If you currently run a blog, you’ve got a lot to keep an eye out for. You need to be sure you’re bringing in a healthy amount of traffic day by day, and you need to be sure the content you’re posting is some quality stuff. More than that, you need to keep an eye on your social media presence, to make sure you’re interacting with your fans and posting at the right times of the day, as well as make sure everything is OK on the back end of things too.
But most of all, you need to keep an eye out for the warning signs. When something goes wrong, and quite a few things can and will go wrong, you need to be sure you’re the first to spot them. Your blog can go through a lot whilst it’s live online, and you need to be able to keep up with it.
So, without further ado, here are a couple of issues you might want to keep an eye out for, more than any other. They have some rather severe warning signs, so hopefully, you won’t see them crop up out of nowhere!
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A Low Reader Retention
You’re crafting out some catchy titles, but is the ensuing content good enough to match? If you can’t keep people reading your content for any longer than a minute, when you’ve got a 5 minute post for them to get through, there’s a chance you’re simply not grabbing them with what you say. And if you have a low reader retention, and your analytics are really letting you know about it, all that traffic being driven to your blog might just end up meaning nothing in the long run!
More than that, if you’re not writing quality content, and you’re not posting it on a regular basis, you’ll have no chance of building a proper SEO campaign. People aren’t consuming your content, and they’re not clicking on your links either – if you want to be linked back and forth to, and if you want to be ranked at the top of Google, you might be in need of a change of tone and style.
Don’t worry, it’s easier to do this than you might first think. Work out what isn’t working; maybe your formatting needs changing, maybe you need more breaks in your paragraphs, maybe your images aren’t quite gripping enough, etc. Try out a few different writing styles here and there, and see what people respond to the most. If you find something that people make it all the way to the end of a post with, you might want to stick with that style for the time being. Let yourself get comfortable with it.
An Alert From Google
Google can tell us a lot. From the price of bananas in Zimbabwe to the current value of the pound coin, from the best package deals for a trip to the Azores to the top 10 children’s TV characters of the 1990s, a single search term can ping back billions of results for you to look into. And if you search for your blog, and a Google alert pops up to tell you it’s been flagged as a malicious or malware filled site, there’s a chance you’ve been hacked.
You need to be sure that the network you’re operating on, and all the devices connected up to it, are protected. Your smartphone, your laptop, your tablet, your main PC etc., all need to be checked on and updated on a regular basis, to ensure nothing slips through the cracks due to simple tardiness.
You might need to invest in some extraneous software here; you can’t keep a reminder on everything, after all. Electric offers protection from today’s cyber security threats, and a simple way to keep on track with where your devices are, how they’re being used, and whether or not they’re in need of attention.
What Warning Signs Are You on the Lookout For?
There are a lot of warning signs that your blog can flag up to you. It’s your own little part of the internet, after all, and you should know it like the back of your hand!
If you check your analytics, and you don’t like what you see, it might be time to make changes. And if there’s ever a chance that someone has worked their way inside your blog, it’s time to get serious about security. Take control of your blog!
