4 Steps to Successful Blog Planning

The best time is always now…

Stop wasting your time. If you want something done, do it now.

Think of blogging as a business. In fact, treat it like a business. No matter how little or big you invest in it, the point is to always make it grow for you to get the returns that you rightfully deserve.

And for that to happen, you must do something – a plan put into action.

Don’t Be a Free-Floater
“A free-floater is a person who just let the circumstances carry him…”

Literally. It’s like being in the middle of an ocean on a boat with no sail. Yes, you move and go to some direction, but it doesn’t take you where you want to be.

Free-floater bloggers spends their time with no particular direction in mind. They just blog constantly without thinking of the specific end result that they want to achieve. More dangerously, they don’t have any solid strategy on how to accomplish things.

Free-floaters waste a lot of valuable time. Instead of doing projects or creating products, they remain stagnant in their blogs. Whether you’re blogging for a month or a year, being a free-floater is something that you should completely avoid.

It’s just too much of a worthless, unproductive state.
Instead, Be a Schemer

“A schemer is a person who plans his desire outcome and acts upon it…”

Don’t be misled. I’m not just saying that you must have a just any plan. More than that, what you need is to have a workable and achievable plan.

For example, do you think your favorite bloggers write New Year’s Resolution post just for the sake of having one? No. It’s meant to tell you that a new year means a new plan. It tells you that they’re up to something… again.

Brilliant planning is always step number one. That’s an important lesson in starting success from the beginning.

Be a schemer. Come up with ways on how you’ll manage to increase your traffic, or your earnings, or whatever it is that you want to accomplish.

Simplified Steps of Scheming

One good skill of being a schemer is to be able to plan properly with the current conditions of your blog. Of course, it isn’t logical to plan for 1000 subscribers if you barely even have less than 10 registered in your feed chicklet. Again, it has to always meet an achievable target.

The steps blog planning is a systematic guide on how to formulate a good plan. It’s supposed to make your life easy so make sure to follow the levels carefully.

Step 1: Identify the Goal

Always start with the question “What do I want?” rather than “What can I do?” or “How will I do it?” It could be a problem, a weakness in your blog, an area that you want to improve, or probably a project that you want to accomplish. It could be anything.

The point is that it should be the output or the end-product that you want to achieve.

Step 2: Collect All Possible Solutions

Two is better than one. Anything at all is better than just one.
It’s not enough that you settle for a single method. As they say, don’t put all your eggs in just one basket.

There could be thousands of approaches to a single goal. For example, if you want to raise your traffic, your sure bet would be Search Engine Optimization. But, you can’t go wrong either if you do social media, guest posting, email marketing, article marketing and even advertising.

But let’s be more definite. By “all possible solutions”, I mean all solutions within your hand’s reach. Say if you have low funds, advertising should be crossed out on the list. Instead, focus more on other things that promises to have the commensurate, or even better results.

Step 3: Set the ‘How’

After listing all possible solutions, it’s time to make the goal a reality.
Set the ‘how’ or the process that you would do. These includes:

• identifying the priority.
• breaking down the process into mini-components
• creating a routine workflow

Identifying the priority. If you have a long list of possible solutions, it’s best to rank all your solutions according to their level of priority. That way, you’ll know where to best channel your efforts.

Breaking down into mini-components. If the solution is too big or general, make the process more concrete by identifying it’s mini-components.

Example: say ‘be more active in social-networking’. You can break it down by
a. joining 2+ new social-networking sites
b. writing a post about social-networking and plugging your accounts
c. organizing a contest for your new friends/followers
d. updating your status and/or bookmarks at least thrice a day
e. adding at least five new friends/followers a day

Create a routine workflow. This makes you to be more committed by actually allocating a specific time-frame in your working hours. It could be as easy as just a 30-minute workflow a day. The important note is that you have to constantly set reminders to yourself. Put it in your planner or cell calendar or whatever it is that you use to organize your schedule.

Step 4: Target the ‘When’

‘Being a schemer always means getting things done.

“People that lack focus usually have a hard time finishing what they started…”
-Daniel Scocco
Founder of DailyBlogTips & OnlineProfits

Focus accomplishes things. For every goal you set, or project that you start, you should always be focused and committed to the end result. The point of having a deadline therefore is to have something constantly push you into taking action.… and more importantly… to stop wasting time.