Having a plan of action when writing your blog is what makes good blogs stand out from the truly great ones. According to Content Marketing Institute, 60% of businesses with a strategy are effective, as opposed to only 32% with a verbal strategy.
Writing a plan of action is vital to improve your chances of success as well as saving your hours of wasted time potentially writing about the wrong subjects, people, or trends. It will also help drive traffic to your website and improve your SEO.
So how do you create the perfect plan for you? It’s essential to start with the basics.
STEP 1 – Goal setting
This is where you sit down and decide what it is you want your blog to actually do. Having a clear, defined goal will help you keep in mind WHY you’re doing it. Sure, people may know WHAT you do – but the why is just as important. Do you want more traffic to your website? More sales? To educate people on what you do? Build your brand?
Once you’ve figured this out, these targets will be your main priority. Make sure to be specific – include timeframes, costs, percentages etc. So for example, if your goal is to increase traffic, define your goal to something like “my goal is to increase traffic to the website by 10% in 2 months”.
STEP 2 – Do some research
You now need to figure out what kind of content you need in order to fulfil the goals. Performing some market research is vital – you need to know what your audience is interested in. Figure out what they like to do, where they go, what they read. You need to understand what your audience is going to read. Imagine their lives; what do they hate about their current work or home situation? What would they find useful, interesting, or helpful? Do they use Facebook, or are they more Instagram-based?
You might know your customer's demographics (who they are), but what do you know about their psychographics (why they buy)? Use surveys and interviews to gather as much information as you can. Your primary objectives here are to find out what your readers are trying to achieve, what’s preventing them from doing it currently, and what’s going to happen if they don’t achieve it. Producing a solution to the problems you’ve found is the key to great content.
STEP 3 – Come up with content ideas & keywords
This is where you need to sit down and have a good think about SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. It’s not as difficult as you’ve possibly been told – you just need to think about the kinds of words you want to be associated with that have a high search volume, but not too much competition.
You then need to write great content with these keywords included. Use your chosen word in the title, body, header and image alt text for best results. DON’T overdo it and don’t try to ‘fake’ your SEO by writing the word over and over and making the text white to hide in the background. This might alert Google you’re up to something sneaky, which could result in penalties.
You then need to work on getting backlinks (incoming links to a webpage) to your newly written article with your main keywords as the ‘anchor text’ – for example, if your blog is about customer optimisation, you need the link to your site to be related with the text “customer optimisation”.
Other things to think about are page loading speeds, excellent accompanying images, and getting the article shares. All these things will help get more time spent on your page, which will help get your article to Google’s first page.
STEP 4 – Get scheduling
Arranging for your blog posts to be shared on time is important to keep things timely and efficient. If you work with a team, having a calendar will ensure you all know who is up to what, what’s due when, and when you can expect things to be posted. This also means you can stay on top of any seasonal or trend-affected blog posts, so they are posted are their most effective time.
STEP 5 – Assemble your content
Ensuring your blog is written well is an obvious step, but what about images? High-quality, relevant images will ensure readers stay put on your page for longer, as well as summarising what the content is about.
At this stage, you also need to be checking all grammar, spelling and possible mistakes in your writing. Nothing screams unprofessional more than a blog post littered with mistakes!
And that’s it! You’re now ready to go ahead and plan your very own blogging strategy. Good luck!
Comments