Learn how to create a successful blog strategy with these tips

How to create a Blog Strategy

1. Understand Your Blog's Ideal Audience

First, you need to understand your audience. Ideally, assess your ideal customers by performing persona research. In lieu of that, begin by developing a sketch of your ideal customer and their desires. Your own customers might not read the blog, as they receive your newsletter or social media, but they’re likely to mimic your future customers, so using them as your guide is efficient.    

2. Set Goals for your Blog

With your customer in mind, asses what you want to achieve with your blog. Here are some important questions to answer before starting your blog:

• How many visitors do you want to your blog?
• What kind of engagement do you expect from your blog?
• Are there any specific conversions that could happen through the blog?
• What brand stories are best handled in a long-form space?  

3. Choose the Topic for your Blog

Blogging will require time from both the writer and editor to be successful, so make sure the topic chosen is worth investing time into developing high-quality content about it (and maybe even research). A blog strategy ensures your time is well spent.

4. Choose the your Target Keywords

You can write the most helpful, insightful, and amazing blog pieces but if you don't have a keyword strategy then your blogs will not fulfill any goals of growing your audience base. This is because keywords are how people who do not know your brand find your blog.

5. Review How to write Effective SEO Content

If your content isn't written with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices in mind then Google will not rank it high enough when returning search results. The top page listed on Google search has an average click-through rate of 24.7% and 75% of people never scroll past the first page so you want your content to be as close to the top as possible.

The Importance of a Blog Strategy Before Starting A Blog

It is essential to have a blog strategy in place before you start to write your post. Without one, it will be challenging to ensure that the content of your blog is achieving the goals that you set out for it.

Here are some things to consider when writing your posts:

• Write with a clear goal in mind.
• Write with a specific target audience in mind.
• Write with a specific purpose in mind (this can be anything from increasing brand awareness, increasing conversions from visitors who land on this page and more).

How to Write a Blog Post?

Once you have your topics and keywords set, you can start writing. Start by Writing a blog post that is easy to read; use short sentences and paragraphs, bullet points, and subheadings, and make sure you have a call to action at the end of your blog post.

A blog is not just an extension of your website or social media; it should be created as its own entity with its own personality and tone. If you think about it this way, it will help you decide what kind of content you want to publish on your blog so that readers can find what they’re looking for easily—and come back again and again! To ensure this, don't just write fluff pieces, write insightful and helpful content that offers the reader something to take away from reading your blog. You never want a reader to finish reading your blog content and think, "wow, I just wasted 5 minutes of my life."

To make things easier on yourself when trying to write naturally engaging content consistently, consider investing in some software like Grammarly (which helps detect spelling errors as well as grammar mistakes). This will save hours spent checking over everything manually later down the line!

1. Show off your Expertise

Blogging is a great way to share your expertise with the world. In fact, it's one of the most effective ways to build trust and credibility with your audience.

Showcasing your expertise isn't just about sharing information though; it's also about providing value by giving advice on topics you know well. This is the best way for you to demonstrate that you know what you're talking about, not just what others have told you.

2. Answer Customer Questions

If you're wondering why customers are so interested in your blog posts, it's because they want answers.

That's right: people want to know how to do things! They want to know how they can get more value from a product, or what their next steps should be in an industry, or how they can better understand some other aspect of the world that interests them. Your business blog is a great place for them to find these answers.

It's important that you don't just copy and paste your FAQs into blog posts—this will result in boring writing and won't improve engagement with your content much at all, plus you'll take a hit on your SEO for having the same content on your site in more than one place. Instead, write engaging content around specific customer questions (i.e., "How do I use this product?" or "What kind of benefits does this service offer?").

3. Pair Blog Posts with Complementary Content

Your blog is an extension of your website, but it can also be a standalone asset. It's important to understand how people use the web and how search engines work so that you can make sure this is the case for your business.

The best way to do this is by creating complementary content: on-site pages that help readers learn more about specific topics without being linked directly from the blog post. Complementary content includes things like product pages, glossaries, FAQs, and more.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

Despite the trend of declining attention spans (blame Tiktok), long blog posts are the better choice when trying to rank.

A Medium article says you want to aim for about 7 minutes of reading time per piece. HubSpot took this information and extrapolated that at 300 words a minute, the ideal blog post should be about 2,100 words. Anything longer then 3,000 words should be turned into a downloadable. HubSpot's best performing content is between 2,250 and 2,500 words. As a reference I'm current just over 1,100 words at this point so we're about halfway through.

The option for more words is because long-form content is seen as more valuable and engaging, as a reminder blogs that are thought to be of more value to the reader are better ranked by Google's SEO algorithms . Despite the increased effort required to write longer posts, the benefits are significant.

What Are the Benefits of Longer Blog Posts?

Longer Blogs are More Helpful and Rank Better on SERP

As mentioned above, longer blog posts are not only seen as more valuable to the reader, but also give your more opportunity to build in proper SEO blog structure. This includes internal links, external links, meta descriptions on images, and more.

Readers Stay on Your Website Longer

The goal of a blog piece is to bring new visitors to your site. Visitors reading a long format blog spend on average 40% longer reading that piece that they would on an average website page. They are also 25% more likely to click around and look at more pages on your site. This is from a Neil Patel study.

If readers find value in your blog, they are also more likely to sign up for your Newsletter, giving you a way to nurture them as a lead until it is the right time for them in the sales cycle to make a purchase.

Readers are More Likely to Share Longer Blogs

According to QuickSprout, they found that on average, posts with fewer than 1,500 words received 174.6 tweets and 59.3 Facebook likes, while those with over 1,500 words received an average of 293.5 tweets and 72.7 Facebook likes. This indicates that posts with more than 1,500 words receive 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes on average.

What Should I Avoid Doing while Blogging?

There are many ways to ruin a perfectly good blog, below are the most common:

• Too Much Self- Promotion
• Not Performing Keyword Research
• Not Using the Keywords you are Targeting
• Using too many of the same Keywords in Different Blogs
• Choosing the Wrong Topics for your Audience
• Not Publishing Frequently Enough
• Not using internal and external links in your blog
• Not researching your blog well enough
• Plagerism
• Covering too many Topics in one Blog
• Writing about the same Topic Over and Over
• Writing too formal
• Not Using Images
• Not using proper SEO Blog Practices

How Do I Get My Blog Noticed?

If you've started to publish blogs regularly and you've followed all the best practices but you're not getting much traffic, you may need to go out and get traffic rather than wait for it to come to you.

Promote Your Best Pieces on Your Newsletter

An email newsletter is a great way to surface your best blogs to your audience. A newsletter is great for multiple reasons - first, you can nurture leads over time with content so they can learn more about your products and brand and you'll be in their mind when they're ready to make a purchase.

Secondly, you can segment your newsletter based on interest. If you offer multiple products or services, or your product or service can appeal to different groups of people, you can bucket your audiences and serve them different content, even different offers.

Post it on Social Media Channels

Taking content from your blog and turning it into an appropriate form of content for your social media channels can help boost your blog readership and get you more followers on social media. For example - I could take this list of way to promote your blog and turn it into a short Reel on Instagram. I would post just the titles and let the watchers know that for more info, they can check out the blog which is linked in our bio.

Write More

The more often you write, the more traffic you will get. You need to train the algorithms to pay more attention to your page and that it can expect new content on a consistent basis.

Review For SEO Best Practices

Yes, you have keywords but have you optimized your title tags, meta descriptions, and URL slug? Have you added internal and external links? Technical SEO is just as important as On Page SEO because it is how Google learns how to index and surface your page.

Does My Blog Need to Have Images?

Yes it should. Images work to enhance the reader's understanding of the content. Even if you only have one photo on your blog, a visually appealing image that shows up when your blog is linked can be the reason your blog is chosen (or not) over another of similar content.

Additionally images help your blog show up in search when someone is using Google Image Search.

Where to Get Images to Use on Your Blog

1. The Most Obvious and Time-Consuming: Take them Yourself
2. Make it Yourself on Canva
3. Hire Someone to Take Them/ Draw them
4. Use an AI Service like Midjourney to Create them Yourself
5. Use Free Stock Images
6. Pexels
7. Unsplash
8. Pixabay
9. PikWizard

Conclusion

Now that we’ve covered what it takes to create a blog strategy, the next step is simple. Start writing! Or, if this all seems like WAY too much work - at Baotris we specialize in blog strategy and content. Check out our organic marketing packages and book your free 15 minute audit to find out your organic marketing growth potential.