A Blog Strategy helps you to define what you wish to achieve with your blogging activity and create a definitive plan for your business blog. Blogging is about catching the attention of your target audience and educating them with valuable content. If it works for your prospective customers, it works for search engines as well. If your blog is replete with helpful and engaging content, your business will be loved and respected by one and all. It will not just convert into high traffic and reputation but also give you loyal fans and customers.
Buffer, a social media automation tool started their blog in the year 2011. At that time the blog had zero traffic on it. They published more than 1000 high-quality posts and their traffic rose to 1.5 million monthly visitors in the year 2017.
They created content that their audience would benefit from and they did it consistently. Their blog included rare tips in each of the posts and simply focused on educating the audience in the best way possible. They also went to the extent of getting feedback from their blog readers.
Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links. -Hubspot
Blogging works – it helps you to showcase yourself as an expert and improve brand recall among your target customers. Here are 10 steps to create a Blogging Strategy that can bring you some kick-ass results for your business.
10 Steps for Creating a Blogging Strategy
# 1. Know Your Audience
Blogging is the best way to help your potential customers. But how will you help them if you do not know them and the challenges they are facing. You should know who you are talking to – have an audience persona in place. A persona will help you to define your audience’s age, location, profession, and preferences etc.
#2. Create A Distinct Voice
When you are blogging for your business, it should reflect the voice of your brand. It should have a distinct tone that’s unique to your business. You need to create a blogging style guide that your blog contributors can use as a ready reference. A style guide would include the following elements:
- The writing style that works best for your brand – conversational, formal, casual/fun etc.
- Content formatting: Long paragraphs or short and how to use pointers
- Guidelines for internal and external links: the maximum number of links one should include
- Image selection: a list of stock image sites along with the kind of images you prefer
- Success formula: Include examples of reference posts that have done well.
#3. Have a Consistent Schedule
Blogging success is about consistency and patience. Studies have shown that businesses who succeed at blogging publish at-least 16 blog posts in a month. Blogging is a process of creating a body of work that’s valuable and helpful to your audience. You must have a blogging calendar that helps you to publish blog content on a regular basis. Define the number of posts and their titles for the coming weeks and months. Define a workflow and the roles within your team – keyword research, content writing, image creation publishing, and promotion etc. This will help you to develop a blogging plan. Do add monthly goals of the metrics you wish to achieve from your blog posts. It will help you to analyze and improve the results you are getting.
#4 Length of Blog Posts
You need to make sure your blog posts are in-depth and long-form. A study by Backlinko showed the ideal length of blog posts should be between 1700-1900 words. Make sure you have a point of view in your posts. Another way to add value to your posts is to add actionable insights that your audience can readily use.
#5. Decide on the Blog Topics
Blogging is about knowing the challenges your target audience is facing and providing answers to their questions. A regular keyword research will help you to have a repository of topics you wish to write about. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner and UberSuggest to do a keyword research in your niche. Just add some sample keywords in these tools and you will get a bunch of keywords to choose from. Select keywords that have high average monthly searches and low competition. You can use the Hubspot blog topic generator to add your keywords and generate innovative topic ideas.
#6 Add Visuals and Video
Making your blog attractive is the best way to get noticed. You can add blog graphics, GIFs, memes and video content to get your audience to stick around. These elements improve the overall readability of your blog content. Visuals make your blog content more exciting and help you to communicate more through interesting facts and statistics. Content with original data and high-quality images has much higher probability to attract quality backlinks as well as content shares.
#7. Promote Your Blog Posts Effectively
First and foremost, you must ensure that your blog is optimized for search engines. If you are using a platform like WordPress, make sure you have the Yoast SEO plugin installed. Make sure your title and description are optimized for keywords and are attention grabbing. It is critical to ensure that your post content and URL are optimized for the relevant keywords or similar meaning words. Keyword optimization helps you to categorize your content as relevant to a particular niche and helps improve content discovery. Don’t forget to share each of your blog posts on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Use the relevant hashtag in your post captions on social media to leverage from social search.
#8 Collect Subscriptions
The purpose of your blog is to build a long-term relationship with your target audience. For that, you need to add a call-to-action to your blog page and get your audience to subscribe to your newsletter. Once they do that and share their email address with you, you need to share your latest blog posts with them. A weekly or a monthly newsletter is a great way to build a relationship with your audience and get them to convert.
#9. Update and Repurpose Your Blog Posts
Updating your old blog posts can help you to add more value and provide your audience with a fresh perspective. When you make your existing posts more valuable, you increase their chances of ranking up higher on search engines. Google prefers fresh content and updating posts makes them as good as new.
To get the most out of each of your blog posts, you can repurpose them to suit a variety of formats and channels. You can convert your blog posts into videos, slideshows, LinkedIn articles, Quora answers and more. You can also repurpose a post and pitch it as a guest post to a high domain authority website while linking it back to the original post. You create a detailed strategy by reading this post on content repurposing.
#10 Measure Success
Defining the metrics you wish to track is a good start. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track the number of views you are getting from each of your posts. The number of social media shares is also a valuable metric to track. These metrics are used to understand the worthiness of your content pieces. You can also check the search engine rankings of your blog posts. Your blog should be able to fetch a growing number of subscribers in the long run. You can expect blogging to start fetching you the desired results in 9-11 months.
Blogging Tools
Here are some blogging tools that will make your blogging process more productive and result driven.
Buzzsumo – it’s a free tool for finding trending content in your niche.
Google Trends – helps you find the latest trends and helps to create content around trending news and conversations in your industry.
Emotional Headline Analyzer – helps you to understand the effectiveness of your headlines.
Grammarly – helps you make sure your blog is free of grammatical errors.
Click To Tweet – the tool helps you to add tweetable quotes to your blog posts.
Readability Test Tool – the tool helps you make your blog more readable and user-friendly
Pixabay – it’s a free stock image website to find blog images.
Pocket – a very useful tool to bookmark your articles and access them from anywhere.
Be Passionate when Blogging
There are many benefits of blogging for business. It helps you to build an authority in your industry while helping you to get more rankings for your website. Blogging should be an essential part of your marketing strategy. But, don’t blog simply because you wish to get more leads. Blog with passion and the intent of adding value to your target audience. Be original and go out of your way to provide tips, tricks, and resources that your audience can use. Tell them immersive stories that they can remember.
60% of the content published by brands is poor or ineffective. – Meaningful Brands
A blog helps you to gain industry insights and pass them on to your readers. It’s a way to learn and grow while you are helping your readers gain as much knowledge as possible.
Knowing how to write case studies & including them in your blog can help you build credibility & gain the trust of the target audience.
Looking to get an in-depth understanding of blogging for business? You can enroll in our certified Digital Marketing Course. Have questions or suggestions related to about building a Blog Strategy? Please do add them in the comment section below.
