Blogging is among the best ways to add value to your customers and attract them to your site organically. Blogging is also the most common and popular content marketing strategy. All this does not make for an easy task. And to take all the advantage of this activity, you should not merely create a blog, but draft a clear blogging strategy.
Create a Good Blogging Environment
If you’ve just created your website or you already have an online presence but haven’t started blogging yet, then you should start with setting up the blogging environment.
Set up a Budget
Blogging seems like a pretty small investment and even a “free activity.” And it may be, if you, as an owner of the site, are an author of all the content. However, most often this is not the case. A good blog requires value-adding resources. And these resources require careful consideration. If you have a team, you better assign some of the articles to it, but also account for the time your teammates will invest in creating these posts. If your team is not made up of the best writers though, then you better outsource the copywriting activity. And last but not least, having a good blog with good content is a great start, but won’t be sufficient unless you promote it well. And that’s another part of the budget you need to consider upfront.
Set the Right Goals
Before you start blogging, you need to set some things up. And in addition to the purely practical blogging environment, you should consider carefully your motivation and set your goals. What do you aim to achieve while blogging? Attract more links to your site and rank better in the search engines? Reach more people through your blog posts? Improve your social media activity? Setting clear goals and objectives gives you purpose and direction and facilitates your entire blogging strategy.
Research Your Competitors
Once you know what you want to achieve with your blog, you better take a look at your competitors and check what they are doing and how they are doing it. What do their blogs look like? What do they post? How often do they post? Do they promote their content? Who is their main target? This line of questioning will give you a good notion of what works and what not regarding blogging in your specific industry. And you better learn from the mistakes of your competitors and not your own ones.
Create a User-Friendly Landing Page
The last couple of decisions you need to take regarding the blogging setup concern the landing pages. You first need to design a good blog page with easy and convenient category navigation. Then you need to consider the posts that you are going to create and contribute to other sites and media channels. What links are they going to include? To which landing page are they going to lead? A product page or a blog article one?
How to Plan a Blogging Strategy: Step-by-Step Guide
Once you are done with all the initial preparation, you better focus on the blogging strategy itself and create a guide map for all your activities.
Develop a Buyer Persona
What you need to determine first is who you are writing to and who is your target. In marketing, those targets take the form of a buyer persona, semi-fictional representations of your ideal users and customers. And when thinking about blogging, you better develop more than one buyer persona, as you will try to attract more than one category of people.
Consider Your Keyword Research
Keywords are the basis of any digital marketing campaign and specifically important for blogging. And here you need to focus on the so-called long-tail keywords. Those are longer and more concrete phrases usually with informational intent. If you are selling jeans, you will rarely rank for the query “jeans” itself, but you have better chances for ranking for “how to wear high-waist jeans”. So go back to your keyword research and find all the relevant words for blogging content.
Create a Content Strategy and Calendar
As you know who you would like to reach, you need to draft a clear content strategy and map it to a calendar. Keep the buyer persona on your mind, when thinking about topics. And then focus on the traditional marketing funnel of awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention. The topics you need to write on to reach more people and tell them about your existence surely differ from those you need to write to convince the same people to convert. Then determine your schedule. How many articles will you post per week, per month? Think about what your users need, but do not forget to consider your capacity. Posting regularly is great, but will you be able to produce this content in a timely manner?
Choose Your Promotional Channels
As we’ve mentioned already having great content in your blog is a very good basis. However, if no one ever knows about this content, what’s the point. The easiest thing you could do is share the posts in your social media. Surely, you can boost those with a PPC campaign, too. However, the most beneficial tactic concerning SEO focuses on building links to your blog. This will boost the authority of your site and will help it rank better in the search engines. This, in turn will get you more organic traffic. Of course, there’s no shortcut and this strategy will require continuous efforts, but will also yield long-term results.
Add Value & Build Relationships
To sum it all up, marketing is now all about adding value. And so is blogging. Keep this in mind while planning and executing your blogging strategy and it will be a successful one.
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