Blogging tip #3:Why do you need a blogging strategy

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

Updated 6 years ago

Having a feasible and sustainable blogging strategy is critical for your business. There is no other way … If you want to make money with a blog or if you want to make a living with blogging, you need to define a clear blogging strategy.

The first and most important step in launching a business blog, is to define some crystal-clear goals for the blog. Defining clear goals will help you in two ways:

• to set achievable, realistic targets

• to measure your results

There are two basic scenarios:

1. You are planning to launch a business blog

Most likely you have already defined your main business goals. I am talking about the goals defined for the business itself. Well, the blog will be there to support that business, and obviously, their goals should be in line with each other. In other words, you’ll have to take a step back to revisit your initial business goals, and to find out how the blog can help you to get your business closer to its goals. The mission statement and the core purpose of your business will help you to define the goals for your business blog.

2. You are planning to launch a niche blog

If you are planning to create a niche blog – without having an actual business-background -, you’ll have to define the main motivating factors. Do you want to build an income stream? Do you want to become a well-respected expert in your field? Do you want to build a topic-centered community? Find the answer and break it down into smaller niche-specific questions. The final answers will help you to define meaningful, achievable short- and long-term goals and objectives for your niche blog. And believe me, that’s the first step that will help you to earn money with a blog. Or to make a living with blogging …

Yes, I said “long-term objectives”. I strongly recommend you to create a one-year plan (at least) with clearly defined targets and milestones. Here are a few tips:

• the first month: the very first month is about building immediate interest using newsletters, launch parties, industry publications, online and offline advertising campaigns, social media, etc

• the first quarter: the first quarter is about SEO and increasing the number of your visitors; in this period you’ll have to focus on search engine optimization and content creation; creating and publishing more and more new search-friendly – and user-friendly! – content will help you to increase the positive influence of your blog

• the second quarter: the second quarter is about building a stronger, outstanding social media presence; in the first three months you have managed to reach a certain number of visitors and organic searches; now, you want to focus on social media by creating shareable, channel-specific content pieces; also, after six months it’s time for a deeper, objective evaluation; analyze your results, compare them to your initial objectives, take a hard look at your failures and make the necessary changes; finally, identify the best-performing, most-shared content pieces created in the first six months, and use them as content templates for future articles

• the third quarter: the third quarter is about getting more focused and creating precisely targeted content; in the first six months – and especially at the and of your half-year evaluation process – you have gathered a bunch of useful data; now it’s time to use that data in order to craft well-targeted email follow-ups, segmentation-based advertisements, remarketing campaigns, etc

• the fourth quarter: the last quarter of your one-year plan is about tracking, evaluation, testing and optimization; revisit everything you have done in the previous nine months and try to optimize every step and every strategy to make them even more efficient; re-evaluate your results and your methods, and focus on finding new, untapped approaches that could help you to achieve your blogging goals

Needless to say, it’s completely up to you how will you define your milestones and how will you define your priorities. What is really important, is to define clear milestone-based long-term objectives from the very beginning. It takes time for a blog to establish itself on the web, and this period of time – I would say the first two years – must be used to build an efficient, flexible system that will represent the backbone of your blogging activities for really long term. Periodically – let’s say at every six months – you’ll have to perform deeper re-evaluations by taking a closer look at all the data you have collected. Use that data and re-analyze everything: your goals, your decisions, your weaknesses, the implementation process, etc. This is the only way to efficiently identify what works and what doesn’t work. This is the only way to continuously improve your blog … and yourself. This is the only way to achieve your dreams if you want to earn money with a blog or if you want to make a living with blogging.