11 Things To Take Care Of While Planning Your Blog Content Strategy

Content is vital to the success of any kind of marketing, especially brand marketing. A viable content strategy helps you clarify several questions and understand the need and value of content. You’ll know why you’re creating content, who you’re trying to talk to, what your audience wants from you and so on. A good content strategy provides you with clear direction as to how you’ll produce and manage content over time.

1. Set Content Goals

Content helps you to get pageviews, and allows for audience engagement and loyalty to build. Set specific goals for your blog – say you want to generate $10,000 in a year from now. Based on your goal, determine your content publishing frequency, post types, media, number of posts per month, traffic objectives, comment quality and quantity and so on.

2. Create A Content Calendar

A clear, viable and integrated content calendar is your content strategy’s backbone. A content calendar aligns your PR, marketing and editorial efforts. In it you can include a schedule of product content releases, videos, tweets, Facebook status updates, editorial and regular articles, and promotions and so on. Your content calendar must also display platform-specific relationships.

3. Create A Content Style Guide

Create a content style guide that reflects your blog’s brand ethos. If you are working solo, the content style guide will help you stay on track of your content’s format, style, font size, writing style, image placements, image size and many other parameters. If you have a content team, then the style guide will keep everyone’s effort streamlined and standard.

4. Establish A Review Process

No matter who writes the content, it should be thoroughly reviewed before being approved for posting. Set up a review process for the original author to self-review content after the writing is complete. Set up a master review process so that you and your core team can review the content before publishing it.

5. Set Up A Content Curation Process

Consider your content to be a valuable business asset and treat it with care. Set up a curation process so that content on your blog is regularly updated for currency. Archived content should be marked as archived so that people know that it’s historical and not current. This process will help you create dedicated landing pages for popular content series.

6. Budget Specialist Skills For Special Content

You will need to commission specialist content now and then for your blog. This could be an eBook, an infographics, mobile apps, Facebook apps, and audio podcasts and so on. In your content strategy, allow for a budget to create some of these types of content for your blog.

7. Inventory Your Content

Set up an inventory process to list each piece of content in your blog along with its category, publishing date and other associated metadata. This will help you locate posts that are outdated, categorized incorrectly, broken links, typos, spam comments and so on. Regularly applying this inventorying strategy will help you evaluate your content assets and weaknesses.

8. Evaluate Content Gaps

Once your content inventory is taken and you’ve collected relevant metadata, the next process is to evaluate content gaps. Do this keeping your content goals in mind. Have you overlooked important tags, or is that you’ve not used tags based on what your audience is looking for? Address all these issues; create additional tags if needed, and categorize your content intuitively and logically. Ensure that your content’s mechanics are aligned closely with your content goals.

9. Identify Content Responsibilities

These are tasks and responsibilities that you set based on your content objectives and goals.

• List out your content tasks based on content goals
• Create a content frequency schedule
• List the tools you will use to publish content
• Determine content source and content requirements
• List tasks for content follow up and accuracy check, spell check, posting schedule

10. Determine Types Of Content You Need

You’ll be posting content not just on your blog, but also on other blogs as a guest blogger. There are different kinds of content – there are articles, product reviews, reports, infographics, and blog posts and so on. Based on your promotional and business goals, determine what types of content you’ll need. This will help you decide who’ll write the content and if you need to hire someone, commission a third party and so on.

11. Create A Writing And Publishing Schedule

If you are doing most of the writing, determine a writing schedule based on your posting schedule and your timelines. If you’re working with a team or commissioned writers, create a master schedule, assigning individual child schedules for your team.  Your writing schedule should be in sync with your publishing schedule; use the same worksheet if possible, so that everyone’s on board with both schedules.

Dean works for conversion rate optimization company Invesp and helps business in improving their landing pages and online campaigns.

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3. A Different Advertising Strategy
4. A Simple But Effective “Untold” Blog Promotion Strategy
5. Blog vs. Website- What Are the Differences?

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