NB: This is the 22nd installment in The Inspired Solo’s Build a Better Business Blog in One Month series. Designed to help solo lawyers and other professionals boost their blog’s performance, the series consists of a daily lecture and task (or tasks) that focus on one “blog improvement project” at a time. Each post in the series is tagged with “[BBBB1]“. You can start the program at any time. Catch up with other BBBB1 posts here.

Build a Better Business Blog, One Block At a Time

Day 22: Lecture and Task

In today’s installment of the Build a Better Business Blog series, we’re going to be looking at one of the richest sources of blogging tips: successful blogs in your practice area and profession. Why make your own mistakes when you can learn from the leaders?

Shortcuts Are Great: Learning From the Successful Blogs in Your Area

I’m a big believer in shortcuts. If there’s a way to get from A to D that doesn’t require stops at B and C, folks, I’m all for it. I don’t see this as cheating. It’s simply making use of the resources at hand, and learning from those who’ve been there, done that (successfully or not), and worn out the t-shirt.

Blogs that are similar to yours in terms of your profession and your practice area are a terrific resource for picking up hints and suggestions for your own blog, whether the blogs you’re looking at are succesful or not. From the blogs with traffic zooming through the virtual roof, you learn what to do. From the blogs that are sputtering along nearly on empty, you learn what not to do.

Take a moment today and research those blogs. Start with simple Google searches for your keywords (but leave out geographic restrictions in order to obtain the broadest possible results). If you know of a blog directory that’s restricted to your profession, examine it (lawyers, go to the ABA Journal’s Blawg Directory and scan the list of subjects — but be warned, some blogs may be listed in one subject while they could also have been listed in another, so cast your net wide).

Learning From the Masters and the Beginners

When you identify a blog that looks like it might be on target, open it in a new tab in your internet browser. Don’t review them just yet — just keep opening new tabs, until you have a goodly selection of ten or so blogs (hopefully, you can identify that many — if you can’t, then you know you’ve got a good shot at cornering the market!).

Now, take a look at each one. Judging popularity is a bit tricky but you can do it simply with a few easy, free tools:

• Look at the number of comments.
• Examine the frequency of posting.
• Go to Alexa and plug in the URL of the blog to see its rank.
• Check out the PageRank on the blog itself.
• Do a Google search for keywords on the blog and see where it ranks in the Google results.

For each blog, ask yourself “What is this blogger doing right? What can I learn from her? Of those things that she’s doing and I’m not, what makes sense for my own blog?”

That last question is paramount. You don’t necessarily want to take actions randomly simply because they worked on one blog. You don’t know the whole backstory — it could be that this particular feature you’re thinking about changing doesn’t really bring in the numbers (something the blogger would know from her own Analytics but isn’t readily apparent to you). It could be that what makes sense for one blog doesn’t really translate so well to your blog.

The trick is to keep an open mind — try things out — but then test them and judge the results. If they’re working, keep them. If not, consider getting rid of them.

What specifically are we looking at, when we talk about “trying new things”? Well, the options are endless, really. Analyzing a blog is a bit of an art, but here are some of the things I look at when I do a blog review:

• How quickly and clearly the blog “announces” itself
• Activity level
• Layout
• Color scheme
• Readability
• Headlines
• Whether the sidebar is clean or cluttered
• Whether and to what extent any particular feature “adds value” to the reader
• The quality of the posts themselves

That’s just a partial list, of course, but it’s enough to get started.

So take a few moments to start this project today. You might be surprised to find out just how well you’re really doing compared to your competitors, and you may learn something to boot. Win-win!