How to Create a Blog Content Strategy – What 4 Years of Experience Have Taught Me

A written blog content strategy separates the good blogs from the really great ones.

Basically, you double your chances of success with a written blog strategy. According to Content Marketing Institute, 60% of companies with a written content strategy are effective compared to just 32% of those with a purely verbal content strategy.

Reading: How to create a blog content strategy

(Chart from Visualizer Lite.)

I’ve been blogging since 2013 professional, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that a blog content strategy is a necessity if you want to see real results.

Having a written plan not only increases your chances of success, it saves you Hours of time wasted using the wrong promotional strategies, writing about the wrong topics, and working with the wrong influencers.

Are you ready to save time, get more traffic to generate and more successful blogging to s marry? Then read on! Here are the five steps to a great blog content strategy:

Five steps to creating a blog content strategy

This guide is broken down into five steps:

1. Define your goals.
2. Perform market research.
3. Think about topic ideas and keywords you want to target.
4. Create a content calendar.
5. Create amazing content.

Brief introduction: A good blog content strategy should answer three questions:

• Why do we create content in the first place?
• What content do we need?
• How do we get this content to achieve our goals?

Let’s start with why.

Step 1: Define your goals.

If you don’t take anything further from this article, take the goal setting with you. A clearly defined goal will prepare you to see through all the other steps, all the hours of writing, and any obstacles that will come up.

Your goal is your why and the stronger it is, the more successful you will be.

Just check out Simon Sinek’s TED talk on the power of “why”. It’s 20 minutes of pure gold (seriously, watch it) on why we need to lead from one place, “why” we do something, not how we do it or what we do. His chart looks like this:

So how do you define your why…your blog goal? Answer these questions. Do you want…

• Driving walk-in customers to your shop or office?
• Increase sales or generate leads?
• You explain this to prospects and customers do?
• Keep your customers up to date on what’s going on in your business?
• Attract prospects from outside your region, e.g. B. Overseas customers?
• Build a brand?

Choose no more than two or three of these goals for your blog content strategy. Any more and your blog will become unfocused and not all succeed.

For example, I have a blog for my freelance work. My primary goal is to generate leads for my services, with secondary goals of educating potential clients about my work and building a brand around my name.

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Be specific with your goals. Simply saying “get more traffic” is not enough. You need to specify how much traffic you want and in what time frame. A better goal would be “Increase sales by 15% in three months.” Very specific.

Once you have your why, it’s time to figure out what type of content you need. To do this, you need to go through the following:

Step 2: Do some target market research.

Let me ask you something; Have you ever showered and just couldn’t get the water to the right temperature? It was lukewarm, so you just barely turned it and it was piping hot?

While it’s frustrating, it shows you how a very small amount of effort can result in that something goes from lukewarm to hot. You’ve heard this before – it’s called going the extra mile.

This step is that tiny inch of tweaking that will take your blog from mediocre to great.

So, how do you conduct targeted market research?

First, ask yourself a few good questions:

• Where does my audience come from hanging out online? (Specific blogs, social media platforms, forums, Facebook groups, etc.)
• What is your biggest criticism of the work? strong> (Maybe they hate their commute, or their boss, or they’re bored, or they don’t get enough traffic on their website.)
• What type of content or articles do they prefer to read? (Check out your Google Analytics for your blog if you have one. Which posts were the best? You can also use BuzzSumo to see which articles your competitors are sharing the most.)

To give you more clarity, I tracked Brad Smith, the content expert behind Codeless asked his thoughts on target market research. Here’s his advice:

There you have it – the secret is to figure out the underlying motivations of your target readers and then help them achieve those goals.

Once you have an idea of ​​who you are writing for, the next step is:

Step 3: Brainstorm topic ideas and keywords you want to target.

Let’s start with keywords:

Keywords are the be-all and end-all of an effective blog content strategy. Without them, you will find it difficult to rank well in the search engines. Without a search engine ranking, you’ll have an even harder time getting a lot of consistent traffic.

Despite the information overload from supposed “SEO experts”, keyword research and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not too difficult.

Let me break it down for you in three easy steps:

1. Find some keywords you want to rank for have high search volume and little competition.
2. Write stunning blog content that includes your most important keywords in the title, body, headings, and image alt text (but don’t overdo it 3-7 times in an article is enough, depending on length).
3. Work on getting backlinks to this article with your main keywords as anchor text (i.e. if your main keyword is “marketing strategies”). , you want the link to your website to be associated with the text “Marketing Strategies”). Again, be careful not to overdo it. Too many optimized anchors could trigger Google in a wrong way.

Of course there are many other complications like page load speed, time spent on the page and (at least for Bing) the number of shares, which the item received. But if you can do the three things above, you’re well on your way to the first page of Google.

Still, you don’t have to base all of your topics on keyword research. I asked Cara Hogan, a content strategist and consultant, how she comes up with themes. Here’s what she said:

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I didn’t let her leave it at that. Instead, I pushed for an example. Here’s what she told me:

The diner? Always try to target keywords, but don’t let that stop you from writing about a great topic.

Step 4: Create a blog content calendar.

A content calendar keeps you in the loop and creates a system to ensure your content is always top quality and published on time. The best calendars also have social sharing and email marketing information built in to keep things organized and easy.

To explain the importance of this step and how it affects your overall blog content strategy, I asked Cameron Conaway, investigative journalist and content marketing manager at Klipfolio, his thoughts on creating a content calendar. Here’s what he told me:

To help you understand the whole “yo editor” thing, here’s what your spreadsheet looks like in Airtable:

You can too Use a free tool like Trello or Google Calendar to create your blog content calendar, but if you’re looking for a fully dedicated calendar with additional features to help you grow your blog, a tool like CoSchedule might be more helpful.

The choice is yours, though. For example, here at Themeisle we’ve been using Trello quite successfully since the blog was born. Our motherboard:

Step 5: Create amazing content

You’ve got your keywords, you’ve created a content calendar, you know who you’re writing for. Now it’s time to actually create your content.

I say create, not write, because great content isn’t just written — it’s assembled.

An amazing content needs to be…

• Well-written (which means using correct spelling and grammar and not using unnecessarily complex language or terminology. You can also use other free grammar checking tools. )
• Researched (i.e. uses statistics, case studies and examples to show you’ve done your homework.)
• Media rich (i.e. lots of high quality and highly relevant images).
• Formatted for scanning (i.e. use lots of headings, subheadings, bulleted lists, block quotes, bold and italics)

Pro tip:

strong> You can get high quality stock images for free from MyStock.Photos or even create your own images using tools like Canva and others.

Conclusion

While it may be tempting to get started with your blog posts As they come to mind, having a blog content strategy written can give you hours of headaches. Plus, you’ll see a lot more success.

It only takes a few hours to put together a great blog content strategy. As the old saying goes, if you have four hours to chop down a tree, you stand a better chance if you take one of those hours to sharpen your axe. Or something like that.

This blog content strategy is the equivalent of sharpening your axe. You’ll be a lot better prepared and probably have more fun if you take the time to put it together.

Have questions about creating a content strategy for your blog? Feel free to comment in the comments section below.

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