Contributed by: Roger C. Parker

Blog marketing success involves blog content management. Management implies that you not only plan your blog posts, but that you manage—or protect—them so that they will be available for later use.

Blog content management becomes necessary when you view yourself as a proactive—as opposed to reactive—blogger.

Proactive versus reactive bloggers

Most bloggers are reactive. Most of a reactive blogger’s posts are in response to topics currently in the news, or currently being addressed by popular and influential bloggers in their field. Accordingly, their messages follow the trends; ultimately, they respond, rather than originate ideas and topics.

Proactive bloggers, however, work from a plan and view each post as an important part of both the personal or corporate brand they’re creating. They view each blog post as part of an on-going program of content development and prospect education. Accordingly, proactive bloggers view each post as a reusable and expandable “nugget of information” that can be used in multiple marketing and product applications.

The following addresses the two key elements in managing a proactive blog content program.

1. Immediate offline back-up

It scares me whenever I encounter individuals who do not have secure back-up copies of each of their blog posts on their own computers. Although severs don’t go down that often, and blogging software back-up utilities are available, I just don’t trust online backups as much as blog posts saved as files on my own hard drive.

It scares me because I can identify with individuals who don’t have every blog post backed-up on their computers! Most of the time, I also find it much easier, and more fun, to write my blog posts in WordPress, and save them as drafts so I can immediately preview what they’re going to look like.

Working in WordPress is fun because I enjoy the positive feedback of seeing formatted text, i.e., subheads and quotes, as well as the way that the formatted text looks next to adjacent visuals. I can do a better job of gauging paragraph length and line breaks when I can view the formatted text.

Yet, once I finish writing a post in WordPress, I tend to put off backing up the post in an offline word-processed file “until later”….and….we all know that “until later” usually translates to “Oops, I forgot!”

File management details

Here are my recommendations for backing-up your blog posts on your computer:

• Separate folder. I encourage bloggers to create a separate, easily-located, folder on their hard drive called “Blog Post Archives,” or something equally obvious.
• Immediate back-up. Immediately after creating a new blog post in WordPress, the title and full text of the blog should be copied and pasted to a separate Microsoft Word file in the Blog Post Archives. Each blog post should be saved as a separate word-processed file.
• File identification. Pay particular attention to the filenames you use to save each blog post. Often, blog post titles are too long to make good filenames. Try to include the topic and main idea of each post in the first few words of the filename.

When appropriate, create separate sub-folders inside your Blog Post Archives folder for the different categories of blog posts. This will help you organize your Blog Post Archives by topic, making it easier to locate ideas at a later date.

Printing and backing-up your blog post archives

One of benefits of saving all of your blog posts in a single folder is that it will be easy to locate and back-up all of your blog posts at once.

With all of your blog posts archived in one folder, you can easily drag the folder to an external hard-drive, or online back-up service. You can also easily Zip (or compress) the folder and FTP it to a secure location on another one of your websites.

In addition to backing-up your blog posts in a single location on your hard drive, I also encourage you to print-out each of your blog posts yoru website.

• Print immediately. Immediately print our each post. Don’t get behind in this. It’s harder to print 5, 10, or 15 blog posts than it is to print one at a time as they are created.
• 3-hole paper. Print each blog post on 3-hole paper, so that you can save your printouts in a 3-ring binder. Don’t put
• Use tabbed dividers to organize your binders. Use the tabbed dividers to organize your printouts into the appropriate post categories. This requires a little extra care in assigning blog posts to specific categories. Likewise, avoid the temptation to unnecessarily bulk-up your 3-ring binder with duplicate print-outs of blog posts that references multiple categories.

2. Centralized accessibility

Having printed and saved back-ups of your blog posts, all that remains is to devise a system of easily locating each of your blog posts.

Here’s the system that I now use: using Mindjet’s MindManager, I have created a mindmap that I use as a “dashboard” to visually display the various blogs I write for, and the topics that I have completed for each one.

Mind maps excel in displaying complex information. You can expand each topic on a mind map to show as much detail as possible associated with the topic, or collapse each topic to just show the titles of the different blogs where posts appear. Mindmapping software programs also include a “Find” command that allows you to search for filenames containing the key ideas and words you’re looking for.

Most important, mind map topics can be linked to either files on your hard drive, or the unique URL of each blog post. This permits me to instantly access my original blog posts, making it easy to copy and paste the blog post into longer topics like articles and newsletters, or shorter topics like tips and tip sheets (i.e., compilations of tips).

Other access options

You don’t have to use a mind map, of course, to create a system for locating previous blog posts. Microsoft Word’s Table feature, for example, is very powerful. It’s extensive sorting feature permits you to search and sort on 3 variables at a time.

Many bloggers use spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel to track their blog posts.

Conclusion

As the above shows, planning and writing blog posts is only the beginning. To take full advantage of the personal content equity you build up each time you post a new topic to your blog, you have to set up a content management system.

Once you do, like all other systems, your blog content management system becomes a part of your daily or weekly routine, taking just a few moments after you create each new blog post.

I’ve known individuals with two years of wonderful content whose hosts corrupted their blogs and only offer a couple of months of free hosting to make up for it. (At times like that, don’t you just wish you had read the small print?)

Bad things do happen to good people who don’t religiously back up their blog posts on their own computers!

Author bio

Roger C. Parker is the 32 Million Dollar Author, writer’s coach, and e-course developer. Get his free, 14-page, Write Your Way to Success white paper at Published & Profitable.