If you think effective blog management is just about writing whatever you think about and hitting the publish button, think again!

If you want to be successful blogging for yourself or your business, you need to understand what goes into managing a blog that can reap benefits for your business.

There are a lot of moving pieces to consider, but in order for blogging to be an effective means of communication, it must be read. And in order for blogs to be discovered and read, there needs to be some basic blog management in place. The best way to ensure all these benchmarks are met is to practice effective blog management.

Let’s take a look at what you need to be successful.

Make Sure Your Blogging Objective is Always Aligned with Your Marketing Strategy

If you are serious about blogging, it all begins with planning.

You DO have a marketing strategy, right? While hobbyist bloggers might think it’s OK to just put things out there, readership will always be low without a strategy. After all, the best way to keep readers is by making your blog a go-to website for people in your niche. It doesn’t matter what your niche is: it could be anything from business-related topics to hobbies. Either way there needs to be an incentive for potential readers to spend their valuable time on your website and then spend their valuable money with you.

To that end, you need to have a strategy for increasing traffic. For many bloggers, this includes making your posts search engine friendly enough that people looking to learn about your topic will find them. Another way you can do this is with email marketing, wherein people who are interested can join a newsletter that announces what you’ve posted about at certain intervals. Finally, never underestimate the power of social media to promote your blog. This can include paid advertising, self-promotion through organic posting, or a mixture of these.

Keep reading for specific advice on some of these ideas.

Further Reading: Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working (And How to Fix It)

Keyword Research for Your Content Library

Next, it’s important that you know what keywords to use in your blog posts. The best way to do this is using keyword research tools, such as Ahrefs, MOZ, or SEMRush. Some of the options are paid, while others are free. With each of these tools, you can both determine which keywords are hot, and which ones might be a good opportunity to compete with less popular ones. Each keyword you choose should be appropriate for your blog and its niche, however. Keyword stuffing is poor blog management that can result in irrelevance.

NO matter how effective your fist set of keywords might be, an established blog still needs updating. After all, search trends change. Who had heard of COVID-19 back in 2019? Only a few scientists had. Now, the virus is on everyone’s mind. While drastic, this is a good example of why you need to keep up with keyword trends.

Finally, you’ll need to change keywords as your products and services shift. For instance, in my own area of expertise we talk a lot of influencer marketing. However, this is a new form of marketing that’s emerged in the last five years. When most of us started working in the marketing space it wasn’t a major option, if it existed at all.

Further Reading: The 5 Biggest Mistakes to Avoid with Content Marketing Campaign Keywords

Editorial Calendar

While it’s great to just write out your thoughts and post them, this isn’t an effective way to draw and keep readers. Instead, proper blog management should include developing an editorial calendar. If you aren’t familiar with this term, an editorial calendar is a list of topics and content plans, along with when and where you intend to post them. To that end, I have a long pipeline of blog topics which will be written and published as appropriate.

What should go into an editorial calendar? Topics that address your keyword research, and which should be appealing to a lot of people running the related keyword searches. At the same time, you want to aim for topics with somewhat lower keyword competition. Otherwise, you might be tempted to stuff keywords or commit other writing “sins.”

Further Reading: 12 Free Tools For Creating an Effective Editorial Calendar

Ideation

One of the biggest problems that bloggers face is writer’s block. You know, that time when writers stare into space because they can’t decide what to write about, or how to say what they want to. Luckily, there are ways to overcome this problem. As a blogger, you need to be proactive about writer’s block prevention. The easiest way to do this is through ideation. To do this, look around and see what people are searching for in your space. Once you find some great ideas, add them to your editorial calendar.

Further Reading: Stumped for Blog Post Topics? Here’s What Your Brand Should be Blogging About

Blog Post Content Creation

Now that you know what you’re going to write about, it’s time to actually get some writing done. However, you shouldn’t “just write.” Instead, the posts need to contain an SEO-optimized headline, title, and description. In addition, you’ll want to ensure that the content itself is both engaging and grammatically correct. Finally, make sure your posts meet your audience where they are.

Further Reading: 12 “Secrets” to Writing Quality Content for Your Blog

SEO Alignment of Your Blog Post

Of course, SEO doesn’t stop with the preliminaries of your blog post. Rather, effective SEO and blog management involve using SEO tools which ensure your entire post is reader friendly. One of the most common SEO tools is Yoast, which not only considers basic SEO concerns but also readability. Another thing to include is an NLP or AI-based tool, such as Frase. With Frase, you’ll get an idea of how well you’re answering a reader’s question. Together, these tools are highly effective.

 Further Reading: 10 Top Tips to Increase Your Blog Post SEO

Image Sourcing or Creation

Even the most engaging blog copy needs some images to make it visually appealing. We as humans prefer our world to be colorful. And, images convey a lot of meaning without saying a word. To add images, consider using a free photography and images site. You’ll need to ensure that the license allows republishing of the photo, however. Prefer to make something? Try an image editor like Canva. Many of these tools are free, while others are cheap.

Further Reading: Top 10 Resources Where to Download Free Images for Blogs

Post Scheduling and Publishing

As the saying goes, you can’t be everywhere at once. This includes the ability to post your content at the right time of day, especially if you need to consider various time zones. Fortunately, some website builders and content managers will let you delay posting. If you use WordPress, then there’s an automatic option to post immediately or later. This choice is made once everything has been added to the post. Other applications may do this differently.

Further Reading: How to Manage Your Blog the CoSchedule Way

An easy way to promote your content is on social media. While everyone has the ability to post links on their profiles, there are other options. One of these is to get a Facebook author page, which lets people follow your content without exposing personal information. Another way is through paid social. Each of the networks allows you to buy ads in people’s feeds, and it’s typically shown to people based on keywords. Web cookies also help decide what people see. Finally, encourage people to link to your content and refer people to your website.

Further Reading: 10 Ways How to Promote Your Blog

Outreach and Link Building

There are definitely limits to the statement “if you build it, they will come.” Proper blog management involves getting backlinks from other people, and this takes work. One way to do it is by reaching out to fellow bloggers and letting them know you featured them on your blog. Another way to do this is by linking to their articles. Over time, these online conversations produce a lot of backlinks.

Further Reading: 12 Subject Lines for Better Blogger Outreach Campaigns

One thing that most effective blogs have in common is that they invite comments. In this case, I’m specifically talking about the tendency for readers to post their responses to your material in the comments section, not your “asking” for them. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of spam comments and other poor-quality comments out there.

Here too, effective blog management is necessary. To avoid having these junk comments take over your blog, I and many other experts recommend using content moderation. This can be done either with a built-in feature on your blog or using a plugin. Either way, be sure to control what ultimately goes live on your blog.

Further Reading: WordPress Comment Moderation: A Beginner’s Guide

If you’ve read this far, you already know that blog management requires social media promotion of your content. However, do you know what to do when people respond to this promotion? In short, it’s critical that you manage your reputation on social media. One way to do this is using social media management programs such as Hootsuite or Agorapulse. These will not only help you with the posting, but help manage the traffic through robust analytics.

Further Reading: 7 Ways to Save Time for Social Media Management

Rankings Tracking

Another thing that will help with blog management is a method of rankings tracking. This is a subset of website analytics which will tell you how well your posts are doing in Google rankings. Here, you’ll want to know the rankings for each post, based on target keyword. Besides giving you a current ranking, this method of tracking will allow you to pivot your strategy over time.

Further Reading: Content Marketing ROI: 10 Essential Metrics to Track

Analyzing Performance

I can’t say this enough: keeping track of analytics is critical to any blogger’s success. To that end, you need to review Google analytics for your blog regularly. In addition, you might want to add other analytics tools to your website. Some of these options will vary depending on whether you blog on your own site or use free tools like Blogger. Your stats to watch include post views, leads, and bounce rate (how many people leave right away).

Further Reading: Google Analytics for Bloggers – 9 Metrics To Watch Closely

Guest Post Outreach

As important as the content you personally write may be, it isn’t enough if you want to boost traffic. Instead, part of your blog management should be reaching out to other bloggers in your industry or niche. Not only should you be complementing what they write, but you also need to talk with them about guest posting. Often, bloggers will do each other a favor by posting on the opposite blogs. Others have different policies. Either way, you’ll want to make the pitch compelling.

Further Reading: How To Invite Influencers To Guest Post On Your Blog

Paid Advertising

Sure, it’s tough to pay for advertising even though you spend a lot of time writing and moderating your blog. However, if you want your blog to grow then paid advertising is often the way to go. One of the easiest ways to do this is by paying social media networks to boost your blog posts to where people will see it. Using this approach, a thumbnail of your blog and its image will be placed in one of the advertising slots on people’s feeds. By doing this, you can increase the number of views and leads generated by your blog post. Even better, you can get bonus leads if people repost the links.

Further Reading: The Complete Guide To Paid Social Media For Bloggers

Software Updates and Maintenance

No matter which blogging platform you use, it’s important to keep its software up to date. This can be as simple as “okaying” suggested changes on a platform like Blogger, which updates your blog. Or, if you run a WordPress site, it’s important to run updates manually. In many cases, the software will let you know if an update is needed for blog management. Otherwise, run an update check on a regular basis, such as monthly.

Further Reading: 11 Leading WordPress Maintenance Services to Consider

Especially if you’re just starting out as a blogger, it can be easy to make blog management mistakes. After all, there are many things which you won’t think about right away. Comments and software updates happen without your even thinking about them. However, if you don’t stay on top of blog maintenance you risk having a messy website that people don’t like to hang out on. Worse, you might end up with an “empty” site if you lack an editorial calendar. Luckily, expanding your website and making it successful is easy if you follow these basic blog management tips.

Did I miss anything here? Any of these tips that you find challenging and need help on? Drop me a comment below.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Neal Schaffer is a leading authority on helping businesses through their digital transformation of sales and marketing through consulting, training, and helping enterprises large and small develop and execute on social media marketing strategy, influencer marketing, and social selling initiatives. President of the social media agency PDCA Social, Neal also teaches digital media to executives at Rutgers University, the Irish Management Institute (Ireland), and the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland). Fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, Neal is a popular keynote speaker and has been invited to speak about digital media on four continents in a dozen countries. He is also the author of 3 books on social media, including Maximize Your Social (Wiley), and in late 2019 will publish his 4th book, The Business of Influence (HarperCollins), on educating the market on the why and how every business should leverage the potential of influencer marketing. Neal resides in Irvine, California but also frequently travels to Japan.

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