What follows is my current list of daily blogging priorities. This doesn’t take into account large-scale, ongoing projects such as blog redesigns, new site planning, and other longer term activities, but constitutes what I seek to achieve each day, based on my current situation.

1. Find and produce content

• Ensure all primary news feeds are performing and delivering via email / RSS / bookmarks.
• Flag and action incoming email particularly from trusted contacts e.g. PR contacts, other bloggers in niche.
• Write content:
  * Succinct: gets to the point, no waffle.
  * Accurate: all key facts stated, hearsay stated as such, opinions properly attributed.
  * Timely: break important news ASAP.
  * Informative: gives your readership what it needs to know, no less.
  * Entertaining: I’m blogging, not writing a research paper
• Ensure all external daily posting quotas are met – absolutely no question.
• Strive to meet all internal posting quotas / targets – these could slip if necessary.

2. Site maintenance

• Handle comment and trackback spam as efficiently as possible (preferably with advanced automated blog tools such as Akismet and Spam Karma)
• Read and respond to legitimate commenters as necessary.
• Check statistics, particularly (for maintenace) broken pages (404 errors), forbidden access (403 errors) and server errors (500 errors)

3. Handle email

• Delete stray spam not handled by your automated systems on contact.
• Maintain email filters, smart folders, adding new ones as necessary to keep email well filed and easy to find.
• Prioritise mail to respond to and flag.
• Delete or archive old subscribed content that you’re sure is not required any more.
• Ensure email is fully indexed and keyword searchable, for finding that email in a hurry (there’ll always be a time)

4. Comment

• Provide genuine commentary on other blogs, both within and without your niche areas, entering the most appropriate URL (if allowed).

5. Network: maintain and nurture contacts

• Maintain a good electronic and/or paper contacts list: eg PR firms and people, news contacts, company insider contacts, bloggers. Record as much information as is pertinent (email, name, address, cell phone, land phone, fax)
• Make your contact book keyword rich, and create smart folders, so that you can call up “all PR contacts” or “people who work at [company]” with just a few clicks or keystrokes

6. Check earnings

• Believe it or not this is actually quite low down on my list of priorities at present. Checking earnings detracts from everything else, but of course it’s important to check out what’s happening at least once a day – trends, problems, payments.
• I don’t need to check my ‘static earnings’ (ie that which I receive from Shiny once a month) – that just comes into my bank account. What I do need to check is AdSense, Chitika, etc.

I won’t necessarily do every step every day (for example, I don’t always comment on blogs daily) but I will aim to make these tasks a regular and habitual part of my blogging routine.