Summer is the perfect time to rediscover your favourite places and to renew your blog

As I near my 100th blog post, I find myself reflecting on how far my blog has come since my first. Naturally, I want to keep building my blog and to do so, I decided that it would be interesting to take stock of my blog. I wanted to see whether I could come up with some ideas for improvement.

Interested in taking stock of your own blog? Check out these steps to evaluate and renew your blog:

1. Take a trip through your archives and categorize your posts (Eg. Great, Average, Needs Improvement). Base your categorization on personal preference and the number of views, continued hits, comments, and likes each post has received. This allows you to visualize where different types of posts fell and provides you with the starting point for your assessment.

2. Using your categorized posts, determine which types of post excelled and which were flops. Which were your most successful posts and what did they have in common? Were there some themes that just didn’t fly? What did you enjoy writing most? And were there topics that didn’t fall within your blog’s scope?

3. Based on your findings, write down some ideas for moving forward. Where should your focus be? What did you/your audience enjoy? Where are the areas that you can improve? I started by writing lists using the categories “Things that worked“, “Things that didn’t work”, and “My new blog“.

4. Redefine your blog. The easiest way to do this is to rewrite your “About” page. Write your goals for your next X number of posts. Written goals are the easiest to keep track of.

5. Talk to a blog reader/friend about your findings. What are your successes and failures? Where can you improve? What would you like to bring into the mix? Hearing yourself describe it aloud can be the best inspiration.

After reading through all of my previous posts, I can see my voice develop and my blog begin to take on its own life. I’m looking forward to putting my research to good use in many posts to come.