Blogging Skills Checklist: How Do You Measure Up?

We often look at “external” metrics like email subscribers and traffic levels, but should we also occasionally look at our own blogging skills to see whether they are developing nicely?

This idea has been floating around in my brain for a while now, and so I decided to do a type of audit to see what skills I had and what skills I wanted.

In the end I decided to put together a basic blogging skills checklist that you can use as an audit or guidepost to see where your skills are and what you might want to develop. Hopefully it helps bloggers who aren’t sure what is the most important area to be working on.

Let’s take a look.

Blogging skills checklist: what’s your score out of 100?

Here are the practical things that I try to develop as a blogger.

Give yourself the full points if you know it well enough to charge a client for advice, half the points if you can apply it well but are still learning, and no points if the topic really confuses you.

The main things I think should be on the checklist:

1. Understand the principles of effective content creation (+20)

Content creation is the backbone of all online marketing. It doesn’t matter whether you run a blog or a physical company, it’s the content that you create that grows your audience, makes sales and gets you in front of new markets.

Sadly, many new bloggers don’t really understand what makes for good and effective content. And if you want to run a blog or grow a business you really have to figure out what works and why. Ultimately you want to make sure your content (long form articles, videos, podcasts, etc.) help to solve problems. It should help people.

Strategically speaking, good content creation comes down to having a deliberate strategy that achieves outcomes. Dedicate as much time as you can to researching and mastering this point because without effective content the rest becomes useless.

2. Grow traffic and convert it (+15)

The lifeblood of any successful blog is traffic. And not only do you need visitors, you need to be able to convert them once they arrive on your site. This process of converting visitors into subscribers or readers is absolutely vital and should be emphasized in your study.

A considerable portion of your time should be spent on understanding how to get more traffic, how to get more email subscribers and then how to test and setup your blog in a way that maximizes these conversions.

As Bibiano said recently:

There are a lot of successful people online who had been in more challenging situations than me but still managed to ship things. Then there are full-stack, talented individuals who AFAIK haven’t made anything substantial and sustainable for themselves or for others but seemed to have the knowledge and resources to do so.

There’s no point spending time writing that amazing content unless you’re getting the right readers and then converting them to an outcome.

3. Begin collaborations with other bloggers (+15)

Any success that I’ve had here on Blog Tyrant has been because of the influence, kindness and collaborations I’ve had with people like Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Glen Allsopp, etc. By making connections with these people I have been able to land guest posts, get endorsements and find a lot of new traffic that I otherwise might have missed.

From the very first day that you start a blog you should start making connections with people in your niche. This means mentioning them in the amazing content that you write, tweeting their content and getting on their radar. Over time these relationships become more genuine and you can really start to build something that is mutually beneficial.

4. Manage your work and rest time effectively (+10)

If you work for yourself there is a temptation to always be working. In fact, what I’ve found is that this means doing a lot of things really inefficiently all the time at the expense of your family, health and business itself.

I think Matt from Stack Digital said it well on my Inbound thread:

What doesn’t get you revenue? Reading Facebook. Redesigning your newish website. Setting up a social media profile on Periscope and using it to watch fireworks videos. Checking your Analytics for the 3rd time today. Checking Moz blog again. Seeing if anyone sent you a message on Slack. Taking 20 minutes to figure out how to re-enable desktop notifications. Setting up your Unroll.me email subscriptions.

It’s the same for everything. You want to lose weight? Eat less, move more. Do the work. You want to write a book? Write some words that will be in the book. You know what doesn’t write the book? Tweaking a sentence or two, doing research again and getting lost on a Youtube tangent about how to use Scrivener. Write the book.

But the next part to this is knowing when to stop. Taking time to sleep, have routines and be healthy. You can push yourself really hard for a little while but after a point it begins to be really unproductive. This also ties into something we talk about a lot here – outsourcing things to people who can do it better than you.

Here is what Sarah said:

The personal metric I value the most is understanding my limitations. There’s stuff I’m great at and stuff I suck at. You can waste so much time trying to get your weaknesses to a basic level when you could just acknowledge you’re lacking in that area and get some help. Ask a mate, hire a freelancer, user fiverr, whatever it takes.

You don’t have to do it all yourself. In fact, you most definitely shouldn’t do it all yourself. Make sure you prioritize this stuff because it will really help you focus and maintain some sense of blogging longevity.

5. Manage security protocols across all your assets (+10)

Security is becoming more and more of an issue as the internet gets older and more complicated. It represents a pretty big risk for our online businesses.

And while it can be frightening, you don’t need to be overly stressed about it if you have plans in place. I mean, if the US Government and massive websites like Sony can be compromised then what chance do we have? Just do you best. Here’s a list of some very basic tips I wrote a few years ago that everyone should be doing.

Some of the main things you need to consider are regular server backups, security plugins, complicated usernames and passwords, computer antivirus and malware protection, and never using public WiFi. If you’re not sure about this stuff the best thing to do is jump on support with your server support staff and ask them what is best for your particular setup.

5. Understand metrics and results (+5)

Are you getting the results you want? Do you know what content is leading to sales and signups? This is a really basic question but one that not a lot of bloggers can actually answer. It’s quite funny.

You don’t want to be checking your stats every five minutes but it is a good idea to know your basic blogging goals and then track whether or not they are happening for you.

At a minimum you want a service like Clicky Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and then something like AWeber where you can monitor how your emails are performing. Take a daily look at your stats like traffic, page views and bounce rate but then learn how to dive deeper into your content and see how to develop stuff that attracts backlinks, shares and then sign ups.

6. Know the basics of server admin (to communicate with support) (+5)

When you’re set up on your own blog host there’s a bit of a learning curve to go through. This can be a little overwhelming at the start but it is okay to take your time and learn it bit by bit.

Having an understanding of the difference between your server’s back end and WordPress’s back end, how plugins work, what a database is, how to use FTP, etc. can be really useful if you need to get work done or sort a problem out with your support staff. It makes the communication process much quicker.

For example, if you are having an issue with site speed you can look at throttling, your image sizes, the plugins you are using, the configuration of your caching, etc. and talk to support about what might be happening.

7. Adapt to modern SEO (+5)

Search Engine Optimization is always evolving and changing. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, you can get caught up in it and really bugger your business. Focus on the wrong things and a change in their algorithm could be horrible.

This is why it is really important to have a basic understanding about how modern SEO works. I don’t think you need to spend thousands of hours figuring it all out (unless that’s your thing…) but I do think you need to have a fair idea about what Google is looking for in the short and long term.

Here’s a post I did a little while ago on blogging SEO basics that is still relevant. Try to get your head around back links and their value and then just focus on solving problems while building a memorable brand. That’s what Google wants.

8. Know where to find and manipulate graphics, photos and other media (+5)

A big part of blogging is finding and choosing good graphics to use in your posts, social media, adverts, products, etc. This might be a photo or it might be a video that you create with your iPhone.

The thing is, if you try to do all of this by yourself you’ll find that there isn’t a lot of time for actual blogging! It’s a good idea to have a system in place for all of this. Try and find a few people you can work with and make use of sites like Unsplash and Fiverr.

9. Use social media efficiently and sparingly (+5)

Social media should not take up a significant portion of your day unless you are running Facebook ads or some equivalent. Bloggers to often get caught up in the idea that social media is the answer for traffic and relationships – it’s not.

I would spend some time figuring out what platforms work best for you and then focus in on them strategically. Don’t ever spend time focusing on Tweets when you could be writing new content for you blog. This is a really important lesson to take away and while it’s not true for everyone, I have found it really helpful for my own business.

10. Troubleshoot problems effectively (+5)

When you run a blog it’s not a matter of if something will go wrong it’s just a matter of when.

What this means is that you need to be ready to troubleshoot problems without freaking out and getting yourself into even more trouble than before. So what do you do?

Your first point of call for most of your blogging problems is your host’s support staff. Open a ticket and get help. If that doesn’t work you need to look for help in different places depending on what’s gone wrong. If it’s WordPress problem then head on over to the WordPress Forums. If it’s a security problem then get in touch with Sucuri. Try to learn how to solve problems in a proactive and individual way, it’s hard but well worth the effort.

But is there something more important?

A few days ago I sent emails out to my friends and started a thread on Inbound about what skills they prioritize most.

This was highly interesting because, rather than give a practical tip, most successful entrepreneurs emphasized something to do with motivation, hard work or discipline.

Here are a few of my favorite answers on what should be included on any bloggers checklist:

Patience. – Pat Flynn.

Dedication. Blogging is all about learning and being consistent. Without dedication there is a good chance you will give up. – Neil Patel.

Consistency. This is where a lot of bloggers go wrong in their first year. They start with the greatest of intentions and then slowly, but surely fade off with their blogging consistency as the year progresses. That’s the WORST mistake you can make, as people need to hear from you consistently. Keep your foot on the gas, create valuable, highly engaging content and do it consistently. Oh, did I say be consistent yet!?? You get my drift! – Chris Ducker.

Determination and I mean that in every meaning of the word. Things can turn sour very quickly and if you’ve got a family then its incredibly easy to just throw in the towel and give up. There are dark, terrible, rancid days that bleed into weeks, followed by months. (perhaps even years)

You’re tested mentally, physically and to an extent spiritually. As you try to rationalize the crazy in your life, with equally as crazy theories, life continues to pound you into an unrecognizable, bloody pulp.

But, if you survive the savagery, then your luck will change. All of the minor victories that were lost in the noise of the daily battles, fit seamlessly together and as the smoke begins to drift, you’ll have a new appreciation for any high-points to follow. Yet, the most important thing of all is that you ‘truly’ discover who you are and what you’re made of. After all, how can you possibly know if determination is a part of your character, unless you’ve been pushed beyond the limits of your imagination? – Chris McCarron.

I tend to agree.

All of the technical stuff can only be possible if you take care of your focus and effort. For me, I really want to make my business grow so that I can donate more money to charity over my life. That is a goal that gives me a lot of determination and helps to keep me motivated. It’s important to find a goal that works for you.

How did you go with the checklist?

How did you score out of 100 with the checklist? Or if you didn’t do it, what other elements do you think I should have included on there? Do you think there is anything else that is super important that hasn’t been mentioned? Please leave a comment below and let me know.

© Zaniman | Dreamstime.com.

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Why Site Speed is Crucial for Every Blogger

If you have a blog you’ll want to make sure that it loads really fast.

In fact, site speed is one of the most important things you can think about.

A slow load time will affect almost everything that occurs on that blog and have dire consequences for your long term success and usability.

Today I’m going to talk about why site speed is so important and what you can do to fix it.

Let’s take a look.

Why site speed is so important

Want to hear something scary?

40% of users will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. – Akamai.

Whatever your blogging goal might be, good site speed is obviously crucial. Many people don’t actually realize the impact speed has on various aspects of online business.

Have a read through this list and see whether you think your blog might be affected.

• It affects your sign ups
  As a blogger your primary metric of concern is probably getting more email subscribers for your mailing list. A slow loading site makes it less likely that people will be patient through the sign up process. As there are already a lot of steps in this process, each delay will cause someone to bounce from the site.
• It affects your SEO
  Google indicated a little while ago that site speed would be a major factor affecting a blog’s search engine rankings. They want to make the web faster and more enjoyable for their own clients and so we need to make sure our site structure is up to the task.
• It affects your sales and conversions
  Waiting time is important for sales both offline and online and it will always have an effect on your bottom line. Roughly 50% of users expect a site to load in under two seconds and if it doesn’t they promptly hit the back button and look elsewhere.
• It affects your readership and loyalty
  If people don’t enjoy being on your blog there is a big chance they won’t return to it. For example, although they produce good content I don’t click through to Forbes anymore because you have to go through an advert screen first. This is a form of load time and I suspect it would have a big effect on their readership.

Good site speed is so important for online business these days and failure to take care of it will have big impacts on how well you can perform in a variety of areas.

How to test your site speed to discover any issues

Hopefully now you’re convinced of the merits of speeding up your site. So what can you do about it?

The first thing you want to do is head over to Pingdom Tools and run a speed test on your blog. Here’s the results for Blog Tyrant:

As you can see, the homepage is loading in around a second (which is good!) and is ranked pretty well in terms of potential speeds. I’m going to change a few things this week to get it down below one second.

The really interesting stuff, however, is down below the result where they show you a breakdown of all the different things that load on your site. Take a look.

Here are two long bars that show Facebook and Clicky which tend to sometimes have a bit of a lag on the load time. Things like Facebook Like Boxes can really slow down your load time.

Go through and see what’s affecting yours the most.

How to make improvements to your site speed

Once you’ve done your test and have some ideas about what is slowly your baby down we need to go through and make some changes.

I can have an educated guess about what the main factors will be and so I’ll give you some tips below.

1. Consider upgrading from shared hosting to a VPS

As your site starts to grow in size and popularity there will come a time when you might need to move away from a shared hosting setup.

I recommend BlueHost shared hosting to all new bloggers because it is a great mix of simplicity, price and reliability. But this shared hosting becomes unsuitable if you start to get bigger – lots of traffic will see your site start to slow down.

Luckily BlueHost also offers a VPS (Virtual Private Server) option which is where you can upgrade to getting your own private environment. This upgrade is a bit of a learning curve but you’ll see site speeds skyrocket with this one change alone.

So how do you know when it’s time to migrate?

That’s a bit of a tricky question and will depend on lots of factors. If you notice your site slowing down under heavy traffic and you can’t fix it with other solutions that might be a key. Lots of throttling, used up bandwidth and so on are also signs. The best bet is to chat with one of the server staff and see what they advise.

NOTE: If anyone is interested in learning more about VPS servers and how to choose one I’d be happy to do a post.

2. Make your images smaller

Big images are usually a main reason a blog will load slowly. I am often really surprised to see people uploading images 2mb to 5mb in size!

Ideally, you want your images to be less than 100kb if possible – especially if you use a lot of images in each post. That’s not always possible but it can make a huge difference to load time.

One way to achieve this is to use a service like WP Smush which strips away some info from your images and makes them load faster. Here’s how it works:

You can also achieve this manually with individual images using Dynamic Drive Image Optimizer which shows you multiple versions of a reduced size image and allows you to choose one to your liking.

3. Consider using a caching plugin

Caching plugins like W3 Total Cache can have a huge impact on your site speed by caching a version of your website and showing that to visitors instead of loading the whole website every time someone visits.

The features of this particular plugin are far too numerous to name, and actually it can be a little overwhelming when you first look at them. If you have the budget I’d recommend talking to a server specialist to see whether they could help you install and configure it.

It’s worth the effort – getting your caching right can have a big impact on how quickly your blog loads. I’ll be adding a new caching set up to Blog Tyrant over the next few days to get it below that one second mark.

4. Enable GZIP

Enabling GZIP is quite technical and something that is best left for your server admin staff. It’s all about compression and how the server talks to the browser (here’s the details), but the end result is some pretty nice improvements on the page. Shoot your server admin and email and ask them about installing GZIP on your server and whether it’s a good fit.

5. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

Content delivery networks can be quite difficult to understand conceptually, but they are generally pretty easy to implement. They are so effective that many server technicians say that this is the most important step you can take assuming your server is set up correctly.

Basically what they do is place your content (images, files, etc.) closer to readers in order to save load time. For example, if your server is in New York and your reader is in Melbourne that content has to “hop” across lots of networks in order to display the content. A CDN chooses servers closer to the user.

Again, you’ll need to chat to your host about whether a CDN is appropriate for your blog’s environment. One popular CDN service is CloudFlare which has a free option available for WordPress users.

6. Remove widgets, plugins and add ons

It’s funny, sometimes you can do all this server-side stuff to speed up your site and still have bad load times. Often it is due to some plugin or service (like the Facebook Like Box) that is failing to load properly.

One example that highlighted this fact to me was when AWeber suffered a DDoS attack last year. Their website went down for days and during that time heaps of blogs began loading slowly because they had AWeber hosted opt-in forms embedded on their blog. Those forms failed to load because AWeber’s servers were down.

A successful and profitable blog doesn’t need to be busy. In fact, in my experience it’s the minimal blogs that have a very clear focus that make the most money and get the most subscribers. Remove any unnecessary plugins or tools and make sure everything is operating at the latest version.

Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t worry.

I contacted my friend David Steven-Jennings, an expert in Linux System Admin, to get his opinion on site speed. I asked about the mistakes that his clients make and found his answer quite interesting:

I think the biggest mistake I see clients make is being obsessed with site speed. Obviously speed is important but it’s easy to take things too far – ie when the results aren’t worth the effort.

The worst cases I’ve seen are when clients are willing to spend hours and lots of money to shave off the last few milliseconds from a 1.5 second load time. In their quest for the fastest time possible they don’t realise that their site visitors won’t even notice such minor improvements. In short, you should first focus on the big impact stuff first and don’t worry about the small stuff unless you are very sure the return on investment will be worth it.

Another big mistake I see clients make is trying to move to complicated hosting when they’ve outgrown their shared hosting, for example moving to cloud-based high-availability clusters or multiple redundant servers. I can see why – who wouldn’t be excited about their traffic levels growing like that? – however it’s usually never needed. The thing to remember is that if the site needed complicated hosting so soon it wouldn’t have worked on a shared host to begin with

Thus, my standard suggestion is to upgrade to a dedicated server or VPS first – this can last you a long time, especially if you sit it behind a CDN or proxy server, and is a hell of a lot cheaper. Most companies find that they never need to move past this, but if you find that you do you’ll probably already have a good idea of what you need.

This is great advice that I think will help a few people relax about taking site speed too far. Of course you want it to be as fast as possible, but you shouldn’t stress about a few microseconds that probably won’t make that big of a difference to anything.

How does your site perform?

I’d really love to know how your blog performs in terms of site speed. Do you have any drastic numbers that need improving? Head on over and do a speed test and let me know what results you get in the comments below. And if you have any questions about how to speed things up feel free to ask.

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Quick Guide: How to Choose a Name for Your New Blog

This One Trick Doubled My Email Sign Ups. Copy it.

Here’s a simple trick you can use on your blog to instantly see a growth in email subscribers.

Be warned, however, it’s not for everyone.

In fact, I’m predicting that a few of you might take issue with this type of technology (even though it’s really cool!).

It’s not illegal or anything like that… just a bit annoying, perhaps.

So what is it? Let’s take a look.

Why are you experimenting with annoying things?

Before I talk about the trick itself I just wanted to kind of pre-dig myself out of the hole I’m about to make.

One of my main goals here on Blog Tyrant is to save you time, stress and money by experimenting with marketing ideas so that you don’t have to. That was also part of the reason behind Blog Tyrant XPeriments.

So sometimes I’ll implement a new plugin or write a bit of software and see how it works because I want to pass on that information to you guys.

I really hate the idea of writing blog posts for the sake of it.

I’d much rather play around with new ideas and see if I can come up with something that benefits my business and then allows me to share it all with you.

And please note that I never do anything illegal or unethical. In fact, this experiment probably isn’t even as offensive as I’ve made it out to be.

How I doubled my email sign up rate with exit features

Let me start by saying that you always want more email subscribers for your blog.

It’s your email subscribers that protect you from Google updates, allow you to launch new products and websites, and help you promote every bit of new content that you produce.

If you want a longterm, sustainable business you want to be trying to grow that mailing list at all costs.

Okay so here’s what I’ve been trying:

If you visit Blog Tyrant for the first time (as in, you don’t have any cookies on your computer) you’ll see a pop up appear when you try to leave the site.

This is the bit that I think some people won’t like.

The pop up only appears when you put your mouse near the “back” button or the little “x” that closes the window. That’s called an exit intent.

I’ve set it up so that you can close the pop up easily by clicking anywhere on the screen, and it will never appear again, which helps me sleep at night.

This pop up doesn’t directly allow sign ups, instead I send people off to a landing page that I have been tweaking for a while and it currently converts at 50.4% since using this plugin – almost double what it did before.

You can check out the landing page here if you want.

As you can imagine, having the best landing page possible is really important for this strategy.

How do you build this function?

There are many plugins that will allow you to achieve this effect but the one I use is a premium plugin called PopUps (not affiliate link).

I personally prefer using premium plugins because they are cheap, get better features and you always have the security updates and support from the staff if you need it.

Essentially with this plugin you just create a new popup much like you’d write a new post. You then style the design as you like it with their inbuilt options and set the exit intent as below.

There are many other features you can play with as well like restricting it to PCs only and ignoring mobiles.

I’m going to keep playing with different options and see if I can get any different/cool results that might be worth sharing. If you choose to try this out I’d really like to hear how you use it and what effect it has on your sign up rates.

Some important notes about this setup

I want to finish this post by giving you some important things to remember when playing with this type of setup.

• Your traffic sources matter
  If you have the wrong traffic sources it won’t matter how good your tech setup is – people won’t subscribe. Always focus on getting more traffic from more relevant sources.
• Your design matters
  Make sure you spend a decent amount of time getting the design right and playing with it to see what converts better. Sometimes a few simple changes like color or call to actions can really change things. This is why we split test.
• The user experience is vital
  The user experience is so important. Please don’t use these things in a way that confuses people or is impossible to close. Don’t show it to regular readers every single day. It should be prevalent but still subtle and smooth to use.
• More email subscribers isn’t the end
  Remember that it doesn’t matter if you have 100,000 email subscribers if they don’t open your emails. This is why I don’t trick people and send them to a second landing page – it lets them analyse if they really want to get in on it. Keep a close eye on your open rates and see if they change.
• Don’t be afraid
  Don’t be afraid to try pop ups. Almost all of the big websites and blogs use them and many utilize and exit intent. Most readers don’t care a bit that you’re using one.

And always remember that what works for my site might not work for yours. This is yet another reason to make sure you pay attention to your results and keep testing.

Will you try it?

I’m really curious to know what you guys think about this type of popup. Will you give it a go? Or perhaps you’ve already tried it and have some results to share? Please leave a comment below and let me know.

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