STEPS:
Creating a blog can be an exciting experience for your business. You often find yourself wanting to jump head first into writing. But I am here to tell you that strategies are make or break. If you’re not creating content without a clear strategy in mind, things might not turn out the way you want them to.
I am a fan of brainstorming and ideas, but I truly believe that if you want something done, you have to write it down. So here are a few steps I’ve found to be successful in creating a blog content strategy that allows you to not only get your first blog post published, but to maintain a steady stream of content.
Step 1: Work Out Your Why
It’s really important to put things into perspective. Flesh out your goals and decide what the purpose of your blog is. What is your blog meant to do? Is it meant to educate? To persuade? To entertain? Really ask yourself what your blog is meant to achieve once it is read by others. Once you have defined some goals you can start setting some concrete objectives to really hone down on what you need your blog to do. Be sure to make it measurable, it could be increased customer acquisition or lead generation or it could be that you need site traffic to various other pages on your website. These are all good objectives and can be measured with the right metrics. An even more important step here is to make sure that everything is documented. The statistics for businesses that don’t document their content marketing strategy are staggering:
Step 2: Who Are You Creating This Content For?
This is where you should do your research. You need to know who you’re writing for. You probably have a good idea who your audience is, but there are some other things you need to know:
What are their interests?
What do they struggle with, and what are the challenges they face that you can present a solution for?
Where do they usually reach the content they read and enjoy?
These questions will not only help you determine what to write about, but how to target it and what channels you should be distributing your content through. Once you have those in mind you are ready for the next step.
Step 3: Selecting the Right Keywords and Writing Your Content
Come up with some industry-specific keywords that are relevant to your topics.
Don’t know where to start? Then you need to either repeat Step 2 or keep an eye on the competition and what they’re talking about. If there’s an article you read that caught your attention that could do with some improvements, then you can certainly be the one to add those improvements yourself.
What you’re looking for ideally are keywords that have high search volume and moderate to low competition. But take this knowledge with a grain of salt, keywords are not the driving force behind your content. The body of the text and the practical information you provide your readers is what counts. Create a table of what you want to write, the relevant keywords and what the article is meant to achieve when readers go through it. That way, when you get on to assemble and arrange your ideas, you can have a set weekly or monthly plan of what needs to be written and when.
Step 4: Organize Your Ideas in a Content Calendar
You’ve worked out keywords for further ideas. Now you should think about when you want to publish your blog content and where you want to do it.
There are a host of tools that you could use: Trello , Notion or Google Calendar. At Digithy we’ve used Trello and Notion, but we also have ours as an editable PDF document that you can use to plan your own content here.
Whatever choice you make, remember to be consistent and to make sure everything is available and online if you’re collaborating with a team.
Step 5: Get to Writing
You’ve got all the pieces of your jigsaw puzzle ready, now all you have to do is sit down and write your content. There are some things to keep in mind though:
Select an engaging title based on your keyword research.
Make sure your text is readable and grammatically correct using tools like Grammarly or the spell checker on your word processor.
Have someone review your work, you might be a one-man show but before you publish something it’s essential to have someone else proofread your work
Break apart your content into headings, especially since people are reading through their phones and will tend to skim read.
These steps can seem like an overwhelming task at first, but in time you’ll come to enjoy curating articles and even updating content you’ve written before. With all that done, you can publish your first piece of content and have a blog content strategy to ensure you have a steady stream of articles. If you have any questions about content creation and content planning, feel free to get in touch with us