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

Having a blog content writing strategy is what separates good blogs from really good ones.

You basically double your chances of success with a blog writing strategy. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60% of organizations with a written content strategy are effective, compared to just 32% of those with a purely verbal content strategy.

(Graphic from Visualizer Lite).

I’ve been blogging professionally since 2013, and if it has taught me anything, it’s that a blog content strategy is a must if you want to see real results.

Not just A written plan increases your chances of success, it also saves you hours of time that would have been wasted on the wrong promotional strategies, writing about the wrong topics, and working with the wrong influencers.

Are you ready to save time, generate more traf ico and see more success in blogging? So, keep reading! Here are the five steps to a great blog content strategy:

Five steps to designing a blog content strategy

This guide will be divided into five steps:

1. Define your objectives.
2. Conduct target market research.
3. Propose topic ideas and keywords to target.
4. Create a content calendar.
5. Create amazing content.

Quick preface: 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 make that content achieve our goals?

Let’s start with why.

Step 1: Define your goals.

If you don’t remove anything else from this article, remove goal setting. Having a clearly defined objective will prepare you to overcome all the other steps, all the hours of writing, and all the obstacles that will come your way.

Your objective is your why, and the strongest one is, the more successful you’ll be.

Just take a look at Simon Sinek’s TED talk on the power of “why.” This is 20 minutes of pure gold (seriously, go watch it) on why we need to lead from a place of “why” we’re doing something, not how we’re doing it or what we’re doing. His diagram looks like this:

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

• drive foot traffic to your store or office?
• increase sales or generate leads?
• educate customers leads and customers on what What do you do?
• Update your customers on what’s going on with your business?
• Attract prospects from outside your local area, such as customers from abroad?
• build a brand?

Choose no more than two or three of these goals for your blog content strategy. More and your blog will lose focus and you won’t be successful at anything.

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 prospects about what I do and building a brand around my name.

Be specific with your goals. Simply saying “get more traffic” is not enough. You must include the amount of traffic you want and in what period of time. A better goal would be “Increase sales by 15% in three months.” Very specific.

Once you know why, it’s time to figure out what type of content you need. To do that, you need to go through:

Step 2: Conduct Target Market Research.

Let me ask you something; Have you ever taken a shower and couldn’t get the water to reach the right temperature? It was lukewarm, so you turned it just a hair, so it was boiling hot?

While frustrating, it shows you how a very small amount of effort can turn something from warm to hot . You’ve heard this before: it’s called going the extra mile.

This step is that little one-inch tweak that will take your blog from mediocre to great.

So how do you conduct target market research?

Ask yourself some good questions to start with:

• Where does my audience spend their time? hang out online? (Some blogs, social media platforms, forums, Facebook groups, etc.)
• What is your biggest complaint at work? (Maybe they hate their commute or their boss, or they’re bored, or they don’t get enough traffic to their website.)
• What kind of content or articles do they most enjoy reading? (Look at your Google analytics for your blog, if you have it. What posts performed better? You can also use BuzzSumo to see what your competitor’s most shared articles are.)

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

There you have it: The secret is to discover the underlying motivations of your target readers and then help them achieve those goals.

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

Step 3: Create topic ideas and keywords to target.

Let’s start with keywords:

Keywords are the bread and butter for an effective blog content strategy. Without them, you will have a hard time ranking well in search engines. Without ranking in search engines, you’ll have an even harder time getting a lot of consistent traffic.

Despite information overload from so-called “SEO experts,” research from keywords and SEO (search engine optimization) is not that hard.

Let me break it down into three easy steps:

1. Find some keywords for which that you want to rank for that have high search volume and low competition.
2. Write surprisingly good blog content that includes your top keywords in the title, body, headings, and image alt text ( however, don’t overdo it – 3-7 times in an article is enough, depending on the length.)
3. Work on getting backlinks to that article with your main keywords as anchor text (ie Say, if your main keyword is “marketing strategies”, you want the link to ce to your site is connected with the text “marketing strategies”). But be careful not to overdo this either. Too many optimized anchors can trigger Google the wrong way.

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

That said, you don’t need to base all your topics on keyword research. I asked Cara Hogan, a content strategist and consultant, for her take on topic creation. This is what she said:

I didn’t let him leave it like that. Instead, I pushed for an example. This is what she told me:

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

Step 4: Create a blog content calendar.

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

To help explain the importance of this step and how it plays into the overall strategy For his blog content, I asked Cameron Conaway, an 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 “editor me” thing, here’s what your spreadsheet looks like in Airtable:

You can also use a A free tool like Trello or Google Calendar to create your blog’s content calendar, but if you’re looking for a fully dedicated calendar with extra features to help you grow your blog, a tool like CoSchedule may be more useful.

It’s your choice, though. For example, here at Themeisle, we’ve been using Trello quite successfully since the birth of the blog. Our main board:

Step 5: Create awesome content.

You have your keywords, you’ve created a content calendar, you know who you’re writing for. Now is the time to create your content.

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

An amazing piece of content should be…

• Well written (meaning correct spelling and grammar, and without using unnecessarily complex language or terminology. You can also use other content tools free grammar check).
• Researched (meaning you use statistics, case studies, and examples to show you’ve done your homework).
• Media-rich (meaning lots of high-quality images and very relevant).
• Formatting for skimming (ie, use lots of headings, subheadings, bulleted lists, block quotes, bold, and italics).

Pro tip: You can get high-quality free images from MyStock.Photos or even create your own images using tools like Canva and others.

Conclusion

While it can be tempting to shoot your As blog posts come to mind, having a written blog content strategy sa I see hours of headaches. Plus, you’ll see much more success.

It only takes a few hours to put together an amazing blog content strategy. As the old adage goes, if you have four hours to chop down a tree, you have 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 much more prepared and probably have more fun if you take the time to put it together.

Have questions about coming up with a content strategy for your blog? Feel free to express yourself in the comments section below.

.