It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing blog posts for your own purposes or whether you’ve picked up work from a company who decided to hire a blog writer, you need to have a plan to achieve long-term growth. But how do you determine what those goals are? Here are some different levels of blog planning that will help you achieve the goals for that blog:
Post planning
When you plan an individual post, you’ll consider how many words are in the post, the topic, what angle you’re exploring, the audience you’re addressing and how you’re formatting it. Say you’re writing for a real estate blog. A 250-word blog post written on the closing process for prospective homebuyers with problem credit in a list format is going to be completely different than a 500-word blog post written on handling offers for real estate agents dealing with commercial property using subheadings to break up the text.
Marketing and SEO planning
In addition to planning the individual post, you’ll want to determine your plan for marketing and search engine rankings. To create content that improves your search engine ranking, you’ll need to research what keywords are receiving a lot of hits consistently, which ones are showing regular growth and which ones need to be avoided because they don’t receive enough traffic or are only receiving hits related to a particular news story or other topic that provides only brief exposure.
You’ll also need to consider the long-term goals with regards to the audience your blog addresses, how to get your blog in front of them regularly and how you expect the blog to help your business.
Long-term blog goals
When you’re looking at the big picture, is the blog you’re working on intended as a DIY resource for plumbing repairs so the professionals are only called out when they’re really needed? Is it based on how to hire the right contractor for your home project with a call to action at the bottom encouraging viewers to get a quote because that perfect contractor is your client? Is it trying to raise funds by providing commentary on political news and how the charity you’re writing for helped promote a bill?
Other things to consider include how often to post (usually 1-3 times a week is ideal), create an editorial calendar based around events at that time (i.e., holidays or special events), how you’ll promote the posts and how you’ll review a post’s performance to propagate successful post’s style.
Whatever your blog goals are, be sure to provide a unified voice by using the same view (first, second or third person and singular or plural), formatting (subheadings and/or bullet points), level of information (beginner, intermediate or expert in the field) and type of topics (real estate, business, professional development, education). If you need to hire a blog writer, you’ll want to try to find a few that can make the goals happen in every post.
Cathleen V is a multi-talented writer with experience in many different fields. She focuses on tutorial, content, blog and article writing for small and medium business management and development, content optimization and marketing, arts businesses, crafts, agriculture, science, construction and home improvement, homesteading arts, food, nutrition and natural health. She is a top 1% content writer out of over 22,000.
