With the beginning of the year right around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about your blog growth plan for the new year. When setting goals, having a clear action plan to reach those is so important. Today’s episode is a behind the scenes look at how I’m optimizing and growing my food blog, A Joyfully Mad Kitchen, next year.

Optimizing Content

A huge area of focus for next year will be optimizing our old content and finding areas of improvement! Here are some of the ways we’ll be tackling that project.

• Internal content audit
• Category audit/review
• Using Clariti to manage projects
• Looking at ad optimization, affiliate links, internal linking
• Updating meta descriptions for SEO
• Doing a top 20 post audit/review each quarter
• Redesigning the blog with a custom theme

Related: How to Manage Your Blog Post Projects with Asana

Creating Content

Next year a huge part of our growth plan is to create more content (without necessarily adding a ton of work or time to my plate!) Here’s what we’re focused on for this part of our plan.

• Increasing posting frequency (Increase from 1 to 2x and eventually up to 4x per week)
• Working on filling out categories 
• More round ups and SEO posts
  • Using RankIQ and Ahrefs for keyword research
• How we’re going to create more content
  • Hiring as needed to reduce bottlenecks
  • Batch recipe development and photographing days
  • Using existing images when possible for SEO/round up posts

Related: 5 SOPs Your Blog Needs ASAP

Hiring Team Members

• Adding a team member to support my blog manager (a blog optimizer!)
• An SEO expert
• Hiring our photography and recipe development as needed

Blog Promotion

• Enhancing backlink profile
  • Podcast interviews
  • Share threads with bloggers
  • Working on round ups
• Experimenting with Google web stories
• Sharing content on Pinterest again
• Start sharing content through email marketing

Tips for creating your own plan

• Start by setting your goals
• Figure out where your gaps are in capacity or skill (and hiring to fill that!)
• Create the tasks/system to make it happen

Pin for later

Come browse my Pinterest for more inspiration >>