How to Develop a Winning Blog Content Strategy in 3 Easy Steps

According to Social Media Today, there are over 6.7 million people that blog on various sites worldwide. Given the competition of that magnitude, it’s safe to question why anyone should spend their time reading your blog.

Blogging isn’t hard, but it’s definitely time consuming process when you’re doing it on a regular basis. For a blog to be successful there needs to be a content strategy in place to promote consistency, a systemised approach so you’re not always in a mad rush to publish just anything at random. Here are some quick tips to implement for your blog strategy with effective SEO practices in place.

1. Define Your Blog’s Objectives as Part of Your Plan

Planning is the first, most crucial part of a winning blog strategy. Without a plan, you may be posting blogs of high quality but there is no publishing schedule and therefore no consistency. Blogging is a process and with any decent process you need to discover the joy of planning.

Your plan will need to include your blogging objectives. Decide what you want to achieve with your blog to give it focus. Some examples of business blog objectives can include:

• Attracting prospect clients to your website through your blog.
• Driving traffic to your office or shop location.
• Updating existing customers with industry news and what’s going on with your business and brand.
• Educating prospect customers.
• Increasing sales and generating leads.

For your blog to be focused, use 2-3 objectives. Anymore and your blog’s purpose can get messy. In the plan, generate a list of ongoing ideas and consider how often you want to post. Whilst blogging daily brings in more customers, blogging twice a week to three times a month can also be effective.

2. Research and Write

The best way to stand out in the millions of blogs out there is by proper keyword research so people can find you, and adequate research and facts to validate your thoughts. Once this is in place and you’ve planned what you want to say, then the writing part of it should come naturally and be fairly simple.

Keyword research is essential for your blog to be found through major search engines like Google. Whilst you want the chosen keywords to reflect your ideas and topics, write for people first and optimise after.

3. Upload and Promote

For a blog post to be captivating enjoyable and informative you’ll need to upload high quality images, videos or infographics that are relevant to the topic to spice it up a little. Make sure you upload your blog post in accordance to your publishing schedule you created as part of your content strategy plan.

The last step and one of the most crucial of a content blog strategy is promoting the post. Often this step is quickly overlooked but it doesn’t matter how great the post is – if you don’t promote it properly you’re missing the opportunity to capture your audience’s attention. Take advantage of social media platforms, regular E-News and online communities where your clients and prospects will be.

4 Quick Blogging Secrets You Should Know About

1. Read a lot of blogs: This will help to generate ideas and make you a better, well-informed writer.
2. Write great headlines: Captivate your audience and make them want to read the post.
3. Always have a list of potential topics: Find you editorial voice and always have back-up ideas.
4. Don’t overwrite: Whilst long posts are good, you want to get to the point quickly. Provide enough information to educate without waffling on too much.