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.

Visionary Blogging, as you may already know, is all about using blogs and social media with a careful sense of vision and focus.

Twitter is a rapidly emerging tool that practically screams to be used haphazardly.

Here’s a quick example of how to think about Twitter.

I am currently helping Heifer International with its Twitter account. Yesterday we came across this tweet (Twitter status update) by Ashton Kutcher, the world’s number one Twitter user in terms of followers with just over two million.

One of the things Heifer does on a daily basis is give goats and other animals to poor families around the world to help them achieve self-reliance. It also allows people to pay for those animals in someone’s else honor – so, you could get a birthday gift of a cow or a goat or some bees, but they wouldn’t actually go to you. They would go on your behalf to someone who really needed the gift.

Ashton’s tweet may not have been directed to Heifer. Nevertheless, it created an opportunity for Heifer and its fans to speak out in favor of animals as vicarious gifts.

2008 is almost over. 2009 is about to begin.

Have you considered your blog improvement plan for next year?

Here are 7 strategy-related questions you should ask yourself.

1. What will I accomplish with my blog in 2009?

Set a few goals for the next 12 months. I recommend having at least one clear, measurable goal for your blog’s overall performance, plus at least one goal each for the following 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

Which means you’ll have at least 9 area-specific goals plus at least one overall blog goal for next year.

Why your blog? Why did you create it?
Why your blog? Why is it special?
Why your blog? Why did you choose the blog format?
Can a new visitor tell me “why your blog” within 10 seconds?
Can you?
Why your blog?