5-Point Monthly Blogging Checklist

Blogging these days means serious business. Bloggers are definitely on the rise, and it's shifted quite a bit from doing it as a hobby to creating businesses. More and more bloggers are adapting to Blogging 4.0, which I read about on Quora. Basically blogs have become platforms to build businesses - I dabbled in it a little bit myself, and you don't have to go far to see others who are making serious money from blogging.

That being said though, just as you have regular audits in your businesses, there should also be checks in your blogging. Doing these things which I will get to below, will help you stay on top of your blog.

1. Backup your blog.I think I've posted on this point before. Check out my post on How to Backup your Blogger blog. There's also a link in there for Wordpress users. 
2. Download your template.You may not have to do this all the time, but certainly do it before you make any changes to your design. You don't want to be caught off-guard by a mistake that you can't undo. For those on Blogger, all you need to do is login, go to your blog Template and on the upper right corner, there's a Backup/Restore button. This allows you to either download your template, or upload a new one. 
3. Check for broken links. Honestly I'm still trying to find my way around this one, but there are a couple of things you can try. I've read that you can find them via Google Webmaster - I'm still learning how to use it, so I can't tell you how yet. You can also just search "check broken links" and use any of the websites that allow you to do it for free. The reason why you want to check for AND REMOVE broken links is multifold - 1) Broken links don't look good for you, 2) You want your readers to have the best user experience on your blog, right? 3) Broken links can make your blog rate lower in search rankings. Imagine, the first time I did this, it found over broken links!!!!! I now have to keep going back to either update or remove said broken links. Please note that sometimes it's out of your hands - a lot of the broken links were from commenters whose links are no longer valid :(
4. Update! Update! Update! Media Kit, About Page, Social Media, etc. Doing this on a monthly basis ensures that if a brand contacts you about a potential partnership, you're not scrambling trying to get your numbers right. Because you've been keeping everything up to date, any interested parties can get a quick snapshot of where you are with your blog. I actually just updated my Advertise page 2 weeks ago, because I realized the data posted was from January 2016!!! I'm preaching to myself here too o.
5. Analyze your numbers. Google or Wordpress or whatever Analytics is your friend! There is a large amount of data that you can get from your analytics tool - from the number of visits you get on your blog, to your reader demographics, and a lot more! Now you have to know that just having the data is pretty much useless. It's what you do with your data that helps. For instance, I checked the stats of the search box on my blog and found that NOBODY was using it! So why did I have one? I quickly determined that the Search box was bascially taking up space on my blog and decided to remove it. In the same way, you can check to see what parts of your blog are being used or visited, and which ones may need to be tweaked or removed.