Five Steps to Craft a Blog Content Strategy

Five Steps to Craft a Blog Content Strategy This guide will be divided into five steps: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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.

If you don’t take anything else away from this article, take away goal-setting.

Having a clearly defined goal will set you up to push through all the other steps, all the hours of writing, and all the obstacles bound to show up.

Your goal is your why, and the stronger it is the more success you’ll have.

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?

Choose no more than two or three of these objectives for your blog content strategy. Any more and your blog will become unfocused and won’t succeed at anything.

For example, I have a blog for my freelance work. My primary goal is to generate leads for my services, with secondary goals of educating prospects on what I do and building a brand around my name.

Be specific with your goals. Simply saying “get more traffic” isn’t enough.

You need to include how much traffic you want and in what timeframe. A better goal would be “Increase sales by 15% in three months”. Very specific.

Once you have your why, it’s time to figure out what kind of content you need.

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.

So, how do you do target market research?

For starters, ask yourself a few good questions:

 



Where does my audience hang out online? (Certain blogs, social media platforms, forums, Facebook groups, etc.)

What is their biggest gripe at work? (Maybe they hate their commute or their boss, or they’re bored, or they aren’t getting enough traffic to their website.)

What sort of content or articles do they most enjoy reading? (Look at your Google analytics for your blog, if you have it. Which posts did the best? You can also use BuzzSumo to see what your competitor’s most shared articles are.)

There you have it – the secret is to find out the underlying motivations of your target readers, then helping them achieve those goals.

Once you have an idea of who you’re writing for, next up is:

Step 3: Come up with topic ideas and keywords to target.

Let’s start with keywords: Keywords are the bread and butter to an effective blog content strategy.

Without them, you’re going to be hard-pressed to rank well on search engines. Without ranking on search engines, you’ll have an even harder time getting a lot of consistent traffic.

Despite the overload of information from alleged “SEO experts”, keyword research and SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t all that difficult.

Let me break it down for you in three simple steps: 1. Find some keywords you want to rank for that have high search volume and low-ish competition.

2. Write mind-blowingly good blog content that includes your main keywords in the title, body, headers, and image alt text (don’t overdo it, though. 3-7 times in an article is plenty, depending on the length).

3. Work on getting backlinks to that article with your main keywords as the anchor text (i.e. if your main keyword is “marketing strategies”, you

want the link to your site to be connected with the text “marketing strategies”). But be careful not to overdo this either. Too many optimized anchors might trigger Google in a wrong way.

Of course, there are plenty of other complications like page load speed, time spent on page, and (for Bing, at least) the number of shares the article received. But, if you master the three things above, you’ll be on your way to the first page of Google.

Keyword research is a great way to come up with new ideas and opportunities for content, but SEO should not drive your entire content strategy. It should factor in, but not fully control, the topics and message of your content. You may find an opportunity for a specific keyword, but you should then combine that information with your knowledge of your target market and personas to write the best possible content.

Step 4: Create a blog content calendar.

A content calendar keeps you on track and creates a system to ensure your content is always top-notch and published on time. The best calendars also have social sharing and email marketing info baked in to make things organized and easy.

A great content calendar gives you a bird’s eye view and has your team’s editorial process baked into it.

It allows us to make real-time updates, organize all content assets, and have end-to-end visibility into who is working on what, when each piece is due, and which persona and stage of the funnel each piece of content is for.

Step 5: Build amazing content.

You’ve got your keywords, you’ve created a content calendar, you know who you’re writing for. Now it’s time to actually build your content.

I say build, not write, because great content isn’t just written – it’s assembled.

An amazing piece of content needs to be…    

Well-written (meaning proper spelling and grammar, and doesn’t use unnecessarily complex language or terminology.)

Researched (meaning uses stats, case studies, and examples to show you’ve done your homework.)

Media rich (meaning plenty of high-quality and highly relevant images.)

Formatted for skimming (meaning use plenty of headers, subheaders, bulleted lists, block quotes, bolding, and italics.)

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