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.