45 “5 Minute Tasks” That Will Improve Your Blog

What were you doing 5 minutes before?

Let me guess, nothing related to your blog.

Right?

That’s a big problem with us. We all want to improve our blogs but don’t give the necessary time for it!

Gear up, no time to waste soldier.

Let get up and running and improve your blog!

1. Check All Your Blog Statistics In Next 5 Minutes: And then do not check them for whole day!
2. Find A Blogging Buddy: Go and ask a friend to help you by reviewing your posts and do same for them. This will help you get valuable insight about your posts before you publish them. This will improve your blog posts a lot.
3. Put Your Blog Up For Review On A Forum: Forums are a great way to get feedback. Ask other members to review your blog. You will get lot of useful advice(and traffic) for sure!
4. Contact A Loyal Reader: Find one guy who comments and participates a lot in discussions and ask for things that you can improve about your blog or the kind of questions he’d like to ask.
5. Say Thanks: Say thanks to your readers. Either publish a nice post for them or mail them! And when we are at it, Thank You For You Time!
6. Comment On Another Blog In Your Niche: Commenting may not get you loads of traffic but it will surely make you a bit more visible in your niche.
7. Write Random Things: Free writing is one of the best ways to get ideas. So go ahead, take a blank paper(or Office document) and write away.
8. Install A Simple, Distraction Free Text Editor: There are a lot of distractions around. Go and get a good distraction free text writer like OmmWriter. This will improve your blog posts by big margin!
9. Start A Notebook To Write Your Ideas: An app or a software will do as well but a notebook is one of the best ways to record ideas anytime, anywhere. I tend to use iA Writer on my iPhone as my phone is always around.
10. Subscribe To Chris Brogan: Chris Brogan is just amazing when it comes to promotion and content marketing advice. Subscribe to his newsletter, you won’t regret.
11. Subscribe To Ben Settle’s Newsletter: Ben Settle’s newsletter is mainly focused on email marketing and there are lot of tips in there.
12. Check Your Blog’s Loading Time: Go to Pingdom and check how much time your blog takes to load completely. If it is fast enough, smile! If it is not, move to next step!
13. Install W3 Total Cache: W3 Total Cache is one of the best plugins to make your blog load faster. Install it and see the difference.
14. Check For WordPress And Plugin Updates: New versions of plugins, themes and WordPress feature many performance improvements. If your blog is outdated, do install those. You will be amazed how much a simple update can improve your blog.
15. Install A Good Security Plugin: There are lot of hacking attacks going on. And many are targeted specifically WordPress. Better secure WP with good security plugin.
16. Install An Offline Blog Editor: Offline Blog Editors are great for writing posts without an internet connection. Get a free one and experience yourself.
17. Go Fullscreen: Want to write online? No problems, just press F11 and go full screen in your to limit distractions.
18. Update Your Most Popular Post: Open Google Analytics(or any other service that you use) and see which is your most popular post. Now update it. Add a big subscription form to get more subscribers, or offer your book!
19. Set A Goal For Your Blog: Where do you want to be in six months? Write it down on a piece of paper, make a plan and follow it.
20. Join A Membership Site: One of the biggest benefits of membership sites is helpful community. People are willing to help you and you learn a lot from them. I am a member of A List Blogging Bootcamps and am loving it.
21. Find Inspiration: What drives you forward? Spend five minutes thinking about your inspiration for your blog.
22. Set Your Blog’s Body Font To 16 px: 12 pixels was considered standard font size for content some time back but now 16 is new 12.



23. Consider Getting A Mobile Responsive Theme: While mobile theme plugins are nice, responsive theme are the new “thing”. They adapt automatically to different screen sizes and devices. Just open Blogging With Success on your mobile device and see.
24. Remove “Subscribe” word from your blog: Asking readers to “Subscribe” to your blog posts? Then consider changing the words to something like “Get updates” or “Join Us”. Copyblogger tells you why in How To Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate By 254%. And while you are at it, do not forget to get your Blogging Guides!
25. Study A Top Blog In Your Niche: Open the most popular blog in your industry and study what the owner is doing right. Write down lessons and apply to your own blog.
26. Join A Stock Image Site: Finding free images for your blog posts takes lot of time and you may not always find what you want. Consider joining a stock image site. I recommend iStockPhoto and Photodune. I have used them both.iStockPhoto has more variety, Photodune is less expensive! Even if you don’t buy anything, the free files available will help you make a good library of images.
27. Learn HTML and CSS: HTML and CSS are very easy to learn and learning them can save a lot of time. You can make minor edits yourself and save on designer costs.
28. Buy A Book About Your Niche: While free books are good, they do not always deliver the high quality and organised content. Get a good book about your niche and read it!
29. Take A Break: It is very easy to work too much and get burned out these days. Avoid this by taking a 5 minute break.
30. Move Your Blog’s Essential Files To Dropbox: You have many books, plugins and themes sitting on your hard disk. What if your hard disk crashed? Better to move them to cloud for easy backup, syncing and sharing in Dropbox.
31. Move From Feedburner to MailChimp: Feedburner is nice but it does not let you send newsletters. MailChimp gives you more control over your list, sends beautiful emails and can track them. And it’s free if your list is less than 2000 members! Sign Up for MailChimp.
32. Make A One Sentence Elevator Pitch For Your Blog: What do you answer to “What is your blog about?” Find an answer to this question.
33. Revise Grammar Rules: While most of us can write and speak easily in English, we do not know grammar that well. Go and revise rules for 5 minutes.
34. Remove a Distracting Widget: Widgets can be quite distracting. Find the one that is least useful for you and readers and remove it.
35. Work On Your Next Post’s Headline: Headline is the most important part of your post. Spend five minutes working on a better headline for your next post.
36. Delete Spam Comments: Clear the Spam comments that you have accumulated over ages. Seriously, they serve no purpose and it just takes 2 clicks to clear all of them.
37. Close Comments On Your Old Posts: You can set WordPress to close comments on old posts via Settings -> Discussion. If you are getting too much spam, this may be the best way to get rid of it.
38. Make Your Next Post Scannable: Let’s accept it, most of us do not read posts fully. And your readers are doing the same. So better make your next post scannable with proper use of headlines and bullets.
39. Make A Writing Playlist: Music can help you concentrate on writing. It will also isolate the surrounding noises. Take 5 minutes and make a writing playlist to help you concentrate.
40. Decide Where And What You Will Write: If you are randomly scattering all your content in different sections of internet, you are wasting a lot of time. Read Where Should You Put Your Content.
41. Set Up A Blogroll: You can not stay alone forever. Similarly, you also can not keep your blog isolated. You need to socialize with other bloggers. And one of the best ways to do it is by setting up a blogroll. Take 5 minutes and set up a blogroll for your blog.
42. Find Out When You Get Most Traffic: There are some days when traffic is high. Check your analytics to find this time for you and remember it. Next time, publish your important posts at that time.
43. Bookmark Related Blogs: Make a list of blogs where you comment regularly and make a similar list for guest posts. Use Diigo or similar bookmarking sites.
44. Join A Niche Social Network: The big social networks are not always the best choice to promote your blog, go and join a network that specifically caters to your niche.
45. Learn An Attention Grabbing Technique: Find a quick way to get attention of your readers, use that in your next post.

Do not just sit idle, start working!

Pick one point and do it to improve your blog.

About the Author:Hannah Cuthbertson is a technical writer at Maxtra Technologies who writes on mobile technology, app development, web app design & development and digital marketing. A leader in his own rights, her grad-friends see her as an avid researcher and a technology evangelist.

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