You've Done All You Can, So Just Go With The Flow

A common theme across most bloggers is this feeling that we should all be doing better than what we are actually doing. So at what point do we say enough is enough? When can we just sit back and admire the fruits of our labour? Maybe never. 

I always talk about SEO and marketing and those things are something we have to keep on top of and monitor frequently, but the trouble is, we end up doing nothing but that. We work continuously hard on our posts, our optimisation and our promotion purely because we never see instant results. We keep pushing as hard as we can but whilst we're pushing, we miss the tiny progress we are making. 

Seeing the results of your blog, both in followers and in your analytics takes a lot of time and patience. Set up blocks of time, this could be a day, a few days or even a week where you focus solely on your SEO, come up with that months promotion schedule and marketing plans. I like to do this at the beginning of every month, I usually spend a day purely on updating and optimising my social media, a day working on my SEO and analytics and two days coming up with a content schedule, a promotional plan and updating my progress reports (I like to use excel to keep track of followers, traffic, post likes etc). 

Once you've worked you butt off for a few days, relax and let your hard work run its course. By all means, keep an eye on how things are going, do a quick check to make sure there's no major faults and do general maintenance whenever you have a spare second. Then, when the next month rolls around, you can have a look and see wether last months work has had any effect. If you find your stats have gone down, have a look into why that might be and rectify it. If your stats have increased, take a look at what areas haven't done as well as others and tweak them slightly to give them a little boost. 

If you take a look at your analytics and followers and find that nothing has changed, leave them be and check back the following month. It might be a case that your hard work needs a little more time to develop. 

It's so important, especially if you're trying to balance a blog with a full-time job, that you don't burn out. You don't want to get so caught up in stats that blogging becomes a stress rather than a release. 

In March's newsletter, I'll be including a FREE content audit sheet to help you keep track of which content is doing well and which subjects you should focus on more. A content audit sheet is a great way to start off your blog reporting, especially if you only have time to focus on one area every month. It'll be released at the end of March with a few handy tips to get you started.