Author: Srinivas Rao

This is a guest post by Srinivas Rao of BlogcastFM.

In the first year of running my blog I wrote close to 100 guest posts. I was consistent and committed to growing my blog by writing 2 guests posts a week on blogs ranging in size from 1,000 to 50,000 subscribers. After 3 quarters of aggressive guest posting I was still struggling to break the thousand subscriber mark. A few months back I interviewed Jon Morrow. After that interview, I realized I had made some critical mistakes that had costs me 1,000’s of potential subscribers, fans and followers.

1. A Focus on RSS Numbers

Like many early stage bloggers, for months I obsessed about seeing the chiclet count on my Feedburner badge hit 1,000, only to find that it wouldn’t do much for me other than inflate my ego. Top add to that Feedburner became completely unreliable and the subscriber count fluctuated dramatically on a weekly basis. The number of people who subscribe to your blog via RSS is one of the most meaningless metrics because it’s not an accurate representation of who is really reading your blog. I’ve found blogs with 1,000’s of RSS subscribers and virtual no comments. So, don’t focus too much of your effort on this.

This is a guest post by Srinivas Rao of Blogcast FM.

If you have spent any time at all in the blogosphere, then you have no doubt come across a post where somebody has created a roundup post of other bloggers. Here are just a few examples below:

• 40 Flightsters You Should know About
• 125 Fearless Female Bloggers
• 24 People Who Will Inspire, Entertain, and Inform the World in 2011
• 27 People I Can’t Wait to Meet in Real Life

These roundup posts can generate massive amounts of traffic for your blog. They also have a tendency to be shared quite a bit on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites, bookmarked, voted upon, and commented on. They do however require a significant investment of time and effort.

Assembling the List

You should expect to spend at least a week on putting together one of these posts if you intend to do it well. Below, I’ve dissected what I think the keys are to creating an awesome roundup of bloggers.

This is a guest post by Srinivas Rao who turns surf sessions into life lessons at his personal development blog, The Skool of Life.

I have been noticing a pattern in the blogosphere that I think is at the root of many problems. I spoke with a client the other day about the “analysis paralysis” issue that seems to be common for many bloggers. I’m going to go out on a limb here and I’m going to bet that you don’t implement most of what you read and you’ll even comment on a post with at tip that sounds like a great idea.

So what’s the deal with this? What’s the cause? It’s simple.

People are overwhelmed because they don’t have a plan and they are attempting to do way too many things at once. The byproduct is they end up doing nothing at all.

If you’re anything like me, you read 100’s of blogs every day with great ideas and in many cases you don’t end up implementing many of those ideas. The problem with this approach of trying to do everything at once is that it’s like trying to eat an entire pizza in one bite. It’s just not going to work.

I’ve said before that you should focus on what you can do today. But let’s break it down in the context of implementing advice that you read on a particular blog. Let’s say you read a post called five tips on how to grow traffic to your blog (that sounds like a post you’ll commonly come across). There will probably be an ongoing discussion in the comments about the value of the tips, etc, etc.

But after reading the post, the ideas will be an afterthought and you’re on to the next blog post in your RSS reader or chasing the next distraction. If you stop for a moment and look at the tips and realize that all you need to do is implement one thing a week then you’ll make 10 times more progress then you would. Depending on the complexity of the tips you might be able to do one every single day.

Sometime in December of 2009 as everybody started to take a look back at the last year of blogging, I decided to do the same. I was still unemployed after finishing my MBA and realized that I hadn’t used one of the major skills I acquired during my MBA, putting together a marketing plan.

As I read numerous posts about how people monetize blogs and the ongoing theme that “blogs don’t make money businesses do,” I realized businesses have marketing plans, so it seemed to make sense that my blog should have a quarterly marketing plan. In putting together that plan, I came up with several reasons why a blog needs a marketing plan. Let’s look at how a marketing plan can help take your blog up to the next level.