How to Craft a Blog Content Strategy for Your Business

If you have a blog for your business—and you should be blogging—then you’ve likely wondered how to manage all of the deadlines and details that make your content successful. That’s where a blog content strategy comes in.

By having a plan that outlines your audience, your topics, your deadlines and more, you will consistently post valuable content that your audience can’t wait to read. And that’s the goal for your business blog, right?

Follow these five steps to craft a solid blog content strategy:

Know Your Audience

Before you start creating your content, figure out who will read what you have to share. As a business owner, you may have already done this exercise—by researching and developing personas of your ideal customers, you have done the work to identify your ideal readers, too. That’s the point of your content after all—to offer enough free value to your readers that they eventually become paying customers and advocates of your brand.

If you haven’t yet identified your ideal customer and readers, now is a great time to start. Do some research and develop a persona (either made up or based on a real customer) that represents each ideal customer for your business. Find out the questions they’re asking, the content they’re consuming, the terms they search in Google; consider their pain points, their desires and what they would find most valuable in your product or service.

Knowing your audience well ensures that you write content they actually want to read—and will also help you determine when you should post and how often, how long your blog posts should be, what images you should include, how you should promote your posts and more.

Get really clear on who you want to serve with your content before you create anything.

Come Up With Ideas Using Keywords

Now that you’ve done your research, you have a pretty good idea of what your audience may want to read. But if you’re still wondering how to come up with content ideas, you can take that research a step further—keyword research is a valuable tool not just for optimizing your SEO, but also for writing about the exact topics your readers are searching.

Of course, keyword research and SEO can be complicated—that’s why our search engine optimization services are so popular! But a little keyword research goes a long way when it comes to uncovering the subjects your ideal customers most want to read.

Start by brainstorming a list of keywords you want to rank—these phrases are the foundation of your blog content strategy. You can also do additional research by:

• Using Google’s Keyword Planner to research the top-ranking keywords in your niche.
• Finding the most popular posts in your industry on BuzzSumo, and analyzing the topics.
• Reviewing Twitter, Reddit, Quora and Amazon reviews to curate the most popular topics (and keywords) customers are curious about.

Once you’ve curated a list of 15-20 (or more!) keywords, start to brainstorm specific topics based on those keywords. Write down anything that comes to mind—right now, no blog post topic is a bad one.

Then comb through your list of ideas and highlight your favorites. Now you’ve curated content topics that speak to exactly what your audience seeks.

Create a Comprehensive Calendar

You likely use calendars to keep track of important dates, milestones, meetings and reminders in your personal and professional life—that tracking is integral to content planning, too!

Your blog content calendar will map out your posts, giving you a macro view of what is scheduled to go live and when. You can also plan for the individual steps that need to be taken to create each piece of content and add in deadlines accordingly.

Calendars are a helpful way to keep yourself and your team on schedule, and to avoid the stress of figuring out what to post at the last-minute! Calendars are also helpful for coming up with blog post ideas—when you see that a specific holiday or company product launch is coming up, you can create content that incorporates those updates.

From a free Excel spreadsheet to a premium platform like CoSchedule, there are a lot of resources to help you create and maintain an effective content calendar. Figure out what works best for your business and your budget, then add your blog post topics and content deadlines—on a schedule that is realistic for you—to the calendar.

Check and update your blog content calendar regularly to keep your posts on schedule, consistent and up-to-date!

Find the Right Writers

The size of your blog content team depends on the size of your business. If you’re a party of one, then you may be in charge of writing every blog post. (And we’ve got writing tips, if you need them.) Or maybe not! Everyone from solopreneurs to Fortune 500 corporations have access to freelance or full-time writers who can support your blog content strategy.

Whether you’re doing all of the writing yourself or you’ve hired writers and formed a content team, make sure you find the right writers for your blog. The best writers for your blog posts could vary based on your content voice, your brand message, your budget and more—before you start hiring, you may want to get clear on those points.

Just keep in mind that you’re not blogging just to blog. You have a very specific audience in mind—with the very specific goal of converting them into paying customers. Be particular about your writers and your content, ensuring that you’re providing a high-quality experience for your readers at every turn.

Provide Value In Every Post

The purpose of blogging for your business is to provide value to your audience: consistent, free value that highlights your expertise, your brand personality and your consideration for your customers—in other words, for the people reading your posts!

We do that here at Roaring Pajamas, too: We recently posted about our favorite dads on the Internet for Father’s Day, but we didn’t want our post to be more fluffy holiday-themed content. We thought about how we could share some fun content, while simultaneously providing valuable online marketing tips to our audience.

Try to do the same with every piece of content you publish. Think back to when you first started doing your reader research—what are the questions your customers ask again and again? What problems do they have? Which solutions can you offer?

When you base every blog post on answering a question or solving a problem or filling a need, then you’ll be consistently providing value in your content. You’ll build awareness, you’ll build trust and you’ll likely convert a lot more readers into customers through your blog content.

Does your business have a blog? Share what you’ll add to your blog content strategy with us in the comments below!