I’ve been lucky enough to work for some fantastic companies and get paid to learn about the importance of having both a comprehensive blog strategy and content marketing strategy for your blog. I’ve successfully applied those same lessons to my own blog—making many tweaks and additions along the way. And if you’re having trouble with your content planning efforts, grab my free blog planner bundle and check out my other bundle of free blogging resources to turn things up a notch today.
Content Marketing Strategy Update Existing Work
What is a blog content strategy?
Here’s how to create a basic blog content strategy today:
Define your blog goals: What’s your purpose for starting a blog? What do you want to achieve with your blog content? Your blog goals might change as you go from learning how to start a blog into growing your blog, but it’s still important to know it early on.
Get to know your blog readers (and where they hang out): Your readers will thailand business mailing list determine whether or not your blog becomes successful. To write for them, you need to really understand them—which is why it helps if you’re also writing for yourself. It’s useful to some research around the audience you’re writing for. Think about the demographics and psychographics of your target audience. Demographics are the quantitative traits of your readers (age, gender, location, job title) and psychographics are the more unmeasurable traits like values, interests, attitudes and belief systems. Once you’ve written down these qualities, you can start to come up with an audience persona—a fictionalized version of your ideal reader.
Decide on your blog’s main content pillars: When it comes to deciding what you’re going to write about, it’s good to have a few guiding categories that you’ll refer back to. I like to call these content pillars, as they’re the foundation that holds up the rest of your blog. For
example, if you’re starting a blog about personal finance, your pillars might be: personal finance tips, interviews with experts, industry news, paying off debt or otherwise. Each of these pillars can have hundreds of blog posts written under them. They also all work together to show that you’re a thought leader in your niche, which is a great goal of learning how to start a blog in the first place.
Map out the content you’re going to create soon after starting your blog: Shortly after launching your blog, it’s worth taking a little time to plan out your content pipeline for the coming weeks (possibly months). You never know when your first blog post might go viral. In that case, you’ll want to have at least a game plan to quickly engage the new readers you get. Even just one or two blog posts under each of your major content pillars is enough to start with, ideally in the form of evergreen content that’ll stand the test of time.
"When you start a blog, begin small and commit to growing consistently over the weeks and months to come."
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We’ve now come a long way in this guide. You’ve gone from learning the technicalities, all the way through to publishing your first post.
It’s time to talk about what happens after you’ve published your first blog post… promoting your content, driving traffic and eventually making money from your blog.