Last month, we gave you the 5 steps to use twitter, and the 5 steps to use facebook more effectively. This month, we are moving on to blogging and blog posts. Blogging is what you do daily – blog posts is those articles written by others. Today, we’ll start with your blog – and how to use it more effectively.

Determine to whom you are writing.

Figuring out who reads your work is almost as important as the content itself. If you don’t know the type of audience (Professionals? Tech guys? VP’s? Children?) how are you going to know the voice, tone and language to use? If you are unsure who you are writing to and you’ve already been writing awhile, the best thing you can do is ask for some participation from the audience – ask them to introduce themselves. This should give you a chance to meet your readers. If you haven’t started writing, then it is up to you to determine the audience you want to attract.

Create a blog calendar for next month.

Having at least one full month worth of blog content prepared and ready to go will help when you have those tough days. It isn’t always possible to find time to write when you want – don’t let that be an excuse. We all have extra time every once in a while (whether it is during TV time or just a slow day). When you get the content written, put it into the calendar. The more preparation you have, the better your content will be. But of course, don’t be afraid to move posts around and change your calendar if the moods suits you!

Narrow your categories to your 6-8 priorities.

Often, blogs get overwhelmed with categories. Every time there is a new post it seems a new category pops up. This can be problematic for both yourself and your readers. If you have too many categories, you can never write enough to fill them all with quality content – which means that your readers can feel like they are missing something. 6-8 categories is the average ideal. If you can get it down to that range, it will be easier to manage and keep fresh content in all categories.

Make subscribing easier and clearer.

This one is simple: if it is hard to get your content, the readers will stop reading. Make it easy, make it one or two steps max and make it obvious. Don’t make your readers hunt to subscribe.

Promote it through your social channels.

Having a blog is great, but if no one can find it, you’ll never get participation. Sharing your content through facebook, linkedin and twitter are great places to start. With both facebook and linkedin, there are ways to auto update your status with the post. That can be done once a day, and will have a great chance of getting noticed. Because twitter moves so rapidly, we recommend sharing the link to the post 3 times during the day (morning, afternoon and evening) in a solid mix with the other tweets you are sending out.

What other problems do you face with your blog?