Guerrilla Blogging: Beginners Blog Battle Plan

Objectives, Strategies and Tactics

Did your eyes just glaze over? If they did don’t worry about it, for a long time I felt like a “deer in headlights” when someone talked to me about Objectives, Strategies and Tactics.

Did you know a military battle and your blog have many similarities? That’s right! Of course you are not diving for cover from sniper fire, but if you want to increase traffic and readership you need to understand what makes them similar.

Fact: Leaders in the military define Objectives, Strategies and Tactics before, during and after real battle scenarios.

Going To Battle

Many of you have served in the military and I would presonally like to thank you for doing so. For the rest of us who have not had the experience, let’s imagine we are just out of boot camp, head shaved and primed for battle.

You are standing in formation when you hear the command “Attention! General on deck!” You see before you a man with more awards pinned to his chest than you have ever seen before. Decorated, proven and respected his first words to you are “We will win this battle!” What he just told you is the Objective, in simpler terms “win the battle”.

As he continues he says, “You will be in one of three groups who will shutdown enemy communications, provide distraction and flank the enemy.” Now what we just heard are the Strategies. Of all the offensive strategies in the military arsenal the General has chosen these three to win the battle.

You hear your name called out and your group assignement. As you huddle in the group you are explained the details of your mission. You are now hearing the overal Tactic along with broken down tasks. Everyone has a task and each must be completed without fail.

Each task is important to the success of the Tactic. Each Tactic is important to the success of the Strategy. Finally each Strategy is important to complete the ultimate Objective.

Guerrilla Blogging

Now lets apply the battle scenario above to your blog. We have already established our Objective which was to Increase Traffic and Readership. Most of us do not have unlimited resources and an army of people at our disposal, so lets make a short term Objective for a beginner blogger:

Increase Traffic to 100 visitors a day

We are going to add one extra element to our Objective and that is a hard date:

Objective achieved by when: In 30 days from today – September 13th, 2009

Did you feel your heart squeeze when you had to pick a date? That’s a normal feeling because now you have a finite amount of time to achieve your Objective. This is important because it defines what strategies you need to use.

Sustained traffic like 100 visitors per day requires a Strategy that is a bit more basic. Everyone starts at zero and increasing traffic requires people to know you exist and liking what you write about. Keeping it simple here are a couple of Strategies:

Blogging
Blog Commenting

Seems simple so far right? Just like the General in our story above there are tons of Strategies that can be used. Being a smart General is knowing what Strategies fit the time frame, resources at hand and will lead to achieving the Objective most efficiently.

Lets break down the two Strategies into several real Tactics you can use to reach the Objective.

Blogging:
- Write a weekly series on your blog
- Write a guide
- Write several How To or DIY articles
- Publish new articles no less than 3 times a week
- Review products or services

Blog Commenting:
- Find and build a list of related blogs to comment on
- Comment on no less than 10 blogs per day
- Write great comments instead of one liners
- Setup gravatar to show logo on comments
- Engage in conversation via comments

Now you are ready for battle! You have an Objective with time frame, Strategies that have been used with great success by others and Tactics to keep you focused on what you have to do. Using this framework like the General, you can now create new Objectives with corresponding Strategies and Tactics as the needs of your site change.

Final Thoughts

Knowing what Strategies to use and developing new Tactics comes with time. The General didn’t get his rank and respect by reading books, at one point he was in the trenches. Start out simple and measure your results, be honest with where you are at and what you can accomplish in the time defined in your Objective.

Many of you have already reached or far surpassed the 100 visitor per day mark. In the spirit of Soxializing and helping new bloggers, what Strategies/Tactics worked for you?

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