Before viral videos became the staple content, people actually read blogs on the Internet. The rise of the blog format was largely due to the limited technologies and resources available at that time. Bloggers had to write a content strategy so people will go to their blogs because of the content. As a result, they slowly built up a following over time through online forums and recommendations.
But as technology became more sophisticated, the potential of the blog format was further exploited and honed. Aside from savvy writing and sleek web designs, people got to follow blogs because it was suggested through optimisation and advertising.
It is not enough anymore for bloggers nowadays to just have great content or great writing skills. They have to have a strategy in order to compete with other blogs and other content formats. And you have to have a strategy for almost every kind of content that you will use in your blog.
Here is a step-by-step guide to help you write a content strategy if you are keen in using the blog format.
Plan Your Blog
You can achieve more by first planning your blog. Regardless of what kind of blog you are trying to set up, you need to have a plan that you can follow.
Even if it is just a personal blog to help you vent or share the things that you do, an advocacy blog, or even a business-related blog, you need to plan. This plan is the thing you would revisit every time you are not sure of what you are doing. This will help you focus on what is important for you to achieve.
You have to be specific in your goals and focus them on what you want to achieve with your blog. Having too many goals will result in a disorganised content just like having very broad goals will.
Know Your Target Audience
You will never go wrong with knowing your target audience and market. It is easy to strategise if you are targeting an audience that you can identify with. It won’t even be much of a challenge if you are going after a demographic similar to yours.
It would be a different thing though, if you were trying to enter a market you are totally unfamiliar with. Knowing your audience and target market will help you create content that is relevant and interesting to them.
If you put yourself in their shoes, you would know what they need and how they feel when certain situations arise. This is valuable information that you can exploit, so you would know when to push for sales or when to hold back and go for light content.
You also need to get information about the kinds of platforms that your audience uses, so you can concentrate your marketing efforts there. You will know which habits you can talk about or which topics they are sensitive about.
Check Out the Competition
Make sure you know what the competition is doing, so you can plan accordingly. There are only a few industries left in the world that has little to no competition at all.
By all means, be original but look at what your competition is doing successfully, so you can check if the strategies they use can work for you as well.
Checking them out will give you the insight on what you can do differently and help you improve your content strategy.
Do Keyword Research
Know the right keywords. Whether you have a personal or business blog, you need to have keywords that you can use to optimise your content. Even if it is just a life event you want to post, you still need to find the right keywords.
Having keywords means that you are letting your blog posts be seen by relevant audiences. You need to find the people who are looking for the content that you provide. You also need to know what topics work great with your target audience.
Research Your Topics Well
Research your topics thoroughly. You write beautifully but are your posts factual? You cannot just talk about something that you do not know anything or too little about. This will make you look foolish to your readers and nobody would want to be reading stuff that isn’t worth their time, unless you are writing satire or lampoons.
Writing thoroughly researched content can result in your audience trusting you. You will become an authority in the industry if you have very objective and truthful content.
This will help convince people to come back to your site, share your posts across platforms, and even encourage sales.
Set a Post Schedule
Establish your schedule for posting. Once you have the previous steps down pat, you need to establish a schedule for posting your content. This is essential when you write a content strategy.
A daily blog will exhaust you and may annoy those who have subscribed to your blog because of the notifications. And posting too few and far in between can cause your audience to lose interest.
Create a Content Inventory
Creating a content inventory is helpful in knowing what kind of content you have posted already and what topics you have discussed. This can also help you track the popularity of the keywords and topics used.
You can identify what makes these blog posts popular with your audience so you can try to make similar content based on the style or the topic that made it popular.
Promote Your Content
Market, advertise, promote. You cannot rely solely on searches for keywords. This is because you might be using a really specific keyword that only few use. You need to make people aware that your blog exists. One way is to market your blog through SEO and other content marketing techniques.
You can use social media to showcase your blog and share the link to it. You can buy ad space in most of the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to boost a particular post, so you can widen your reach.
Check on how you can engage your audience with every post, so you can actually get insights. You can even get future blog post ideas based on their responses.
Keep these steps in mind when you write a content strategy for your blog!