available tools will always be in vogue. You’ll never have to count sheep at night if you’ve been carefully counting your blog’s conversions throughout the day.
13. Don’t get superstitious about what constitutes value – or about anything else, for that matter. This post contains a list of 13 things – I’m not triskaidekaphobic – and I also think you shouldn’t worry excessively about or obsess over the question of your blog’s worth and value. Does it have meaning to you? To the people who visit it? Does it make a difference? You can and should pick some measurable metrics (like revenue, number of visits per month, backlinks, etc.) to help you decide how “worth it” your blog really is to you and/or your business or organization. Just don’t lose sleep over it.

I hope these tips help you find more success – and more and better sleep – as a blogger.

What else can we do to get better sleep? What causes you to lose the most sleep over your blog?

image by flattop341

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