How to Improve Your Blog

Welcome to our free guide on how to improve your blog. No matter how experienced you are as a blogger, this simple step-by-step guide will help you make your blog even better.
If you haven’t started your blog yet or just want to refresh yourself on the process of starting a blog, please see our free guide on How to Start a Blog.
Here’s what we’ll cover in this guide.
Section 1: 5 compelling reasons to improve your blog
Section 2: How to improve your blog in 5 simple steps
Section 3: 9 areas of your blog that you can improve
Section 4: 50 questions to help you evaluate and improve your blog
Section 5: Recommended resources and further reading

Section 1: 5 Compelling Reasons to Improve Your Blog
There are many reasons to consider improving your blog. Here are five of the most common ones:
1. You want your blog’s visitors to enjoy your blog more.
2. You want to attract more readers to your blog.
3. You want to make money (or make more money) with your blog.
4. You want to feel more satisfied with your blog.
5. You want others to see your blog as more valuable.
In the end, all of the above reasons may actually just be means to an end.
For instance, maybe you want to attract more readers to your blog in order to get more people to join your organization and change the world somehow.
Or maybe you want others to see your blog as more valuable in order for you to be able to sell it to someone at a higher price.

Section 2: How to Improve Your Blog in 5 Simple Steps
The bad news: Improving your blog is not always easy.The good news: The blog improvement process is usually simple in nature.
Here is a basic five-step method to help you improve your blog. It’s a pattern you can follow no matter what kind of changes you want to make to your blog.
You’ll notice that you can apply these steps to improving your home, your car, your bowling average or just about anything in your life.
That’s because improving a blog, like improving most things in life, is a challenge of the mind more than anything else.
Step 1: Figure out where you are.
Step 2: Decide where you want to go.
Step 3: Decide how to go there.
Step 4: Go there.
Step 5: Repeat steps 1-4.
Next, we’ll explore each of these blog improvement steps in more detail.
2.1: Figure out where you are.
Take a close look at the current state of your blog. What do you know about it? What seems to be working well? What seems to be a point of weakness?
Remember that you can always ask other people to evaluate your blog too. BlogCatalog has an entire discussion area dedicated to blogging help if you’d like to start there.
Try to measure and quantify everything you can about your blog and keep track of it on a regular basis. This can really make figuring out the state of your blog a lot easier.
For example, if you want to increase your blog traffic, the first thing you should do is find out exactly how many people are really visiting your blog - and who they are. There are many free or cheap blog traffic analysis tools - Google Analytics, Performancing Metrics, Site Meter and Statcounter, to name a few - that you can use to help you determine where people are coming from when they find your blog, how long they stay on your blog, and where they go when they leave.
2.2: Decide where you want to go.
Once you know where you are, you can set a clear goal to get somewhere else.
For example, if you want to improve your blog design and you know from all the research you’ve done that most people who visit your blog love the color scheme but hate the layout, then maybe your goal can be to switch to a different layout in the next 14 days. Once you make the change, you can ask your blog visitors again how they like the layout.
When deciding what to do and where to go to make your blog better, you may sometimes find it hard to determine whether something is really worth the time, sweat and/or money to improve. Here are five simple questions you can ask yourself to help you make these decisions:
1. How important is it that I improve this aspect of my blog?
2. How urgent is it?
3. How easy will it be?
4. How quick will it be?
5. How inexpensive will it be?
For instance, let’s say you’re trying to decide which to improve first: your blog content or your blog design. After asking yourself the five questions above, you decide that you want to work on improving your content first because it will probably be easier and cheaper for you to do, but it will probably make the same difference (or perhaps a greater difference) than working on your design right now.
2.3: Decide how to go there.
This is sometimes the trickiest part of blog improvement. It may require a lot of thought to figure out how exactly to go about improving your blog. You may even decide that you need professional help to make your blog better. It’s not unusual to get frustrated at this point.
But don’t panic! You started your blog. You’re in charge of it. If something’s broken, you can fix it (or have someone else help you fix it). If you have a blog improvement goal, you can strive earnestly to accomplish it.
In Sections 3 and 4 below, we’ll share lots of tips to help you decide how to actually “go there” and improve your blog.
2.4: Go there.
Here’s where most bloggers fall off the wagon. They simply give up because this step can take a lot of work.
But go means go. Go means move. Go means work. There’s no other way to make your blog better than it was before, or to get better results with your blog.
So don’t let anything distract you. Don’t let anything stop you. Pause as needed to catch your breath and make sure you’re still on the right track, but don’t stop. Go go go.
Stuck? Exhausted? Don’t panic if you haven’t reached your blogging goals yet. The important thing is to try as hard as you can, day after day.
2.5: Repeat steps 1-4.
Never stop trying to improve your blog. This, coupled with sincere thought and hard work, is the real secret to achieving success in your blogging efforts.
You may find it helpful to perform a blog improvement routine on a regular basis. For example, every six months you could do a major overhaul, and once a month you could make a few minor tweaks. Find a rhythm that suits you.
Remember that each blog is unique, and so is each blogger. And the Web and people are always changing, so what may make blog improvement easy and worthwhile today may be pointless or impossible a year from now.
So, every time you decide to make another push to change something about your blog, you need to take into account the primary elements you encountered when you started your blog: its intended purpose, topic and audience. Everything you do to improve your blog should be in harmony with all of those primary elements.

Section 3: 9 Areas of Your Blog that You Can Improve
To help you simplify the process of improving your blog, we’ll break things down into nine blog-related areas. We’ll cover each area in more detail in Section 4.
1. Content: The words, images, sounds and/or videos that make up the substance of your blog.
2. Design: The way you organize and present your content to your audience.
3. Community: The people who like your blog and how they interact with it and each other.
4. Traffic: How many people see your blog’s content on a regular basis.
5. Subscriptions: How many people are subscribers to your blog posts and any newsletters or other regular publications you may have that are associated with it.
6. Search presence: How easy it is for people to find your blog using search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Live.
7. Social presence: How prominent and influential your blog is among social media users (like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, YouTube or Twitter users).
8. Conversion: How well your blog generates the results you want (like making money, making friends, or making a difference in the world).
9. Value: Whether your blog is actually worth the time/energy/money.
With these different areas of your blog in mind, you’re ready to tackle some serious questions about each one.

Section 4: 50 Questions to Help You Evaluate and Improve Your Blog
We’ve talked about 9 areas of your blog, and we have 5 questions for each area, so that’s 45 questions. At the end of this section we have 5 key questions to ask yourself about your blog to help you with your overall blog improvement plans. So in all, that’s 50 questions to help you take your blog from here to there!
Each of these questions will help you figure out where you are, where you want to go and how to get there - which, if you remember, are steps 1-3 of the blog improvement method described above.
You may wish to have your blog visitors or friends answer these questions as well, just to give you a better idea of what to do.
4.1: Content
1. How targeted is your content?
2. How unique is your content?
3. How remarkable is your content?
4. How appropriate is your choice of media (text, audio, images, videos, etc.)?
5. How regularly do you publish new content?
4.2: Design
1. How useful is your design?
2. How pleasant is your design?
3. How unique is your design?
4. How simple is your design?
5. How remarkable is your design?
4.3: Community
1. How vibrant is your community?
2. How influential is your community?
3. How easy is it to get to know you through your blog?
4. How easy is it for people to get to know each other through your blog?
5. How effectively does your community promote your blog?
4.4: Traffic
1. How many people visit your blog each month?
2. How much time do people spend at your blog each month?
3. How much attention does your blog receive compared to other websites in your niche?
4. How quickly is your traffic increasing over time?
5. How quickly is your traffic increasing compared to other websites in your niche?
4.5: Subscriptions
1. How many people subscribe to your blog via RSS or email?
2. How many people subscribe to any newsletters or autoresponders associated with your blog?
3. How many subscribers does your blog have compared to other websites in your niche?
4. How quickly is your subscriber count increasing over time?
5. How quickly is your subscriber count increasing compared to other websites in your niche?
4.6: Search Presence
1. How much traffic does your regularly receive from search engines?
2. How many high-quality backlinks to your blog are currently indexed by search engines?
3. How compelling are the search listings for your blog and its articles?
4. How quickly is your search presence increasing over time?
5. How quickly is your search presence increasing compared to other websites in your niche?
4.7: Social Presence
1. How much traffic does your regularly receive from social media websites?
2. How compelling is your blog’s presence on social media websites?
3. How likely are social media users to become regular subscribers to your content?
4. How quickly is your social presence increasing over time?
5. How quickly is your social presence increasing compared to other websites in your niche?
4.8: Conversion
1. How much what people see on your blog is intended to get people to do things? (e.g. advertising that you want people to click on, material that you want them read and act upon, etc.)
2. How compelling is the converting material on your blog?
3. How unique is the converting material on your blog?
4. How successful is the converting material on your blog at achieving its goals?
5. How does your blog compare to others in its niche in these respects?
4.9: Value
1. How satisfying is your blog to its target audience?
2. How addictive is your blog to its target audience?
3. How indispensable is your blog to its target audience?
4. How valuable is your blog to its target audience?
5. How does your blog compare to others in its niche in these respects?
4.10: Overall
1. Why do you really want to improve your blog?
2. How much energy/time/money are you prepared to spend to improve your blog?
3. Who will do the actual work - you, a friend for free, a paid contractor, etc.?
4. What are the potential risks and rewards of your efforts?
5. What do you hope will happen as a result of your blog improvement efforts?
Refer to some or all of the 50 questions above every time you do blog improvement work. Eventually, they will become a natural part of your thought process.