Quality Control on Your Blog
With each post that you create, you can either push yourself to put out more posts, or a lower number of posts, but with increasing quality. While the easy-to-write posts generally drive traffic if you are able to be ahead of the curve with news stories, they won’t be successful in the long-term. They’ll quickly lose position in search engines, as the post(s) will be deemed as “unpopular” and thus, no return will be given for the time that you put into writing the post.
While it can be easier to write five, two hundred word posts, a single one thousand word post that could be more inspiration to other people than these individual posts that do little other than reiterate facts that others may already know or have little true relevancy to your blog.
Setting up a “quality control” standard for your blog can be the basis for which all posts can be written against. From this, you’ll be able to maintain a schedule of posting high quality posts that readers want to read.
Creating Your Set of Quality Standards
The basis of starting a process of quality control is to ensure that all readers (and yourself) feel satisfied with the work that you are producing. You don’t want to start your blog with content that is top notch only to face a steady decrease in the quality of content, and all the known results.
Definition according to the Small Business Dictionary:
“The process of making sure that products or services are made to consistently high standards.”
Using the basis of this definition, you won’t hesitate to create content that exceeds what you’ve previously posted. After all, you can’t reverse previous events without altering what happens in the future – either by improving, or in some cases, appologizing for the mishaps that you made.
Main Points to Include in Your Checklist:
Foundations for creating your “quality standards” checklist are included below. Adapt it to suit the purpose/goals/type of blog you maintain.
- What are my main goals for each individual post – length, content; traffic and subscriber/networking levels that should be attained as each is released?
- Is the content up to my personal standards – can I (or readers) easily spot common grammatical errors (their vs. there), spelling mistakes, etc. Make sure all words in the title are spelled correctly.
- Can I improve the title of the post using “social bookmarking” and highly influenceable keywords? Or will I keep it a boring title, likely to be passed on as a post not worth reading?
- Should images and other graphics/videos be included to complement the purpose of the post — more importantly, are the ones that I have added relevant to the meaning of the post?
- Do I invite readers to subscribe, visit other posts/pages of my site, and is the post community oriented, inviting others to comment and share the content with others?
Before publishing each post, make sure that it contains all the content that you wanted it to, doesn’t contain grammatical or spelling errors, and is relevant to your blog. The quality standards you set should be a “virtual” checklist of items that you must meet before the post is sent out to the general public through your RSS feed and website.
And the main thing is that many people forget: Every day is unique. You can’t replicate any single day with the same blog. Once you start a blog, you have Day 1, Day 2, and so on – days that you will never get back – days that go by without creating content for the world to read. Unless you challenge yourself to be the best blogger that you can be, people won’t join the bandwagon, continue visiting your blog, and subscribe upon reading the content that meets their high expectations.
