From day one, we have had some sort of blogging strategy that directed our energy, gave us measurable goals to achieve, and know where adjustments are needed. With a year long 2011 plan, we reevaluated it every quarter to see if changes needed to be made and an adjusted vision for the site would come about. The goals of the blog in the fourth quarter did resemble a bit of what it started out at the beginning of the year, but we had differences.

Over the course of this year, we hope to follow a model established by Kolby Milton on his site to publicly review every month how the goals are going. Depending on the success and failures of these goals, we may have to make changes at the quarterly intervals and would love your input as we go along in this process.

Here are our goals for the year and a review of how we did this month.

• Use Category Tagging In The Posts
  We updated our category list last month for a reason. Linking within your website promotes navigation within yourself for users and thus more content for the viewer that they seek as well as more views for your website. If you were dumb like us last year and did not do this, make the change in 2012. Every category that is mentioned in a post will be linked from here on out.
  1. January – Success. This has been a relatively easy goal to implement and an easy addition to have when reviewing guest posts. We did find that clustering tags were less effective than parsings them throughout the whole article.
• Add A Portfolio Piece Once A Week
  One of the most exciting changes for us in 2011 was the addition of the portfolio that offers free downloads for you and automatically posts a blog article when uploaded. The hope is to not only fill out the portfolio with our work, but point you to it from the blog.
  1. January – Success. This also is pretty easy because we have a 12 week video series and so have lots to add. There were a couple of bugs with our custom plugin, but it looks like it is working well.
• Two Posts Everyday
  We hope to have two posts everyday. One post based on youth ministry and the other on technology. Anything more will be too much unless it is a simple quote post or submission to the portfolio.
  1. January – Success. For one week, we did deviate from this plan and it looks like we will deviate it again in February, but the purpose for it has been good.
• Youth Ministry Games
  We shared that we will be doing a project with Youth Ministry Games without giving too many details. Honestly, it is because we have nothing to show you. Simply put, we want to have a youth ministry database that is searchable, browse-able, submittable, and community-based with a possible gaming integration. We will be sharing logo and web designs by February, requesting beta testers by May, and by September display a finished product.
  1. January – Success. The logos have been shared and production of the search engine begun. More soon!
• Comment On Others
  To expect something from others that you are not willing to do yourself is both arrogant and stupid. We want commenters and so we will be commenting on your site as well.
  1. January – Success. We are visiting other sites regularly, but need to begin branching out to new sites.
• VLogs and Interviews
  We love the video medium. It’s easy to produce and appeals to many people more than just text. We will try to produce at least two vlogs a week, one for our site and another for collaborating websites.
1. January – Fail. This is the one thing we have not done. Sure, we hit ours every week, but have not done any for other websites. Need to work on how to do guest VLogs better.

What is your blogging strategy?