How’s the blogging going?

I hope you’ve been learning a lot from the information in this blog. No matter if you started a blog and  took the advice listed here or if you’ve had one for a while. It’s time to take stock. How is your blogging doing? I know, I know. With blogging there’s always room for improvement. Always. That’s why it’s time to take a look and really think about where you’re at now… and where you’d like to be.

Check Your Stats

Do you have the ability to check stats? If not, it’s time you installed something. I use Statcounter.com for all my blogs. If you haven’t installed it until now, you’ll have to wait a day or so before you can start checking your stats. After a week or two you’ll have enough data to evaluate your progress. In particular, pay attention to:

• Where the traffic is coming from.

• The keywords people are using to find your blog.

This information can help you when working on getting backlinks and optimizing your posts with keywords.

What’s Your Page Rank?

The next thing you need to check is your page rank.  Is it still at zero?  Is it only at a 1 or a 2? Well, every blog has to start somewhere. To check it, just visit this link. To increase your page rank, all you need to do is generate backlinks. The tactics I use to do so are as follows:

• Article marketing to sites like ezinearticles.com.

• Commenting on blogs (meaningful comments) and leaving the blog link.

• Creating meaningful content so people will want to share it.

The more backlinks you have, the better. So work extra hard on these three tactics and you should see an improvement within a few months.

Are you making money?

Another thing to think about is whether or not you’re making money. Make it a habit of checking these statistics a few times a week. If you aren’t making much money, think about why. Common reasons include:

• Not getting enough traffic.

• Poor ad placement.

• If you’re promoting affiliate programs, you might be coming on too strong.

The logical thing would be to increase traffic. As it happens, if you’re working on your page rank the tactics to raise it will also drive traffic, so just keep at it.

You should go through an evaluation like this at least once a month – every week if you think of it.