I honestly cannot believe we are almost to 2017. 2016 just flew by and although it was one amazing year, it was truly one of the busiest years of my life. With wedding planning, grad school, my lifestyle blog, my full time job and starting Confetti Social – I had a completely full plate. I anticipate 2017 being fairly busy as well, but I’ll be full time with this little business of mine instead of trying to manage both Confetti Social and my full time job so that will free up some time that I definitely didn’t have last year. There is so much to do to prepare your blog for the new year so I’m going to help you get a head start by offering a few key suggestions on what to do before 2017 even arrives.

Prepare Your Blog for the New Year

Craft a plan

One of the most important steps to preparing for the new year is to create a plan. This doesn’t have to be an extremely formal business plan – it can just be something that simply outlines your goals and objectives for the new year. I will be sharing some of my goals for my business this year on the blog so stay tuned for those in the very near future if you like that kind of thing.

Create measurable goals

You’re going to want to implement measurable goals when you’re creating your plan. Simply saying “earn more money from my blog this year” is not going to do you any good because there is a huge difference between earning 5 dollars and 5000 dollars in a calendar year. Setting an actual dollar amount that you want to achieve will help you reach your goals and strive to work even harder to meet them. You can also set goals about increasing email subscribers, increasing your rates for your services or products, and more.

Start planning content

Although it would be a good idea to start batch writing content for next year, you at least need to have it planned out in advance. I use Google Calendar to plan out my content calendar for the upcoming months so that I know exactly what I’m going to write about each week and don’t have to scramble to figure out what to write about.

Pro tip: Try to plan out your content in terms of quarters. By the time January rolls around, I will have all of Q1s content planned out and will follow that schedule throughout the year so it doesn’t get too hectic. 

Clean up your website

At the end of the year, your website probably needs a little TLC, am I right? Clean up your sidebar, analyze your about and contact pages and see if they need any sprucing up, go back and update old blog posts, etc. Maybe you have changed your branding over the year and need to update your graphics to the new branding as well. I like to do a website clean up every six months to make sure that everything is still relevant and true.

Clean out your inbox

I like to start the New Year without a thousand unread emails looming over my head. Take the time to go through your emails and unsubscribe to those that you haven’t opened in forever and try to get to inbox zero so that you can start the New Year fresh – inbox and all.

[bctt tweet=”Preparing your blog/biz for the new year is a MUST. Is your blog/biz ready for 2017?” username=”confettisocial”]

Your Turn:

What have you done to prepare your blog for the new year? If you haven’t done anything yet, what do you plan to do if anything? Please feel free to let me know down in the comments.