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Blogging Basics: Rule of Five

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If you are like me, your blog’s to do list can get pretty stinking overwhelming.  I always have something pressing to do, but years ago I read that you should do 5 of 5 things everyday. Now, I don’t know about you, but to me that equals 25 things. BA HA HA! Yeah, right.  My Rule of Five is different.  Simply do FIVE things everyday, not five things 5 times 😉  But, not just ANY five things – follow the Blogging Rule of Five!

The Blogging Rule of Five

What is the Blogging Rule of Five?

In a nutshell, do five things everyday specific to certain areas of your blog.

  1. Increase Money
  2. Improve (or create) Content
  3. Increase Engagement
  4. Do Maintenance AND Education
  5. Plan Ahead

Do Thing One:  Increase Money – Why are you blogging?  Personally, I am because I LOVE to write and research.  This is the kind of thing I really enjoy.  However, I wouldn’t be able to spend 10 hours a day enjoying myself if it weren’t producing some money.  Every single day, you should do something to increase the income.  The types of things are endless:

  • Contact a company
  • Respond/repitch to those emails in your inbox
  • Check the performance of ads and improve them where necessary you could even apply for a new ad network
  • Update older posts to include new affiliate links
  • Work on a product – or promote the products you have

Do Thing Two: Improve (or Create) Content – Even if you don’t actually publish a new post everyday, you should be dealing with content everyday!  From creating new content, to preparing for future content, to updating old posts!  Content is King – seriously!

Do Thing Three:  Improve Engagement – Now, this one could get tricky and is where most of us get sucked in.  Make your list of must do engagement items and figure out how to work on it for an hour.  Example:

  • 10 minutes – Facebook scheduling, commenting, responding to comments
  • 10 minutes – Responding to and approving blog comments
  • 10 minutes – Leaving comments on other blogs
  • 10 minutes – Plusing, sharing, commenting on Google+
  • 10 minutes – Scheduling, sharing, responding to your feed on Pinterest
  • 10 minutes – Scheduling, retweeting, responding to mentions on Twitter

Do Thing Four: Do Maintenance – From backing up your blog to updating cover photos.  From removing spammers to removing broken links.  From updating plugins to removing old ones.  From cleaning up those sidebars to putting new items on them or in your slider.  From creating new drip campaigns to updating your newsletter.  The back-end of a blog is a never ending battle.  If you can take 10-20 minutes everyday to work on this, you will be JUST fine.

Do Things Five: Plan Ahead – My favorite part 🙂  Checking that holiday calendar to be sure you have content prepared for 4-6 weeks prior to big holidays and 1-2 weeks prior to smaller ones.  Run some keyword searches on your site to see what types of content you can corral into round ups or landing pages.  Run some searches in your favorite keyword planning tool and make a list of future posts to write.  Make a plan so you know what to do tomorrow (and the next day, and the next day).  Need help with your plan?  Take the Learn to Blog SEO class and get an entire keyword plan PLUS the knowledge of making your own in the future!

Now, the above five things should be on your to do list every single working day – however, there are other tasks that need to be done to make a blog run smoothly.  You can add them to your to do list or hire some things out.  Here are a few things that should be done as well:

  1. Education
  2. Email
  3. Building Relationships
  4. Increasing Readership/Subscribers
  5. Guest Posting
  6. Increasing Links in (like linky parties)

Those are just off the top of my head. 🙂

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Jenna Meow

Monday 10th of August 2015

Great tips! I agree it is important to do a little bit of each everyday. :-) www.meowlifestyle.com

Free

Monday 30th of March 2015

Great tips. I so need to be following these rules. Somedays I feel like I'm all over the place. I will be doing these 5 rules everyday plus some other things. Thanks for sharing on Feature Friday!

Janet Fazio

Thursday 5th of March 2015

Plan ahead. It's my biggest obstacle!

Kelli Miller

Monday 9th of March 2015

This is so true! And once you get behind, it is so hard to get caught up and ahead again

Teresa

Thursday 8th of August 2013

Great Post Kelli! I am glad I found it. Reading your posts and such about blogging has helped me a lot :)

Alisha

Thursday 19th of July 2012

I know this post was forever ago... but what is "digging"? :)

Kelli

Thursday 19th of July 2012

Digging is sharing and discovering content on Digg.com :-)