3 Power Steps to Being a Great Blogger

Feb. 04 Blogging 3 comments

Blogging is no longer what it was. Blogging has dramatically matured and if your online reputation and brand is important, then today’s blogger needs to take a much more thoughtful and analytical approach in order to achieve their goals.

The following 3 step map, if followed, will ensure that anybody from a newbie to a more seasoned blogger both achieves what they want and also gets it done faster and at a much higher standard.

Step 1 is to have a crystal clear vision of what you you want to accomplish with your blog.

To be successful at anything it is vital that you know your target. It’s critical to figure out exactly what you want to accomplish with your blog before you do anything else. What is the result you want to achieve by creating a blog? If you are creating a blog for your company there could be many results you want to accomplish, from showcasing your products in a creative way to sharing stories about raving fan customers, to connecting more closely with customer’s by bringing them an “insider’s view” of what’s happening at your company. For authors you may want to write the first draft of a book on your blog or share tidbits of your book as you write it to increase your readers appetite and/or receive feedback.

Whether you are a business or an individual, a new blogger or a more advanced blogger, the first question you want to ask yourself is “what is the real result that I want to obtain by launching a blog?” Take your time and think about your answer. Write your thoughts down on paper. Having a crystal clear goal that you want to accomplish is a vital first step.

Step 2 is to know your reasons for wanting to accomplish your goal.

After you know with clarity what your blogging goal is the next step you need to take is to ask yourself or your team the question, “why is it important for me/us to achieve this goal?” Write down every reason why you want to accomplish your goal. In this step think of both positive reasons and negative ones. For example, if you are a company that does not yet have a blog, a reason why it’s vitally important for you to launch an amazing blog that engages your customers by showing them daily the exciting developments at your company, may be that without doing this on your own blog you are losing out on a major opportunity to connect with your current customers, investors and potential customers, investors and the media. A negative reason could be that simply having a presence on Facebook, Pinterest and other social networks is risky since anyone of them could change their terms of service and you’d lose the current benefits you are receiving, plus you really don’t have a “central-hub” to pull in all your social media activity. This type of analysis should be done whether you are an established company with a web presence, a startup, a new blogger or an experienced blogger that wants to take her game to the next level. The key here is to discover and find as many reasons as possible about why achieving this goal is vitally important to you and how not achieving it will hurt you or your business.

Step 3 is to brainstorm all the ways you can accomplish your goal.
Now that you know what your goal is and why its vitally important to you, step 3 is to brainstorm a list of all the ways you can achieve your goal. The idea here is to list every possible idea that may get you to your goal. Include in your list the names of anyone that you can ask to help you do certain things.

Examples for a new blogger may include, spend one hour a day discovering the best blogs about starting a blog and then reading these blogs. If you’re a more advanced blogger your list may include items such as figuring out what the most successful bloggers in your field did to achieve their success and then writing down a list of items.

The key here is to do a brain dump of every idea that can get you to your goal. The third question you need to ask yourself in order to make your goal happen is, “what will it take for me to achieve the goal I wrote down in step 1?” Repeatedly ask yourself this question until you have a list of items you can do to accomplish your gaol.

Finally, to ensure that you reach your blogging goals and aren’t sidetracked, take the list of ways you can accomplish your goal and each day focus on the 3 items that will get you to your goal fastest. It’s not how many steps it takes to reach your goal that is important but doing only those things that you need to in order to reach your goal.

If you commit to doing this process you will be amazed at how much you accomplish.