I often meet bloggers that think that blogging is about doing certain things. They’ve read a couple blogs about blogging and find out that there are many different blogging activities they can do. So they create a checklist and methodically try to complete every activity on the checklist. These activities may include:
- Twitter marketing
- Guest posting
- Blog commenting
- Submitting to article directories
- Creating list posts
- Doing interviews
- Writing humorous posts
The problem with the checklist approach is that different activities will yield different results. Guest posting may send more traffic than blog commenting. Or list posts may attract more links than interviews.
As you manage and promote your blog, if you’re watchful, you’ll see that certain activities will be more successful than others.
Once you’ve made that realization, you should move more time and effort to those successful activities.
Sometimes the first thing you do provides very good results, so there’s not much reason to spend a lot of time on the other activities.
The 80/20 Approach
Instead of the checklist approach, I suggest the 80/20 approach.
With this approach, you spend 80% of your time on activities that have worked well for your blog. If being active on Twitter has brough a sizable increase on your RSS subscriber base, then you spend a lot of time of Twitter. If funny posts have been well received by your audience, then you set aside much of your time to create those posts.
With the rest of the time, you use it to try out new things or the activities you like that don’t provide the best results.
The 20% is there so you don’t get bored. It seems to be human nature to try new things. Plus, by trying out new things, you could find an activity that works even better than your current best activities.
Different Activities for Different Blogs
One thing to note is that certain activities work well for some blogs but not for others. Just because article marketing works for your pet blog doesn’t mean it will work as well for your travel blog.
This means you should spend time testing different activities to see which ones work for each blog.
For example, I used to do a lot of article marketing but I found that it didn’t work that well for many blogs. For many niches, article marketing is very saturated and overdone. Your articles don’t really get much traffic because there are so many competing articles.
But I submitted some test articles for a new blog in the gaming industry. These articles did well since surprisingly the gaming industry is not active on the article directories. Therefore, I spend most of my marketing time doing article marketing for the gaming blog.
To recap, through testing figure out which activities work well and then spend the bulk of your time and effort on those activities. This strategy will improve your blog as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Performancing offers an authority builder service to help you discover which activities provide the best results for your site.
10 thoughts on “Blogging More Efficiently by Doing What Works”
I learn a lot from this particular point “The 80/20 Approach” in the blog post. I’m a new blogger and I need a lot to learn.
I am still new in blogging. It is really difficult to be known.
Insightful post. I believe the key is being willing to test various activities. Making your articles interesting and useful to your readers is certainly important. Drawing your readers into the conversation seems to get more hits. I’m not sure there’s a single “magic formula” that works best. If so I’d like to hear about it. Or if I happen to stumbe upon it I’d sure share it.
Thank you very much for such an interesting post. Since you talked from your own experience, I could relate better with it. I specially liked what you said about testing what works for your blog market. Thanks!!!
Most of the time we have to consider the topics to be written. The more interesting the topic is, the more people are enticed to reading it. Most of the people would opt to read topics that are lifestyle-oriented rather than on some boring articles. Who would read and comment on a topic that does not piqued his curiosity? Who would be interested in spending much time reading a boring article? So I guess the type of topic is one essential consideration in blogging.
Well the basic thing is Good Blog content.If the content of the blog is not good then no amount of advertising will work.
I support your findings regarding how articles could be effective with the gaming niche. I have submitted four press release articles last month, under game, wedding, hotel, and business categories. I checked out one of the press release site after a month where my articles were published, I saw that the game article received 800 hits, compare to the other 3 articles which has less than 100 hits. So, same with your conclusion, not all techniques could be applied in a specific niche.
Dan, thanks for sharing your example. I’ve found that blog commenting can sometimes be good at getting quality traffic and building relationships with other bloggers. However, it often doesn’t provide exceptional results especially on low traffic blogs or blogs with too many comments.
This is so true. At first I spent almost an hour a day finding posts to comment on, and even then the return was minimal at best. (In martial arts at least, it may be different in other markets.)
I’ve found my time is better spent creating evergreen content for guest posts and my blogs. At least these stick around over time, and give me a sense that I’m buiding something.
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