Content strategy is nothing more than planning what to publish. Your content has to be laid out so you can serve your audience the right way. Therefore, part of the planning process is determining what kind of topics to cover—topics that your target market is interested in doing.
But how do you do it? What steps and factors are important in planning for your content? In this article, I will show several tips for developing a simple content strategy for your blog.
- Define your audience
- Setting your goals
- Brainstorming for topics
- Scheduling your publication calendar
- Identifying the right channels
All of these five tips are important, and none should be skipped. By the end of this tutorial, you should have a step-by-step guide on how to strategize for your blog content and make your blog get the traffic you desire.
1. Define your audience
Who is your target market?
This may seem like an easy question to answer, but it isn’t. If you want to succeed in blogging, you need to plan your content around specific people.
Let us say that your blog is about woodworking. Who is your target audience—is it beginners, intermediate craftspeople, or expert ones?
To be able to do this right, you have to create what is called a customer avatar. It is a fictional character, like a cartoon version of your target market. You have to give it a name and personality. For now, let us call this target consumer Woody.
Here are some examples of how you should define your user avatar.
- 25 to 50 years old
- Beginner in woodworking
- Interested in building cabinets, kitchen drawers, bed frames, and shelves
- Likes power tools
- Likes to explore different wood finishes
- Has little budget for tools
- Likes to do things the manual way if no power tool is available
- Wants to sell his woodwork online
As you can see, we just built a customer avatar. Now, we can plan blog topics revolving around this person’s interest. Once you have an avatar, you have to ask yourself if Woody wants your blog post if he reads it.
All your blog posts will revolve around this character because he represents your target customer or reader.
2. Setting your goals
The second thing that you need in developing a simple content strategy for your blog is a goal. What exactly are you trying to achieve?
Is it sales? Is it traffic? Is it both?
Your blog content must be planned around these goals. If your goal is to have traffic, you have to publish blog posts that are educational in nature, such as tutorials and how-tos. If your goal is to make a sale, your blog posts must be around product reviews and comparisons.
I am not saying that you have to limit your blogging content to one goal. You must have several. After all, there are many ways to earn money from a blog.
However, you have to find a balance with how you will achieve the goals. You cannot have a blog that is only full of reviews. If you do this, you are neglecting the other needs of your target reader.
In our example, Woody needs help. This means you have to write blog posts that will help him become a better woodworker. Also, you must tell him what tools give him the best value for his money.
3. Brainstorming for topics
The next phase is to brainstorm for topics. In this planning session, you have to create categories and then list down blog topics under each category.
Let us say that the first category is the “best of” listicles. Under this topic, you can write about:
- Best impact drivers
- Best power drills
- Best circular saws
The next category could be product reviews for specific tools such as Bosch Jigsaw Review, Dewalt Circular Saw Review, etc. Another category is a buying guide, like buying a circular saw, how to buy impact drivers, and how to buy a table saw.
There are many more categories that we can add here, like how to make stuff, safety tips for using specific tools, hacks, guides to selling woodworking products.
As you can see, this part of the plan allows you to overview what your content is going to be. Again, you must try to achieve balance. If you have ten articles for how-tos, try to have nine or ten articles for your product reviews, too.
4. Scheduling your publication calendar
One thing that matters about SEO is consistency. Google allocates a specific crawl budget for each website. Crawl budget refers to the number of pages that Google will visit on your site per round.
This budget will only increase if the Google algorithm realizes that there is something new on your blog every so often.
This is why you need to schedule a publication calendar. You have to publish a post regularly. There is no scientific evidence as to how many times you should do this. Some say three times a week, and some say that it is okay to publish once a month.
Obviously, the more you publish, the more traffic you get because you are serving different interests. My general recommendation is to publish 12 articles per month, spread out into three articles per week.
5. Identifying the right channels
My last tip about content planning is to decide where you will share your posts. The world has changed because of social media. There are so many areas where you can share your content now. You cannot rely on your blog alone.
Here are some options you can consider:
Choose one or several, and make sure that you automate the sharing. There are free tools like Hootsuite that will automatically post your content once you publish them on your blog.
You should also have an email subscription marketing strategy—if people subscribe, send them an automatic notification to let them know that you have published something new.
Summary: Developing A Simple Content Strategy For Your Blog
A blog is like a newspaper—you need to have adequate coverage of many sub-niches within your industry. There must also be regularity in the schedule of your publication.
Your blog is your main source of traffic, not YouTube or any platform, so you have to plan your content to deliver what your customers expect.
Some may argue that people do not really know whether you have published a new blog or not, so regularity does not matter. This is true, but if you do not regularly publish, Google will not regularly crawl your site.
Lastly, when planning for content, avoid the trap of straying too far from your niche. Bloggers often face a situation where they seem to run out of ideas, so they write about stuff that their audiences do not care about.
Do not make this mistake. Go back to step 3 if you ever run out of ideas—visit online forums and social media platforms, find out what your audiences are looking for, and then give them that content.
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