Blogging is hands-down one of the best content marketing strategies out there. For your blog to succeed, you must have a clear blog content strategy.
Knowing how to create a blog content strategy is one of the most essential things for any marketer. So much of your broader content marketing efforts rely on your blog, so having a clear blog content strategy is critical for achieving your goals and drawing in more customers.
But what exactly should this strategy cover, and how do you use it?
We'll explain it all in the guide below.
What Is A Blog Content Strategy?
A blog content strategy is a plan that outlines how your business will develop and publish blog content. The strategy should include what content pillars you'll cover, what topics you will write about, and what keywords you will target.
A good content marketing blog strategy should be tied to a timeline. This makes it easy to understand when you will publish what posts. Having a timeline in place also assists your blog content production efforts.
Far too many businesses start publishing random blog posts and topics without developing a blog content marketing strategy first. Not only is this messy, but it can harm your content marketing results.
Why Is A Blog Content Strategy Important?
You need a content strategy for blog posts to use your blog to its full potential. This is the essential first step in developing an impactful content marketing plan.
Here are some main reasons why a blog content strategy is so important.
Ensures You Cover The Right Topics
A blog content strategy outlines the different themes, topics, categories, and content pillars your blog will cover. This should be strategically planned to align with your business's products or services. Your blog content should also address your audience's interests and pain points.
By planning your blog content, you can ensure your content covers all of the critical areas for your business. This will help you educate your audience, attract new audience members, and address major questions people might have about your business. It also ensures you develop a broad, far-reaching content marketing strategy that delivers a more significant impact.
Without strategically planning your blog topics, there's a good chance you'll leave major gaps in your blog strategy.
Assists With SEO
Once you've developed your main content pillars, you can start planning an SEO strategy for your blog. This involves identifying which keywords your blog can target and how your posts relate and interlink.
Establishing content pillars first makes it easier for your blog to build authority in these different areas - essential for SEO. It also helps you identify a broader range of potential keywords that each pillar or theme can target.
Strategically planning your blog content strategy also means you don't risk keyword cannibalization - as you can plan which blog posts will target which keywords.
Ultimately, this will help your blog perform better in search engines and generate more traffic.
Keeps Your Content Production Organized
When you create a blog content strategy, you have a clear direction to follow. This can help you understand what content you must develop, how much content you must create, and when to publish it.
This is important for planning out and streamlining your content production efforts. It also helps you develop a broader content marketing plan, as you'll know when your business has new blog content to promote across other channels.
With a clear blog content strategy in place, you'll also be able to know what your needs are for hiring blog writers. This can help your business maximize operational efficiency.
Align Your Blog With Your Marketing Goals
Every blog should have clear goals in place. Maybe your blog is designed to generate leads, drive traffic to your main website, build brand awareness, or sell products directly from your blog posts. Whatever the case, developing a blog content strategy is essential for achieving these goals.
When you create a business blog content strategy, you can ensure that each content you publish aligns with your goals. This means each blog post serves a purpose and contributes to the overall growth of your business.
Stays Relevant To Your Audience
Your blog has to align with your target audience's interests and needs. This is because your blog is specifically designed to attract the right people to your business. Without a clear content strategy, you might be creating blog content that attracts people with no genuine interest in what your business offers.
Developing a blog content strategy ensures every blog post and topic you cover is relevant to your target audience. This helps your blog have a more focused and more significant impact.
Keeps Your Blog Sustainable
Blogging and content marketing are never about generating quick wins. Instead, running a blog is a long-term strategy.
Successful blogs should be consistent and sustainable, with a steady flow of constantly published content. Developing a blog content strategy helps you achieve this.
Instead of scrambling around for ideas and running out of inspiration, a blog strategy means you'll always have a runway of content, ideas, and keywords to cover. This helps make your blogging and content marketing efforts more strategic and sustainable.
How To Develop A Blog Content Strategy
So, how do I create a content strategy for my blog?
A lot can go into answering this question, as content strategies can differ significantly between each business. Maybe you want a detailed breakdown of your content marketing efforts for the year ahead, or perhaps you want a simple blog content roadmap to follow each quarter. Whatever the case, you'll need to follow the same essential processes.
Follow these steps to create an effective content strategy for your blog.
Define Your Goals
The first essential step is to determine what you want to achieve with your blog.
Are you aiming to increase website traffic, generate leads, establish authority, or achieve some other goal? Having clear objectives in place guides your overall strategy.
Once you've developed your blog goals, you'll better understand the type of content you want to publish and how you can use this content to grow your business. Creating a blog content strategy is only possible if your blog content serves a purpose.
Understand Your Audience
Who will be reading your blog? Who do you want to attract to your different blog pages? You need to know this before you start publishing content.
Research your target audience's demographics, interests, pain points, and preferences. This helps you create content that resonates with them and addresses their needs. It also means you can develop content topics your target customers are actively searching for. This results in more high-quality traffic to your blog.
Of course, your target audience must align with your blog goals and keyword strategy - more on this later.
Identify Core Topics And Themes
Now that you know who your blog will be targeting and what your blog will achieve, the next step is fighting out what you're going to publish.
Before getting too granular and focusing on individual blog topics, you must decide on your main themes or content pillars. These should align with your product/service and your target audience's interests.
Brainstorm a list of core topics relevant to your audience and aligning with your goals. These topics will serve as the foundation for your content creation. Once you have developed these core topics, you can start researching them to find specific blog article topics and keywords to target.
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Conduct Keyword Research
Once you've established your main content pillars, you can dive deep into each and create a list of target keywords. This is essential for developing your blog's SEO strategy.
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or other keyword research tools to identify relevant keywords related to your chosen topics. These keywords will help optimize your content for search engines. Once you start researching keywords, you'll discover many potential blog topics you can cover.
Lay Out Your Blog Topics
With your list of target keywords, you can lay out the specific blog post topics you plan to publish. You can arrange these topics in a spreadsheet underneath your main content topics.
It's a good idea to arrange these topics in order of importance. This will assist your blog production efforts. You could do this based on keyword search volume, keyword difficulty, or how well the topic relates to your brand.
While targeting keywords is essential, you may also want to throw a few blog post ideas that are not explicitly keyword-focused. You may want to write about product features or answer popular questions your customers face. These are also valuable blog post topics - even if they don't generate much traffic from search engines.
Create Content Types
Decide on the types of content you'll produce, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, or a mix of these.
Your blog content strategy can focus on more than just standard blog posts. Different content formats can cater to various audience preferences. Other content formats can also help you achieve different goals.
This is where your blog content strategy aligns with your broader content marketing plan. Now, you can figure out precisely what content marketing channels you will use and how each channel works towards your overall marketing goals.
Create A Content Calendar
Your blog topics and keywords have all been established - the most important work has been done! Now, it's time to lay this out in a calendar.
Create a content calendar that outlines when you'll publish each piece of content. Consistency is key, so establish a realistic publishing schedule that you can maintain. You can set this up in a simple spreadsheet that outlines the publishing date and includes any tasks or notes for your blog writer.
Create as long a content runway as you want. The longer, the better. Ensure you consistently update your content calendar to have a steady stream of blog content to publish. This could be done on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.
Just be aware that your content calendar should be flexible. While having a clear publishing schedule is important, you might need to add new, timely blog topics with fast turnaround times. For example, a big event might take place or a significant new development in your industry happens that you need to write about. So, always be prepared to add some flexibility to your publishing schedule.
Set Content Creation Guidelines
When you create a content marketing strategy for a blog, you aren't only planning your blog topics. Establishing a transparent process for how your blog content will be produced is also essential.
Define the tone, style, and voice of your content. Consistency in these aspects helps build your brand's identity and makes your content more recognizable to readers. It also means that your blog content ties in with each other - helping you develop a more impactful content marketing strategy.
Clearly outline your content creation guidelines and include this in any brief you provide your content writers.
Think About Content Promotion
Now you know what you will be publishing and when. The next consideration is how you will be promoting this content.
This could involve using social media, email marketing, influencer collaborations, or even paid advertising to increase its reach. While SEO is vital for the long-term growth of your blog, you can only partially rely on SEO to attract new readers - especially when your blog is new.
A structured promotion system can help your blogging efforts be far more impactful. Again, this also fuels your broader content marketing plan.
Allocate Your Resources
Blogging can be free, but it does take time and effort, And if you want to see the best results from your blog, you'll likely have to invest some money, too.
Identify the resources you'll need for content creation, such as writers, designers, or tools for content production and content optimization. Allocate your time and budget to match your blog content strategy.
Establish Metrics And Measurement
Remember those goals you set at the beginning of your blog content strategy? Well, now you'll need to make sure you're achieving them.
Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your strategy. This could include metrics like website traffic, engagement, and conversion rates. Clearly outline these KPIs in your blog content strategy so that you know what content is successful and what content is not.
By regularly monitoring your content's performance, you can find ways to improve your content and align it with your content marketing goals. This helps you create a more impactful blog strategy over time.
This also means you can adjust your blog content strategy as time progresses. Your audience behaviour, industry trends, and business might constantly change. So, your blog strategy must change with them.
Document Your Strategy
Put all of your research into a written document. This strategy document will serve as a reference point for you and your team as you execute your content plan.
Ensure you share your blog content strategy across your team so everyone who needs to can access it. Blogging is often a collaborative task, so ensuring your content strategy is laid out and visible is important.
Conclusion
If you're starting a blog from scratch, never dive in blindly without a clear strategy. And suppose you already have a blog that could perform better than you'd like. In that case, it's time to revisit and refine your content strategy.
Developing a blog content strategy is a pretty straightforward process. Once you've invested the time and effort into doing this correctly, you should see far better results from your blogging efforts.
When you have a strategy, the next essential step is publishing high-quality content. Contentellect offers expert content writing services on-demand - making it easy to roll out your blog strategy. See how easy it is to place an order for your blog.