How to do a Business’ Blog Mid Year Review

Performing daily tasks to maintain a blog can be time-consuming. Numerous small, detailed tasks need to be completed, and these may be more important than reviewing your progress. However, reviewing your progression over time is also essential.

The benefits of doing a mid-year review of your blog.

1. You can see the direction of your blog and how it’s progressing.
2. You can determine which topics work more effectively with the audience.
3. When visiting the data, you will be able to learn about your audience’s interests and where they come from, which will help you tailor your posts more effectively to them.
4. When you can review data over several months, it’s much easier to see the big picture.

Did I convince you that this will be beneficial for your business blog? I hope so.

If you’re ready, let’s discuss the steps you’ll take to conduct the mid-year review of the business blog and the areas you need to examine to gain a comprehensive view.

Guided Steps on how to do a business blog mid-year review

Review your analytic data in Google Analytics.

If you have your website connected to Google Analytics, you likely have a wealth of information at your fingertips that will help make the mid-year review process easier.

The most important thing to do is to get the date range right. First, set the date range to 1/1/20__ to 6/30/20__. Then, compare it to the previous year for the same period, instead of comparing the previous period, which would be 7/1/___ – 12/31/___. Some continuing sales industries can do this because you are comparing the activity that is growing over time. However, for cyclical industries, such as organizing, retail, salons, and others, comparing prior periods will not consistently align with the right activity for each month.

Check your newsletter followers and see how it is progressing.

View your subscriber lists and review the reports section of your email marketing platform. Compare the prior six months. How many new followers did you receive? Are there people who unsubscribed? How many people opened your RSS feed newsletters? As you review the answers to these questions, you can determine what the next topics will be on your blog posts and newsletters.

If you have set up tracking of your email newsletters in Google Analytics, you can also access that data.

If you want to find out how your social media followers are progressing, visit our post: How to Track Social Media Followers in your business

Send a test to your capture email pop-ups, forms, and posts to ensure they are working correctly.

You likely have multiple forms, whether on your services page, contact us page, pop-ups, or sidebar. It’s time to revisit these areas to ensure these forms are still functioning correctly. I’ve experienced several times in the past where a plugin stopped working, and the emails never arrived. It’s very frustrating to find out this happened, so I want to help you avoid this problem.

Go in and test each form to see if you get the request form in your email. If you do, great! If not, you can determine what happened by visiting the form creator plugin or website.

Tip: To remember where all these forms are, you can create a list of the pages and posts with the active forms on them. Using a spreadsheet app, add the website URL, the name of the form, and what it is used for, so you can easily add to it when you add new forms in the future. It will also help you remember forms that you created years ago.

Review your monetization income if it is active on the blog.

Review your Google AdSense, Affiliates, and Amazon links to ensure they display correctly. How did you do? Make a note of what affiliates and what products sold the most through your blog. The goal is to generate a variety of income streams from different sources to supplement your income.

Ensure that all your plugins serve a purpose.

Do you have many plugins? Visit your plugins. Some may have added features that you didn’t know about, and you can completely eliminate the other single-purpose plugin. This will help streamline your plugins.

A popular tip to improve SEO (affiliate) is to reduce the number of plugins you have to about 10-15 to speed up your site. So, reviewing these plugins is an effective way to spend your time. Analyze what you have been using for a while and see if other plugins also offer those features. Then, you will be able to remove the extra plugin.

Yes, it may involve several detailed tasks, but it will help you create a direction for your business and determine goals for the next six months. I hope this post motivates you to take action and take ownership of your business’s blog.

Now it’s your turn. What areas of your business blog do you visit and review regularly? Please leave a comment below.

Below are some additional posts I found about what you need to visit when doing a blog mid year review. Feel free to check them out.

7 Areas to Focus on During Your Mid-Year Blog Review

How to Analyze Your Blog Posts: A Beginner’s Guide

If you want some more tips on business blogging, feel free to check out the collection of posts here.

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• The Best New Blogger Time Saving Tips
• How Often to Review Business Bookkeeping Reports