You basically double your chance of success with a written blog strategy. According to Content Marketing Institute, 60% of organizations with a written content strategy are effective, compared to only 32% of those with a purely verbal content strategy being effective.
I’ve been blogging professionally since 2013, and if it’s taught me anything, it’s that a blog content strategy is a necessity if you want to see true results.
Not only does a written plan increase your chances of success, it also saves you hours of time you would have wasted on the wrong promotion strategies, writing about the wrong topics, and working with the wrong influencers.
Five Steps to Craft a Blog Content Strateg
This guide will be divided into five steps: Define your goals. Perform some target market research. Come up with topic ideas and keywords to target. Create a content calendar. Build amazing content. Quick preface: A good blog content strategy should answer three questions: Why are we making content in the first place? What content do we need? How do we get that content to accomplish our goals? Let’s start with why.
Step 1: Define your goals.
Your goal is your why, and the stronger it is the more success you’ll have.
Just take a look at Simon Sinek’s TED talk about the power of “why”. It’s 20 minutes of pure gold (seriously, go watch it) about why we need to lead from a place of “why” we’re doing something, not how we’re doing it or what we’re doing. His diagram looks like this:
So, how do you define your why… your blog goal? Answer these questions. Do you want to… drive foot traffic to your shop or office? increase sales or generate leads? educate prospects and customers on what you do? update your customers on what’s going on with your business? attract prospects from outside of your local area, such as clients from overseas? build a brand?
Step 2: Perform some target market research.
Let me ask you something; Have you ever taken a shower and you just couldn’t quite get the water to the right temperature? It was lukewarm, so you turned it juuuust a hair, then it was scalding hot? While frustrating, it shows you how a very small amount of effort can cause something to go from lukewarm to hot. You’ve heard this before – it’s called the extra mile. This step is that small centimeter tweak that will take your blog from mediocre to great.