I’ve decided to take part in the 2010 Blog Improvement Project. I know there are plenty of areas in which my blog needs improving and I’m hoping that participating in the BIP will give me some ideas and inspiration.
How does the BIP work?
On the first and third Monday of every month, a new activity will be posted on the BIP blog. Each participant can then spend the next two weeks working on that task or challenge.
Week 1: Create a Blogging To-Do List
After spending some time thinking about what I would like to achieve this year, in terms of improving the quality of my blog, here is a list of things I want to focus on.
- Comments – I’ll try to include more questions at the end of posts to encourage people to comment more. I have a few ideas for other ways in which visitors could interact too. I also need to comment on other blogs more often and get more involved in the blogging community.
- Navigation – Now that Blogger allows us to create permanent pages (in a similar way to WordPress) it means there are more options as far as navigation is concerned, so I could add an About page, Awards page etc.
- Frequency of posts – One of my biggest problems is finding time, so I want to be better organised and have more posts written in advance. Also, I’d like to be more consistent – there are some weeks where I manage to post almost every day, but other weeks there are three or four days between posts.
- Quality of posts – At the moment, I have book reviews and the occasional meme or challenge post. I would like to include more original content and other types of posts to add some variety.
- Labels – This was one of the areas I worked on during Bloggiesta last month, but I will continue to delete labels or add new ones whenever I think it’s necessary.
- Social Media – I will try to use Twitter for more than just announcing new blog posts (I use twitterfeed which does this automatically). I also want to learn about other social media tools. I’d appreciate any advice on this – which ones are worth using and which aren’t?
As the year progresses I know I’ll probably think of other things I want to improve on, but this list is a good starting point.
She Reads Novels 
These are great goals! I’m still thinking about/still have to post mine for BIP but your post motivated me to get started. Good luck with your goals!
I’m also looking forward to creating some pages in Blogger this year! I’m really excited about BIP 2010 and all the improvements I hope to make.
Emily – Thanks! I hate making to-do lists, but once I got started I found I could think of plenty of goals for the year. Good luck with your own list. 🙂
Amanda – I’m looking forward to seeing the improvements you make. Good luck!
Thank you for signing up to the blog improvement project and thank you for writing a to-do list even though you hated doing it!
Hopefully the next task will be much more fun.
Good luck!
I also have a hard time finding time to blog and it seems drafting posts ahead of time is the only solution. I am going to give that a try with this project!