Blog ‘Spring Cleaning’ – Day 4

There’s nothing that says that this challenge has to be completed in a month, right? That’s why I’ve decided to take the weekends off. This will give everyone time to finish up each week’s tasks on Saturday and Sunday before starting the next round. And it’ll give me time to visit your blogs and see what you all have come up with! I’m thrilled that so many are participating – both longtime friends and new ones.

Day 4: Analyze a top blog in your niche

This means that you have to figure out what your niche is, if you don’t already have one… which brings back memories of Chris Brogan’s presentation at the Social Media Moms Celebration last month.

“Where are all my homeschool bloggers?” he asked. A few women in the audience raised there hands. “Aww, that’s cool,” he said.

“Where are my discount/deals type bloggers?” A few more raised their hands. “I see you,” he said.

“Where are all my lifestyle people, blogging just about what it is to be a mom and raise all those kids out there?” Maybe half the room raised their hands, including me!

“Look at all that!” he said. “That’s… that’s a saturated niche.” Everyone laughed.

I’m fine with this… being part of a “saturated” niche, that is. The key is to not look at other bloggers as competition. It just means there are that many more moms out there that I can relate to!

Visit ProBlogger for Day 4’s lesson. He provides a long list of questions that you can use to analyze a blog.

Today’s homework?

• Take 15 minutes to analyze a top blog in your niche. What did you learn?
• Take 15 minutes to analyze your blog. Look at your stats. What keywords bring people back again and again? Judging by page hits, what’s been the most popular post on your blog to date? Maybe these are subjects you should write about more often.

As an example, my post popular posts are:

• Safety 1st Complete Air Convertible Car Seat with Air Protect
• What do you say to someone who is dying?
• EA Sports Active 30-Day Challenge – Week 1
• I scream for ice cream cone cupcakes

A lot of that is due to the title of the posts. Learning about SEO will make a huge difference in how much search engine traffic you get! Both the Safety 1st and EA Sports Active reviews were posted right around the time the products were released, which brought a huge surge of traffic to my blog and kept me in the top ten search results in Google. In fact, I’m still in the top ten. Just search for EA Sports Active 30-Day Challenge or Safety 1st Complete Air car seat and you’ll see!

And what do you say to someone who is dying? Yeah, depressing, I know. Unfortunately I get hits on that just about everyday. I didn’t write much in that particular post, but I think it’s the comments that are most helpful to whoever happens to click on it. The ice cream cone cupcake post is a fun how-to. I should probably do more of those.

If you’d like to participate, leave me a comment so we can visit your blog and see how you’re doing! You can also link up specific blog posts relating to today’s challenge below. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Want to go back to the beginning? Visit Day One of this series…