Content is king when it comes to blogging, and any marketing professional entering the realm of content quickly realizes that creating original content is not a task for the faint-hearted. To create quality content regularly for your blogging website, you need to create a content strategy that helps you plan the content you’d need. Its pertaining purpose helps you accomplish deliverables for yourself and your team.
Creative content writing and blogging are no easy feat and require hours of planning behind them. If you run a blogging website and feel that your content team needs a direction, keep reading to find the eight steps you need to follow to create a content strategy for your blog:
Establish your target audience
Establishing your target audience is crucial for your content strategy. You need to figure out who your blog is for and where do most of your readers come from. If your blog is designed for a particular niche or a business, it would be easy for you to understand your target audience as it would equate with your potential customer.
Once you have established your target audience, you can now spend time figuring out what it is that your audience would like to read and then write accordingly. The internet today is filled with all sorts of content, and what is likely to help you stand out is understanding what your reader needs and giving it to them.
Set your goals
You can’t possibly be blogging for no reason at all – if you spend time blogging you are likely to have goals that you hope to achieve through your blog. Whether you are hoping to increase your readership to get sponsors or to increase your company sales, your goals would be an integral part of your content strategy.
Setting your goals would also allow you to understand whether or not a particular content strategy is working for you as you would be able to develop KPIs and metrics to measure your blog’s performance.
Perform keyword research
Anything related to content writing more or less always requires sound keyword research, which helps you understand the topics that your relevant audience is interested in. While keyword research is undeniably important in search engine optimization, it also plays a role in determining what you would be writing about and hence what your content calendar would be composed of. You may seek help from a professional or perform free keyword research through tools like Google’s Keyword Planner.
Creating a content calendar
Once you have identified your target audience, set your KPIs, and completed keyword research, the next ideal step is to create a content calendar. A content calendar is essentially a tool that will help you organize the ideas you have for your blog into an actionable plan. It will also help you follow a set schedule and remain consistent in your marketing approaches.
A blogging website that features planned and new content at regular intervals is likely to garner many more readers than a blogging website with no schedule and unpredictable operations. A calendar is also likely to help you accommodate all your topic ideas in a doable schedule, rather than creating an overambitious schedule that you are likely to burn out from and abandon together.
Write well-curated content
Writing well-curated blog posts should be an integral part of your content strategy. Simply writing blogs for the sake of it shouldn’t be your mission rather you should take an active role in creating blogs that are truly unique, informational, and relevant to your target audience. Every blog post written and posted through your medium should be articulate, well-researched, and accurate. Also, be sure to proofread all your content through both in-built spell checkers in word processing documents and external apps such as Grammarly.
Optimize all blogs for search engines
Search engine optimization should be a crucial aspect of your content strategy because if your target audience cannot search for them how on earth do you ever expect them to read it. To optimize your blogs for search engines, there are a few basic things you can do which include using relevant keywords in the webs page URL, including keywords in subheadings, sectioning your blogs, including keywords in image titles, and also in the alt text. You should also pay attention to achieving high authority backlinks and including internal links and meta descriptions in your blog posts.
Evaluate KPIs and improve strategy
You are bound to make mistakes in the first draft of your content strategy. However, instead of feeling disappointed, this is your chance to learn from your mistakes by evaluating your KPIs and understanding whether or not you met your goals. You can do so by using Google Analytics to understand how well your blog did or did not do by the goals you established earlier.
If you see signs of community engagement and social media shares, you might be on the right track. If not, you may have to revisit your strategy and make changes as required.
Focus on promotion
The final step in your content strategy should be the promotion of your blog. In addition to optimizing your blog for search engines, you should also focus on marketing your blogging website. You could use sponsored ads, email marketing, and public relations to promote your blogs. Another common way of promoting your blogging website is by finding relevant questions and queries on Quora and answering them while linking your blog below for further reading.
You should also consider guest posting on other websites and in a way promote your blog by linking to it. If you have any social media channels, be sure to insert a “link in bio” in your profile’s description which links to your blog while also creating a social media post for the same. You could also consider converting your blog post into a series of social media posts for better reach.
The bottom line
Blogging can feel like a cumbersome task if you aren’t getting the results you expected and aren’t fulfilling your expected target reach. Blogging often requires you to assess the quality of your content and revisit content terms to understand what is or is not contributing to your blog’s success. A well-written content strategy would be able to assist you in terms of understanding and implementing your goals, and pivoting as and when needed.
