Starting today and going until next Wednesday, I’m going to start a new feature where I’ll share my best ideas to help you improve your blog. The idea is simple: if you have a blog and take these ideas into reality with your own blog, I can almost guarantee an improvement in readership.

#1: The Point System

Having a personal point system is a great way to improve your blog’s traffic and readership. There are many different ways to set up your own point system, but the best way to do it, I think is like this:

• Get a piece of paper and a pen. Have them by your side at all times (just leave it on your desk).
• Everytime you do something worth points, write down how many points you got, what you did, in an ordered list/table style setup.
• The next morning, record the previous day’s traffic and RSS readers (as tracked by Feedburner) and their respective changes.
• Keep the totals for each day, and then if you want you can track weeks and months too.

My personal point system works like this:

10 points for writing a blog post
6 points for emailing a reader
4 points for commenting on another blog
4 points for replying to a reader’s email
1 point for commenting on my own blog
1 point for a (relevant) forum post

Simple enough, but your points might be different. It all depends on what you want to do. For me, I want to write more comments on other blogs while still posting, so my point values reflect that. You can add things, change things or whatever to suit your blog.

I try each day to get a minimum of 30 points. I could post and write 5 comments for 30 points, or any other combination of things. If you don’t make it, don’t worry. You can always add them on to the next day or spread them out through the week.

If you’re already working to a point system, I’d like to hear how it has been going for you and what values you use. If not, this is the simplest thing that can produce huge results if you just try it.  I’m going to try and have these posts out at 11AM EST for the week so it’s early enough for you to participate the same day and late enough for me to sleep a little