7 Things That Change as You Scale Your Blog

Scaling a blog from a place where your founders wrote a few posts on their view of the industry to generating 1m+ sessions per month, creating influence and awareness, and generating revenue involve several different phases of growth. Here's why:

A blog will need to mature and evolve like any company or product. Add to that the competitive and dynamic nature of organic search, social, and other distribution channels, and you have a mini-product that requires strategy, planning, and execution.

Most companies understand how to start writing content in their space and sprinkle in some keywords. When they begin to get traffic, they do more of the same — creating 8/mo instead of 4/mo and then keep working their way up to more.

But eventually, the effectiveness of that begins to fade. It used to feel like you were running up the 'up' escalator, and now it feels like you are walking up the 'down' escalator, struggling to maintain ground.

Here are 7 things that change as you scale that need to be addressed if you want to continue consistent growth:

1. Optimizing, consolidating, and pruning existing content
2. Branching out into more topic categories
3. Perfecting site structure, internal linking, and crawl optimization
4. Creating processes, templates, and planning frameworks
5. Introducing new content formats
6. Hiring different skill sets, allowing for specialization
7. Collaborating with more internal teams on content alignment

If you view your blog and overall content strategy as a mini-product that will grow and evolve over time and respect that what got you this far won't get you to your goals, you will succeed.

If you want to take shortcuts, treat it as an afterthought, or don't stay ahead of the strategy, you won't.