It’s a new year and a full 12 months of opportunities are out there for you if you are a blogger. Opportunities like working with brands, increasing ad revenue, engaging more with your social followings, creating products, producing more videos, there’s a whole year of “stuff” you can focus on for growth but the first week or so should be spent on a bit of cleaning up and tasks to prep your blog for the upcoming year.
Let’s start with your blog itself, the actual nuts and bolts of it all.
- Check for broken links and fix them.
- Clean up your sidebar.
- Update your About information, including more recent photos and a headshot. Headshots are often used by agencies and freelancers when putting together pitch decks for brand partnerships, so make one available.
- Make sure your contact information is available, and make it visible in more than one place on your blog. Make it easy for anyone to contact you.
- Run any updates to plugins – and while you’re there, see which ones you barely used in 2018 and consider cleaning them up.
- Ask your ad network to make sure you’ve optimized your ad placement and follow any advice they give!
Now let’s look at all of the influencer marketing platforms and agencies you worked with during 2018 where you have some sort of profile.
- Log into each of these and make sure your numbers are updated. Check the account connections or manually enter all updated numbers for social following and blog traffic.
- Update your profile further by making adjustments to demographic information, a new headshot, bio, etc. Clean it all up.
- While you’re doing this, create a new spreadsheet and enter each of these. Have a column for the name of the agency/platform, the link for the login page, and a column for the date of when you last worked with them. Keep this updated throughout the year, adding any new ones and when you revisit at the end of the year you’ll be able to see at a glance which were most beneficial to you. You could also add a tab to this spreadsheet and track each post (blog and social) for each network to REALLY keep track of which were the most beneficial.
Dust off that media kit and give it some love too! Save it as a PDF and also keep it saved in Google drive so you can easily send it when it’s requested.
Here’s another great tip for when it’s time to deal with taxes – see that spreadsheet you made of every agency/network you worked with? You’ll likely have some idea of which ones will be sending a 1099, so track when you receive those right in this spreadsheet. This just helps you know when you have all of your paperwork and can get started on taxes and not be sitting there wondering if you have everything. It’s definitely helped me that past few years I started tracking that!
Another thing you can do to help welcome success in 2019 is to explore what Influencer Marketing Platform you may not be a part of, and at the very least, you can create a profile or send an email to see how to get added to their database. For example, do you know about ShopHer Media? It’s a good idea to secure these profiles just about anywhere you can because you can never predict which brands will utilize what services, and you want to make sure that YOU and YOUR BLOG and socials can be found!