Business Blogging: 5 Risks Which Needs Mitigation on Your Blog

Business Blogging: 5 Risks Which Needs Mitigation on Your Blog

Business blogging – Are you the one who does a risk analysis often on your blog? Or are you one of those who considers that there is not much risk in business blogging?

What is a “risk“? According to BusinessDictionary

A probability or threat of a damage, injury, liability, loss, or other negative occurrence that is caused by external or internal vulnerabilities, and that may be neutralized through preemptive action.

There can be many classifications for the risk but here are the 5 types, which we need to look and try to mitigate for our business blogging.

Business blogging always includes financial risk

Each blog requires some finance to run, it can be as little as zero (from free blogging platform) to some dollars per month. But what happens if you are not able to meet those expenses?

This is a risk which is low at the start, as there are fewer expenses. But it has a potential to grow with the growth of a new blog.

As you grow you try to move towards dedicated servers from shared hosting, look for redesigning blogs, start developing your products etc. All these are expenses for your blog and if your earnings are not able to match those then you are at risk.

Many bloggers do not manage their financials and when it’s time to create their own product they realize that they are short of money.

The key is to start managing financials from start of the blog.

No Business should be run in LOSS. Even if you are doing blogging for fun you need to make sure that you are getting your costs from the blog.

You don’t need something professional for this, it can be a simple excel sheet where you just note down your earnings and expenses to check how much is your profit. You need to keep a check and make sure you run your blog in profit.

Process risk

This kind of risk includes what process you use to drive traffic back to your blog or the process to update your blog, process to schedule your posts, etc.

Traffic sources

How do you get most of your website traffic? Are you totally dependent on Google to give you traffic or is it more of a referral traffic. This analysis is really important, if you depend only on one source then it’s a risk, or if only one source is growing then also it is a risk.

You need to make sure that you have a good mix of sources and all of them are growing. Many times we just go ahead and try to improve our rankings in the SERPs and we forget that there are other ways to generate traffic.

Google has just changed the way it was generating results for the first page. They started including social recommendations and if you were ranking lower on SERPs you might have already felt the impact.

Business blogging – Update frequency

How frequently you update your blog? Do you schedule your post or write them on the go?

If you write your post on the go than you are running on high risk, as if you don’t get time or if you get stuck in some other task then your blog will suffer. You should be scheduling it at least two weeks in advance to get some reserve time.

Along with the blog updation schedule, you should have a blog promotion plan. You should promote your each post with a proper schedule. I always make sure that my each post gets proper attention in terms of initial number of comments links. I also sometimes do guest posting to promote that post.

I prefer schedule posting as it will give a way to systematic promotion plan. You can have your schedule set up as such that you will have proper time to promote that post.

Time risk

This is not much of risk in blogging as you can have your own time, but if you are working with a lethargic mindset then you will not be pushing for results. You need to set yourself some targets and timeline to complete those.

Once you have targets and timeline, you need to watch. Targets can be small with small timelines like:

  • Get 100 more email subscribers in next 1 month
  • Write 5 guest posts in next one 1 month
  • Or they can be big with much bigger timelines. Once these are finalized you need to make sure you are following the timelines.
It is really important to keep track of the progress against each target, this will help in achieve those in timely manner.

Human risk

If you are the only one who is updating your blog, then you are an risk to your business. It includes your critical employee also.

You need to make sure that your blog is not dependent on one person. You should have some backup for you or your employees.

It can be your friend or somebody whom you trust, that person has to be aware about your blog updating process and the quality of content you publish.

Physical Risk

This includes damages caused to the physical resources such as your laptop, servers, hard drives etc. You need to be ready for these events.

Last time when I wrote on Problogger on what you can take from your worst day, I mentioned that we need to be ready. We should have a backup of our blog and that backup should be stored properly.

There is no use of a backup if you can’t access it when required. I always prefer 3 copies of my blog’s backup and always keep them on offline (USB backup Drive) and Online (Dropbox) along with my hosting provider. This way I can access them any time and any place.

Is there any other risk which you try to mitigate?

Write a Comment