If you’re going to put forth the effort to blog, you might as well plan for its success to start with. Otherwise you’re just posting for the crickets … and it becomes a waste of time there for vanity’s sake alone.
So, I suggest you take a little bit of time to write down an simple plan for what you want your blog to accomplish for you and your career. Believe me, you will be happy that you did.
To help you do this, here are some questions you should ask yourself as you pull together your plan.
» What results do you want to achieve with your blog?
Are you blogging to grow a fan base? If so, how will you measure it’s growth? Through an RSS subscription list? An opt-in list? Possibly both? The earlier you make this decision, the better, because switching list management technologies later will reduce the size of your list.
» How often will you post to your blog?
Research has shown that the more often you post to your blog, the more visitors you will get. That said, you don’t want to commit to a schedule you won’t be able to keep up. So include your posting goal in your plan. Do you want to post daily? Weekly? On specific days of the week? Keep in mind that you want to stick to a regular schedule. Once your readers (a.k.a. fans) know that you update frequently, they will return to your site on a regular basis.
» What kind of content will you post to your blog?
Will your posts be personal? How personal? Maybe you want to write about the craft? What about the business? Will your blog include a mix of these things? Only you know what you are most motivated to write about.
Also, think about what what style of delivery you will use. Will your posts include photographs? Clipart? Video? Set up your style and stick to it as best you can.
» How will you promote your blog?
Too many bloggers, actors included, spend all of their time creating posts and next to no time marketing the site, so this is a key element of your plan. There are so many ways to do this both passively and actively, that I can’t really list them here. But this is definitely something that should be a part of your blog plan. Remember, you want people to visit your blog or what’s the point?
» How will you measure your results?
Will you measure visitor statistics? Quantity of comments posted? Opt-in subscriber growth? Incoming links? Something else? Monitoring the results of your blogging will help you make better decisions to improve your blog. For example, if you find that you get better traction with video posts, you may decide to do them more often. Maybe your podcast brings in more traffic. Without having a way to measure these things, you’ll never know.
While you are creating your actor blog plan, you can dream big but also be realistic in the time lines you set for your goals. If you are new to blogging, you might have unrealistic expectations of how fast your readership will grow and how much of an increase in visibility it will bring you. When these unrealistic expectations aren’t met, many actors stop blogging … often just before they’ve reached critical mass and were at the edge of blogging success!
So create your short- and long-term plans – and stick to them!
