Preparing and planning the content for your blog will put you ahead of the rest in a huge way. Believe it or not, many bloggers only blog when the inspiration strikes and have no regular content plan. But, those who are serious and want to create a money-making, high value blog, start with a plan.
Understand Who Your Audience Is
Part of creating a great blog with awesome content is to really know your audience inside and out. You need to know what words make an impact on them. In addition, you need to know all their worries, fears, loves, and interests and how it relates to your products and/or services. The more you can speak their language about your products and services, the more impact your content will have on them.
What Impact Your Niche?
Knowing in advance about what is coming up, or being aware enough to jump on something that has just happened in the news surrounding your industry are important components in creating an excellent content plan. Whether you blog about events, accomplishments, and happenings in your own life, or about a business industry, doesn't matter. Keep it relevant by matching it to things your audience cares about.
Newsletters, Email and Social Media
Today, your blogging content has to work with newsletters, email and social media content. You can't plan your blog content without thinking about how you will promote the content. It's no longer good enough to write it "and they will come" - instead, it's important to understand how it all works together.
Main Pages
There are important pages that your blog will need in order to look professional. Potential pages to choose from may be:
About page
Contact page
Guest posting information
Advertising information
Services/product page
Archived posts
Tools and resources
Subscribe page
Start here page
Privacy policy
Not only are these pages important, but they also provide more real-estate to add in copy that is needed to attract search engine traffic and your audience to reading your blog post. Decide in advance what pages you'll have so that you can plan the content for each page.
Categories Are Important (But Don't Have Too Many)
Once you've determined the pages you need outside of the "blog" page, it's important to determine which categories you'll have on your blog. Limiting the number of categories for your blog is important. Stick with 9 to 15 categories. The more you can narrow down the subject matter and categories, the more focused your blog posts will be and the easier they will be to find for your readers.
Your Content Schedule
When creating the content plan for your blog, ask yourself how often you plan to post content. This is very important to know as you create an editorial calendar based on the products and services you want to promote. Knowing you plan to post daily requires just slightly more work than posting weekly when you have the plan in front of you and of course, will get better results when it's focused.
Major and Minor Keywords
Studying keywords within your niche can help you come up with categories as well as subjects which you want to blog about. The subjects can also help determine what forms the content will appear in. For example, you may want to interview movers and shakers within your niche. These might be better suited for a podcast while a "how to" post might be better if it appears as a video on your blog.
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