Your Business and Economy World: Improvement Checklist 9 Points

The Blog Improvement Checklist: Ready, Set, Go!

This checklist covers nine blog improvement areas:

Blog content improvement
Blog design improvement
Blog community improvement
Blog traffic improvement
Blog RSS feed / Atom feed / email subscribers improvement
Blog search engine optimization (SEO) improvement
Blog social media optimization (SMO) improvement
Blog monetization improvement
Blog value / return on investment (ROI) improvement

1. Improve Your Blog Content

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

Number of published articles (posts + pages)
Age of first published article
Age of latest published article
Posts published per month
Comments by blog visitors per month
Trackbacks/pingbacks per month
Words per article
Images/audio/videos per article
Internal links per article
External links per article
Compelling headlines
Descriptive headlines
Concise headlines
Appropriate writing style
Useful content
Remarkable content
Targeted content
Accurate content
Unique content
Viral content
Effective use of multiple media formats
Appropriate anchor text in hyperlinks
Appropriate number of hyperlinks
Relevant hyperlinks
Descriptive use of categories/tags
Concise use of categories/tags
Relevant use of categories/tags
Visible policies
Useful policies

2. Improve Your Blog Design

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

Eye-pleasing
Unique
Simple
Organized
Appropriate
Easy to read
Easy to navigate
Easy to distinguish links from text
Looks same in various browsers
Looks same at different resolutions
Mobile version looks good
No broken links
No code errors
No missing alt text/placeholders
Memorable favicon
Appropriately-sized masthead
Eye-pleasing masthead
Relevant masthead
Appropriately-sized logo
Resizable logo
Eye-pleasing logo
Relevant logo
Logo works without color
Blog works without images
Blog works without CSS
Appropriately-sized blog title
Memorable blog title
Descriptive blog title
Memorable tagline
Descriptive tagline
Visible search box
Obvious search box
Useful search box
Visible feed/email subscription options
Visible article headlines
Appropriate number/size of article excerpts on homepage
Appropriate number/size of article excerpts on archive pages
Visible social media sharing options
Relevant social media sharing options
Appealing social media sharing options
Visible blog comment area
Easy to publish a comment
Easy to browse comments/trackbacks/pingbacks/tweetbacks
Organized sidebar(s)
Useful sidebar elements
Organized footer
Useful footer elements
Feed displays correctly
Useful feed elements

3. Improve Your Blog Community

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

Visible author information
Compelling author information
Visible contact information
Compelling contact information
Blog comments encouraged
Useful blog comments

4. Improve Your Blog Traffic

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

Monthly visitors
Monthly unique visits
Monthly page views
Average visit duration

5. Improve Your Blog Feed/Email Subscriber Count

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

Feed subscribers
Email subscribers
Newsletter subscribers
Autoresponder subscribers

6. Improve Your Blog Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

Number of backlinks
Quality of backlinks
Search engine rankings/SERPs
Google PageRank
Domain age
Pages indexed in search engines
Page load time
Homepage URL memorability
Homepage URL relevance
URL structure
Descriptive blog title/tagline
Descriptive article headlines/subheadings

7. Improve Your Blog Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

Social media referral traffic as percentage of all referral traffic
BlogCatalog presence
Delicious.com presence
Digg.com presence
Mixx.com presence
LinkedIn.com presence
Propeller.com presence
StumbleUpon.com presence
Technorati.com presence
Twitter.com presence
Yahoo! Buzz presence
YouTube presence

8. Improve Your Blog Monetization

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

Appropriate amount of advertising/sales copy
Appropriate placement of advertising/sales copy
Relevant advertising/sales copy
Compelling advertising/sales copy
Appropriately-priced products/services
Valuable products/services

9. Improve Your Blog Value / Return On Investment (ROI)

Rate each item below on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = awful; 3 = okay; 5 = perfect). Write down any relevant statistics, observations, ideas or questions.

Discernible purpose
Discernible target audience
Addictive
Remarkable
Irresistible
Irreplaceable
Valuable
Makes a difference

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Create a Visionary Blog Improvement Plan

Now that you’ve evaluated each aspect of your blog, it’s time to make a plan to improve it. Use the Visionary Blogging method to help you go through these steps.

Step 1: Evaluate

1.1 Complete each section of the Blog Improvement Checklist that corresponds to an aspect of your blog that you want to improve. (It’s okay to skip items or sections. Some bloggers do not care about monetization, for example.)

1.2 For each item, assign a score from 1-5 according to how well your blog is doing and write down any ideas or questions that come to mind.

1.3 For each section, add up the scores and divide by the number of items to get an average score. e.g. The blog content section has 29 questions; if your total score for that section is 87, then your average score is 87/29 =3.00.

1.4 Add up the section averages and divide by the number of sections you evaluated to get an overall blog score (e.g. 3.67).

Step 2: Decide

2.1 For each checklist item, rate on a scale from 1 to 5:

How important it is to improve (1 = not important; 5 = extremely important)
How urgent it is to improve (1 = not urgent; 5 = extremely urgent)
How easy it is to improve (1 = not easy; 5 = extremely easy)
How quick it is to improve (1 = extremely time-consuming; 5 = extremely quick)
How inexpensive it is to improve (1 = extremely expensive; 5 = extremely inexpensive)

2.2 Add the scores together and divide by 5 to get a priority score for each item.

e.g. eye-pleasing logo = 1 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 5 = 15/5 = 3.00

2.3 Sort the items in descending order of priority.

You may wish to ignore items below a certain priority score (such as 2.00).

2.4 For each item, write a specific goal to improve your checklist score over the next month.

e.g. I will publish at least one blog post per weekday in the month of October.

You may also wish to set section-specific goals (e.g. a general blog content improvement goal) or overall blog goals.

Step 3: Act

This part’s easy. Just force yourself to carry out your plan.

Step 4: Review

4.1 Daily: Keep track of how much time, energy and/or money you spend trying to improve each aspect of your blog. Evaluate yourself as an improver. Ask, “What could I do to speed up my blog improvement efforts and make them more effective?

4.2 Monthly: Repeat steps 1-3 to track the improvement of your blog and review/set blog improvement goals. Some things may improve or worsen without your intervention (for example, the number and quality of blog comments may fluctuate without any effort on your part).

Thanks to: http://www.visionaryblogging.com/blog-improvement-checklist/

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