16 Blogging Tasks That Are Just As Important As Writing Quality Content

Perhaps you’re just thinking about starting your blog, or perhaps you’ve set up your blog and are now carefully creating content to publish. Maybe you’ve even got one or two blog posts in your archive now and are looking at writing your next.

In the early stages of your blogging journey, it is easy to assume that the only task that you need to concentrate on is making good, quality content for your posts that other people want to read.

And it’s not that you’re wrong, but writing quality blog posts isn’t the only thing that’s important when running a blog.

In this blog post, I’m going to go through 16 blogging tasks that are just as important when it comes to running a blog as creating good content (and I REALLY recommend that you DON’T skip numbers 7 and 8!).

The tasks in this list are in no particular order and different ones will rank more or less importantly depending on your blogging priorities and goals.

The purpose of this list isn’t to overwhelm you either, or create thoughts of ‘There’s MORE that I need to do!?’

You might want to leave some of these things for when you blog is more established, or you might want to crack on with some of them straight away. Some of these are activities that will take you less than 10 minutes, whilst others will require a bit more planning to implement.

The blogging tasks in this list that you can do in 10 minutes or under are numbers 3, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14 and 16.

1. Start Your Email List

Email lists are incredibly hard to grow; I won’t sugar-coat it.

But an email list is where some of your biggest fans and supporters of your blog will be.

Think about it; everytime you publish a new blog post, you can email your subscriber list with a link to read it. Yes, you aren’t guarenteed they’ll click the link, but as people on your email list, those on your subscriber list are more likely to read your posts when prompted than strangers on social media.

Starting an email list doesn’t need to be a challenging feat. Platforms such as Kit and Mailchimp are easy to set up and integrate within your blog.

2. Update Previous Blog Posts

So, you wrote that blog post a year ago. Is the content still relevant?

It could be. Or the post could be in need of an update.

Sometimes, blog post content gets dated, and to ensure that your blog remains credible, I’d encourage you to update your posts so that you aren’t associated with supplying out-of-date or incorrect information.

Othertimes, the content itself is fine and still relevant, but perhaps your writing style has grown as you’ve got further in your blogging journey. If so, perhaps you want to revise a few things within the post. You could:

• Break up longer paragraphs into shorter chunks
• Insert some more links
• Add some different imagery

3. Delete Any Unused Plugins

Overtime, it’s easy to install and deactivate, only to install another plugin to later deactivate that one too.

We’ve all been there.

Every once in a while, it’s worth visiting your plugins page on your WordPress Dashboard and just checking that there aren’t any dectivated plugins that could be deleted, or even active plugins that you don’t use anymore and could be deactivated and deleted.

Remember, the more plugins on your blog that aren’t in use are just running the potential of slowing down your site.

4. Read Other Blogs in Your Niche for Inspiration

A musician who never listens to music will never know how good (or bad!) they are and never be inspired to get better.

The same goes for blogging.

The more blogs you read, the more ideas you will get about how to:

• Write your own blog posts
• Style and design your blog
• and pick up inspiration for posts along the way

And no, I’m not saying copy what other people are doing, but by reading blogs within your niche, you can see what topics are popular and you can write about for your own blog with your own spin on it. Equally, you can see if there’s gaps in the available information that you can then write about on your blog, thereby giving you a super unique advantage of providing information that few other blogs in your niche are.

Equally, you might find that lots of blogs in your niche are promoting in a certain way or on a certain platform, and you might see an opportunity to promote your blog in a slightly different way either on the same platforms or different ones.

5. Read Other Blogs Outside of Your Niche for Inspiration

Similar to reading blogs within your niche, it’s important to read blogs outside of your niche as well.

Why?

Because if you only read blogs within a certain niche, you could be missing out on opportunities to learn from other bloggers. For example, I blog about blogging, but I found a super helpful article about building a blog on a fertility blog. This is way out of my niche, but I learnt a lot from this blogger, regardless of what her niche was.

6. Do Some Keyword Research

Doing keyword research is a super important part of blogging, because keywords:

• Tell you what your readers are looking for
• Enable you to write content that is targetted at what people want to find

But without proper keyword research, you won’t know what people are searching for on platforms such as Google of Pinterest.

Whilst there are a number of bloggers who will tell you to write for people and not for SEO, I think there is a balance to be had in terms of writing for people, but also to be discovered as well.

7. Set Up Google Search Console

If you haven’t got round to setting up Google Search Console yet, it’s a step that I would highly recommend.

I’d actually go so far as to say that this a number one step that all bloggers should do when starting a blog.

Google Search Console helps index your blog’s content on Google. It also gives you invaluable information about how people are finding your blog and where you’re ranking of Google for different key words.

If you haven’t yet set up your blog on Google Search Console, we’ve got a whole guide that walks you through the process step-by-step.

Read More >> How To Add Your Website to Google Search Console in Under 5 Minutes

8. Protect Your Blog from Hackers and Improve Your Blog’s Security

When you set up your blog, it’s easy to get caught up in creating your first blog posts, setting your colour scheme and generally just getting your blog off the ground.

It’s ok if one of the things that got skipped in the set-up process was your blog’s security.

But blog security and protecting you blog from hack attacks is an essential part of running a blog.

You might think that hackers will only attack large corporations with billions of dollars. But that’s far from the truth.

Some hackers will purposefully target small businesses and blogs because they are less likely to have high-tech security in place. Some hackers aren’t after cash and just like to know that they’ve screwed with someone’s day.

There’s no point sitting with the complacency of ‘it’ll never happen to me. If you haven’t already sorted your blog’s security, take 10 minutes and follow our step-by-step guide to protecting your blog from hackers.

Read More >> How to Install and Configure Wordfence in 10 Minutes

9. Review How User-Friendly Your Blog Is

Yes, YOU know where everything is on your site and how to access it, but is it as obvious for someone who has just come across your site?

Go to your home page and really ask yourself this: ‘If I had just shown up on this homepage, would I want to stick around?’ Be really critical with yourself here.

If the honest answer is ‘maybe’ or ‘no,’ then you need to be asking yourself what it is that you need to do to encourage people to click around your site, thus staying on it for longer.

Make a list of what improvements you can make. You don’t have to make all of these changes at once, but you can refer back to your list each time you’re experiencing writer’s block or want to work on your blog but don’t feel like writing.

Another way to do this activity is to open a random article and consider if, after reading the post, if you’d be tempted to stay on the blog, or just click off it is.

If you think you’d click off, your reader probably will as well.

What can improve the user experience and make them stay?

Improving your reader’s user experience could be:

• Improving your colour scheme to make the words easier to read
• Improving your font for the same reason
• Add in more images so that readers are confronted with massive walls of text
• Break your paragraphs into smaller, more digestable chunks

10. Include Internal Links in Your Old Blog Posts

When you first started your blog you had very little, if anything, to internally link your blog posts to.

As you increased your blog’s content, you are able to internally link you’re newer articles back to your older articles, but what if someone lands on an older article first?

Where do they click to stay on your blog and read more of your posts if there are no internal links?

Going back to older blog posts and inserting internal links is a great way to improve on-page SEO and also to keep readers on your blog for longer. Plus, you might also find content in your older posts that needs updating, which you can do at the same time!

11. Create Content to Promote Older Blog Posts

If you’re anything like me, you write a blog post, schedule for publishing or publish right away, and then promote the post based on that publication date.

But what about promoting older content? It could be exactly what people are looking for, but they don’t know it’s there.

Perhaps you do a ‘throwback’ post on social media to promote an older post, or you create new Pinterest pins. You could go through your posts to see if an older post could be internally linked to another post.

12. Review How Many Blog Posts You Have Per Blog Post Category

This is something that I rarely hear bloggers talking about, but reviewing how many blog posts you have per blog post category is a great way to figure out which categories you might need to focus on fleshing out a little more in the future.

Personally, I keep a Google Sheet of all of my blog posts on The Balanced Blogger. For each blog post, I insert the blog post category that the blog post sits in. Each of these categories are colour coded and for me, this is a great way to quickly see roughly how many posts I have per category.

It helps inform my content schedule and planning when I can see if perhaps I have gone a bit heavy in creating content for one category, to the detriment of another.

Think of it from a reader’s point of view. If you were on a blog and clicked on a blog category to see 20+ posts, but then on another and only found 2 posts, you’re not going to feel that this category with only 2 posts is as loved as the other one with 20+ posts.

Reviewing your blog post categories can also help you realise if you need to ditch a category.

This has definitely happened to me in the past when I was in the early planning stages of a blog and dead certain that I would need X category, only after a few weeks to realise that categories Y and Z covered the content of category X. Category X’s couple of blog posts got moved to other categories and the category got the chop.

Read More >> How to Set Up Your Blog Post Categories

13. Keep Your Plugins and Theme Up To Date

Keeping your plugins and theme up to date is one of those blogging tasks that should never be forgotten about. Because out of date plugins and themes on your website means that you have out of date code on your website.

And out of date code leads to vulnerabilities that expose your website for hacking (see point 8 about improving your blog’s security).

But it’s not just about cyber security; out of date themes and plugins mean that your website might not work as WordPress itself updates (don’t forget that WordPress needs to be kept up to date too!).

By keeping your WordPress theme and plugins up to date, you are ensuring that:

• Bug fixes are implemented (this is a must for ensuring your blog’s security)
• You’re improving your site’s performance (updates often include improvement in site speed)
• Your site has access to new/updated features (perhaps there’s been a fix and a feature that wasn’t perfect has now been improved)
• Your content is better optimised (updates are all about improving performance and often, site speed as well)

All of this adds up to giving your reader a better user experience.

14. Review Your Site Colours for Readability

We’ve all been there; you’ve picked out a stunning colour scheme, only to then find that some of your text isn’t as clear as it could be.

Using Google’s Pagespeed Insights, you can get feedback on the accessibility of your site.

Because if people are struggling to read your content, they won’t stick around and try to decipher it. They’ll just move onto another blog that easily gives them the information that they need.

15. Check Your Website Speed

Speed is everything on the internet.

In fact, research tells us that if a webpage doesn’t load in under a coupld of seconds, people will simply go to another site.

There are tonnes of tools on the internet that calculate your website’s speed.

Free tools that I like include:

• Pagespeed Insights
• Pingdom
• GTMetrix

It’s worth bearing in mind that each of these tools use a slightly different system to calculate your blog’s speed. So if there’s variation in a score, that’ll be why.

But regardless of the differing scores, they are never that different. And with each score, each tool will give you a handy list of tips to improve your score further.

16. Check Your Menus

As your blog grow, you might find that you change the names or links of your pages and posts and old menu links no longer work. Equally, you might find that you click a link to find that either:

1. The link takes you to a page where you realise the content is in desperate need of an update
2. The page is dead and you get taken to a 404 page
3. The link used to describe the page you’re going to doesn’t quite match the content

I recently had this experience when I was updating my home page.

Whilst I was updating my home page, I set my blog so that the home page showed only a list of recent blog posts.

Great!

But what I had forgotten to do was set my ‘Home’ link in the header menu to this new homepage and kept it pointing at my old homepage which was in various stages of update (some versions saved in draft and some I’d hit ‘Publish’ in error).

Through checking my menu links I was able to see that clicking ‘Home’ in the header menu took readers to an ugly page with no links or anything to read and so I quickly took this opportunity to amend the link.

Now when readers click ‘Home’ in the header menu, they’re taken to the correct home page. But without checking this link, I would have happily assumed that it was pointing to the right page!