Since my blog became a business, I’ve been conscious ever since to grow and improve every part of my blog and social media platforms. It’s a slow process because I currently still have a full-time job and at times it can be tough to juggle both. However, I wanted to chat about how I’ve been using software to help my blog business grow over the past year or so.
This post is sponsored.
Task Management
I have SO much that I need to work on, whether it’s developing my Pinterest board and regularly scheduling pins to create fresh content and taking photos, to editing them and getting them scheduled into Instagram. People have an attitude towards influencers that they do nothing but take photos and get paid thousands of pounds. Sadly for me, that’s not quite the amount I’m getting paid to blog but blogging is a lot of work. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – you could work on a blog 24/7. You have to be a jack of all trades to be able to run a successful blog and I don’t think I’m anywhere near as switched on and organised as some bloggers are. That’s why I’ve been trying to nail down a task management system to unloads everything from my brain and will remind me of what needs doing. I tried CoSchedule first but realised that it was quite restrictive with what you could do so I then moved over to Asana.
Asana has legit changed the whole game for me and I can assign due dates, colour code them and add subtasks within the tasks themselves. I’ve created a content calendar and can have multiple projects on the go.
Getting Feedback
One of the things that I’d like to do more of is to get feedback. I want to know what my readers want from me in regards to the blog and what I can do better. That’s where services like NPS come in where you can get surveys of your customers. I think going forward, I’m looking at using Google Forms or some other form of system where my readers can get involved in suggesting content. After all, they’re the ones reading and engaging with it so why shouldn’t they have a say. This will hopefully help with generating more content ahead of time so that I can just roll it out constantly instead of always chasing my tail.
Using Analytics
Google Analytics has become a real handy tool to use for my blog ever since I implemented it into my blog back in 2015 I believe. It helps you understand your audience from an informational perspective, what the age category is and gender, where they live etc. This has helped me tailor the content but also to keep track of it to send to clients and potential opportunities. One of my goals for when I go freelance is to spend some more time trying to understand the platform so that I can get more use out of it. I want to ideally increase my audience so that I’m hitting around 10,000 views a month and that readers, in general, are spending more time on the blog.
Bookkeeping
And finally, when going freelancing, I’ll need a more detailed and organised way of bookkeeping my finances and I’ve seen a lot of bloggers mention that they use Quickbooks. I think it’s something that I’ll aim to get my ahead around in August as this is likely to make the whole tax return process a little easier than it usually can be. For the moment though, it’s great to see that I’ve hit at least double my 2018 figure for every month so far. It shows that my blog is only growing in success and that makes me so happy.
What software do you use with your business? Let me know in the comments below.
*Disclaimer – This is a collaborative post with NPS. All words are my own.
