22 Apr
They say that if you want to be highly visible online, you need to put up your blog. This is ideal from individual influencers to multinational corporations. It’s not surprising that today, there are around 500 million blogs. Sadly, only a small percentage can truly penetrate the market. It’s because most of the time, blog owners do not have a blogging strategy in place.
This is a huge mistake that you can easily avoid. Here’s what we have for you in this post. If you are still about to build your blogging strategy, allow us to give you a few ideas. That way, you won’t waste time and effort writing posts that will not get you anywhere.
Establish Your Goals
The first thing you have to do is to identify the purpose and goal of your blog. You have to ask yourself, “What is it that I want to achieve?”
The answer to this could vary. But, you have to be specific. For example, you wish to have 15,000 unique monthly visitors. Or perhaps, you want to earn $20,000 every month from inbound marketing.
It’s crucial that you make your goals clear because this will dictate how much effort, time, and resources you have to put into your blog. You cannot expect a $20,000 revenue by just writing one blog post every month, can you?
Understand Your Market
In marketing, there is what we call the buyer persona. When we say buyer persona, this is a semi-fictional representation of your market. You try to understand their behavior so that you can provide the best solutions according to their needs.
When building a blogging strategy, having a persona could help as well. With this, you can already establish the topics that your market would want to read. But apart from that, you get to decide on the tone and voice that you will use for your blog posts.
Just so you know, every generation has that signature language. They even have different types of humor. So if you have a specific market in mind, it’s easier to gain traction.
One common mistake of blog owners is that they try to write for all markets. You might think this is effective, but having a lack of focus could confuse your readers as well. They might read one of your blogs, but ignore the others simply because it doesn’t appeal to them. That’s a lost opportunity to get a loyal follower.
Take A Look At Your Competitor’s Blogs
We know that you want your blog to be different from the rest of the competition. And one way to do it is to visit their blogs too.
Sounds like cheating? Absolutely not. After all, whatever you post online is to be consumed by the public, even your competitors.
Remember that you are visiting their page not because you want to ridicule or copy it. But to analyze their strategies that could work for your market too. When you study your competitor’s blog page, it’s more than just observing and listing down their topics. It has to be more extensive than that. In fact, using software and tools might be necessary.
You can try to lift the keywords that they use and gauge if it is worth using for your own blog. Tools such as Semrush can help you with this. Take note that keyword searching is a complex concept, and this requires a different discussion. But as a rule of thumb, choose keywords with less competition. Chances are, you won’t be able to beat those who rank on keywords with high competition.
We suggest if you want to kickstart your blogging strategy is to hire a keyword expert. This will save you time, and you can already start writing and running blog posts.
Do Extensive Research
When you’ve already compiled all the keywords perfect for your blog, it’s time to do some heavy lifting. You may now write your blog post. Take note that since we are trying to outrank your competitors, you need to make your content as comprehensive as possible. And this could be achieved with extensive research.
Yes, it’s easy to write a 1,000-word blog post. But to write well-thought-out, unique, and valuable content, it will entail more time and effort. You have to find multiple resources, both online and offline, even conduct interviews if possible, and simplify technical terms, depending on the knowledge of your market. And on top of that, you must proofread everything. Simply put, you leave such a tiny room for error.
Optimize Your Content
So you’re done with the quality of your post. That’s great! But your work doesn’t stop there. Since we want it to rank, using SEO strategies is a must. Here are some of the basic techniques that you can use for your blogging strategy.
- Your keywords must be visible on the first and last parts of your blog posts
- Don’t forget related keywords and use it organically
- Make sure that your title is compelling enough yet not a clickbait
- Use subheadings to make your post easy to understand
- Be conversational and less formal
- Use images to break long blocks of texts
- Don’t forget to optimize your images too
Distribute Your Blog Posts Using Different Platforms
Most blog owners will just distribute their posts on social media. There’s no doubt that it’s a great channel, considering its reach. But you might forget that there are other platforms where you can distribute your content too. You could also share it to your email list. A weekly newsletter isn’t bad, most especially if you have published multiple contents.
In addition, if you can tap micro-influencers to share your content, that should create a good impact. Don’t just send links to people’s inboxes because it looks spammy. What’s more ideal is to have a short message explaining what your post is about. That could be a good hook.
Conclusion
Managing a blog page is no easy task. And creating a blogging strategy could make or break the success of your page. This is not a side hustle that you can leave for months without updating the content. In reality, if you want to see results, you must focus on them. For bigger companies, dedicating a team to your blog is the best solution.
