Five Things You Can Do Now To Increase Your Blog’s Worth

There are always improvements one can make to increase his or her blog’s “worth”. If we define the “worth” of a blog to mean the value that that blog provides to its visitors, here are five things you can do now to make your blog more worthy:

1. (Re)Focus your “About” page into a mission statement. A mission statement is a statement of intent. It outlines what the blog’s goals are and addresses its position today in terms of reaching those goals.  A great mission statement identifies the blog’s target audience (i.e., its “customers”) and the critical processes unique to your blog that you believe will determine its success or failure. Finally, a great mission statement defines a blog’s unique characteristics that sets it apart from the crowd.
2. Evaluate and periodically re-evaluate your blog against benchmarks. Benchmarks are standards by which your blog should be judged and compared. You determine your blog’s benchmarks by looking at its mission statement and identifying those periodic benchmarks that you feel are the marks of a successful blog, consistent with that mission statement. By identifying a set of appropriate benchmarks, you will be able to make adjustments in the blog’s strategy and focus from time to time. Benchmarks can (but do not have to) mean number of subscribers, links or Technorati citations within some predetermined period of time, say, over every six months.  Benchmarks can also be more personal such as a posting goal per month.  If a blog consistently fails to meet and exceed its benchmarks, it is an indication that it may be time to consider retiring it or refocusing it.
3. Give supporting information in your posts. Blogs postings are full of opinions, ideas and arguments. But the very best posts are those that provide supporting information to back up those opinions, ideas and arguments. The more supporting information your blog postings have, the more useful your posts are and the more credible your positions become. An easy way to provide supporting information is by linking to related posts by you, or by others that you either agree or disagree with, or that present an opinion, idea or argument that expands on your posting.
4. Refresh old posts with new information. It’s easy to make a posting and then forget about it. But old posts form the corpus of your blogging body of work that is (hopefully) referred to by visitors well into the future. In order for your posts to have relevance tomorrow as it does today, you have to go back periodically and update old posts with new information. For example, search engine optimization posts are particularly susceptible to changes in approaches and attitudes. Updating old posts provides your visitor with more useful content than if those posts were left in your blog’s archives as mere memorializations of your past thoughts.
5. Show new relationships between ideas from your best posts past. Rarely are ideas completely distinct from one another. An easy way to set yourself apart from the pack is to be more comprehensive than your competitors. You can be more comprehensive in your niche (i.e., be more of an expert) by showing, for example, how two seemingly different ideas can co-exist. Or, by showing how two seemingly similar ideas cannot co-exist.