September will mark my four month blogiversary and believe me, I have learned a lot about blogging in a short amount of time!
While I did do a lot of research before starting this blog, I had many ideas and things I wanted to accomplish by writing and posting here, actually doing it and being in the blog-sphere has been the best way to learn.
I know I’ve said this before, but this was not my first attempt at creating a blog and I was very nervous about actually getting readers this time around!
August has been a rough month as I’ve been buying a home, selling a home and moving from one home to the other which has taken up 99% of my free time, as I’m sure you can all understand. But I’m going to make it my goal to get back on track and even better in September.
My blog goals for September are:
- Get back into a routine of posting to my blog 3-5 times per week.
- Reach 700 followers on Twitter, 80 followers on Bloglovin’, 200 followers on Pinterest and 100 followers on Instagram.
- Link up to 10 different link parties per week.
- Create a pinnable image for every post, make sure I crosspost each post of mine to Pinterest and pin at least 3 posts from other bloggers that I love each day.
- Leave genuine comments on 5 blogger friend’s posts per day.
- Create an editorial calendar for my blog. (Weekly themes, holiday posts, etc.)
- Work on my recipe ideas for posting.
- Plan a new giveaway.
- Learn how to take more professional looking photos for my blog posts.
- Post something relevant to my blog on Instagram at least 3 times per week.
Now, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to accomplish all of these things with all the unpacking I’m about to have going but it gives me something to work towards and a plan to get more of what I’m wanting for and from my blog.
Here are some of my favorite tools, ones that I use basically everyday:
Buffer – Great for scheduling tweets to post automatically on Twitter whenever you choose. I use Buffer to auto-schedule past blog post links and pictures to Twitter everyday so that I always have something going up at least once a day.
Canva – Awesome graphic creator that lets you import your own images to edit and make professional looking infographics, perfect sized social media graphics, picture collages and much more.
Google Analytics – I use this for tracking all of my stats. Daily, monthly and weekly site visits, referrals from other sites, reader behaviors on my site and so many more things. I especially like to know how people who are reading my blog found it and what they’re staying to read.
Disqus – WordPress plugin for commenting. I love that it makes it easy not only for readers to make comments but also for me to moderate comments and let people know when their comments have been replied to.
WP to Twitter – WordPress plugin that automatically crossposts each blog post link to Twitter along with whatever hashtags or other text you input.
What are some of your favorite blogging tools and goals for the next month or the rest of the year?
