Blogging Strategy: April 2013 Review

This year is the year of growing into the brand as last year was a strong year of simply establishing who we were, networking to get the name out, and creating some great content for 78P and the other blogging friends that we love. It should also be noted that these are all of our goals for the blog, including how we will use social media as well as network with other bloggers and viewers. We want to take the finest parts of our blog that have the greatest potential for growth and so we are putting all of our eggs in this basket.

Blogging

Here are goals and action steps to make the direct blogging better and to grow our community.

Goals

• 500,000 pageviews, up from 120,000 pageviews in 2012. 22,164 views. Not sure what to do.. suggestions?
• 120,000 unique visitors, up from 36,000+ in 2012. 9,355 unique visitors. Nearly 10K unique visitors seems like a HUGE number and I am so thankful for that. Yet, the 120K now seems gigantic, I may need to revisit this in May.
• Get to 15 comments a week, up from 1.5 comment a week in 2012. 24 this month. I love the comments, but I’d love to see this improve.

Action Steps

• 1 Post Every Weekday

  I want this website to maintain a sense of consistency in both its content and structure which includes how many times I deliver it. If I setup an every weekday system, you begin to expect it from us and furthers the brand. No reason to change that. Done.

• 5 Posts On Reserve

  Having posts on reserve means that I never falter with my consistency and hopefully win over new visitors to our blog. This action step is so needed and actually puts my mind at easy when blogging becomes stressful. Had a bunch but was afraid they were getting stale, so I used them up.

Twitter

Twitter is a great tool for networking with other youth workers, Christians, and those who simply love all things tech. Perfect for Christian, tech bloggers.

Goals

• Get 7,500 pageviews from Twitter, up from 2,400+ in 2012. 1,752 pageviews. This month alone we had 1,108 pageviews from Twitter. Not sure what happened, but loving it!
• Get 15,000 followers, up front from 7,300 in 2012. 14,599. Going to need to readjust this next month.

Action Steps

• 80/20 Engagement

  We constantly promote this philosophy that your tweets need to be for your audience, so we enact the 80% giving / 20% taking ratio. Only 20% of the time should we be selfish and the rest of the time it needs to be about you. I was definitely able to spend more time this month with Twitter than I had before.

• 3 hours a week

  This includes reviewing other tweets, writing my own, and interacting with people. As a hobby blogger, this is about all I can do without impacting family and ministry, so if this is not enough, other avenues will need to be reviewed. Did much better and spent about 3 hours a week on Twitter engaging with people.

Google+

This is THE up and coming social network that is more than just social media and something that every blog needs to invest in today. Here is our investment into it.

Goals

• +1 and reshare 10 people a week, up from 2 a week in 2012. 26 this month. Again, lots of comments, not as many interactions.
• Have 750 people add 78P in their circles, up from 50 in 2012. 282. I did not even do anything this month and it skyrocketed! I love that, just want to know why it did it.
• Establish this as the top social action network for the blog, up from #8 in 2012. Google+ is 3rd again at 8.9% below Twitter and Pinterest.

Action Steps

• 5 Hours A Week

  As with Twitter before, I can only invest so much time, but I also know that I am developing this next work. Thus, I will take the necessary time to network, taking away from Facebook and really build this network because I believe in its future. Did much better this month with balancing Twitter and Google+.

• 80% of time on Networking

  While I want to share my content on this, I need to build my profile and so I need to network, engage with the different communities, and build the 78P brand on Google+. A bit less networking this month, but I love it!.

Jeremy Smith

Jeremy is owner of ChurchAndMentalHealth.com and the Co-Occurring Program Coordinator and a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor at a community mental health center. Jeremy has a history of working as a ministry director for Youth for Christ for 8 years and then working as a mental health and substance use adult counselor in Colorado and Ohio, specifically running an Opioid Residential Treatment Center.