Having a robust blog content strategy for your business is an important piece of the digital marketing puzzle. It’s also not always easy to develop but saves you thousands of dollars in paid ads.
For example, HubSpot’s blog generates 12+ million organic visitors every single month, and it would cost them tens of millions of dollars per month to get the same traffic via paid ads. (Source)
Clearly, a blog is something that all businesses should run behind.
In this post, we’ll look at some key questions you should be asking when developing a blog content strategy for your business, as well as looking at some key areas to focus on to help you achieve success.
Let’s get to it…
Why does your business need a blog content strategy?
Before we start talking about the blog strategy, it’s critical to understand why you should have a robust blog content strategy for your business. What are the benefits?
Some of the most important reasons are:
1. You control the narrative
I always mention this quote by Noam Chomsky, “who controls the media, controls the minds of the public”. It is so true.
The biggest benefit that comes out of having a blog is that you control how potential customers perceive your products and your business. You explain why your products are better, why it costs this much, and how it’s a better alternative—basically, you control the narrative.
2. Helps establish brand awareness
There is a distinction between “business” and “brand” — business is sales, but the brand is the feeling. And having a powerful blog serves the purpose of brand awareness effectively.
As strategically planned blogs are capable of driving hundreds of thousands of organic traffic every month, people coming to the website start recognizing your brand wherever they see it.
3. Drives more sales
As mentioned above, blogs can drive tons of traffic — they increase your sales too. Blogs do an outstanding job of converting casual website visitors into customers.
For example, each month Shopify blog drives 1.7 million visitors to its site and ranks for some high-volume keywords like “start a business”, “start drop-shipping”, “start an online store”, etc. And even if they convert 0.5% of visitors to customers, they have 8,500 additional customers every month.
4. Shows long-lasting results
Once you stop spending money on ads, all the incoming traffic immediately stops. But that’s not the case with blogs, even if you stop publishing new content, it keeps driving traffic to your website.
5. Helps with link-building
Backlinks are one of the most important search engine ranking factors, and having valuable articles on your blog helps you acquire some quality backlinks, naturally.
And having more inbound links (backlinks) incoming help build your domain authority which ultimately helps your website rank higher for competitive keywords.
Developing a robust blog content strategy for your business
I have divided this section into the following 4 chapters:
- Planning
- Organizing
- Creating
- Distributing
Now, let’s take a look at each of these in detail:
1. Planning
Planning consists of researching and strategizing — you research possibilities and then make strategies accordingly.
For example, if your business sells auto parts, then you would find out a gap in the content related to auto parts and try to fill the gap with useful content.
It’s the same for all kinds of businesses.
But the challenge is finding out the content gap, let’s understand what it is and how to do that.
What are content gaps, and how do find them?
The topics that can take your business to the moon but are not currently covered by your website are called content gaps. Basically, these are topics that your potential customers are looking for.
Here are some ways to do a content gap analysis for your business:
- Analyze all the top ranking posts on Google and see if they are useful, thorough, and fresh — if not, there’s your chance
- Make a list of all your competitors and do a manual audit of their blogs to understand how you can create better content
- Raid forums (Reddit, Quora, etc.) to find out the problems that people are facing
- Interview your potential customers to understand their pain points and there’s your chance to help them out with your content
- Use SEMrush/Ahrefs, which have inbuilt tools for finding content gaps between your website and your competitors
- Brainstorm and identify all the possible bottlenecks in the buyers’ journey
- Analyze the existing content on your website and find improvement opportunities, etc.
There is no fixed method to find content gaps, you just need to keep looking.
> Your goal should not just be to publish new blog posts, but also to improve the existing ones.
After you find out the areas where you can create content, it’s time to find interesting keywords and plan content creation as per your bandwidth. And, if your business is new and the domain authority is low, first, select topics that are easier to rank, and then move towards competitive keywords.
2. Organizing
If you want to play the game of blogging at scale, you would need an effective organization system so that you…
- can do more in less time and effort
- never miss the self-set deadline, and
- can easily delegate tasks to your team
And after all, having a proper organizational system makes it easier to track your progress.
There are tools like Notion, Google Sheets, Asana, Trello, etc. that you can use to organize your blog content. Most of these tools allow you to create a custom management dashboard as you prefer.
I prefer using Notion to organize all the content published on UntalkedSEO, here is what the dashboard looks like:
But you will find several people using Google Sheets and other mentioned tools to manage their blogging workflow. The goal here is to create a system that is easier to manage and track progress.
3. Creating
Now that you have a plan and the organization system is ready too, it’s time to start creating high-quality content.
According to the recent Google helpful content update, unless your users are feeling that they have learned something valuable after reading your content, it’s not good enough. You have to create content that is “useful” for your readers.
The “useful content” is the content that satisfies the searcher’s intent or the user’s intent. Here are some tips for that:
- Develop user personas that define your audience and keep them in mind while creating content
- Analyze the SERP manually to see what other appearing results are providing, most probably, this is what users want, and
- Make sure the users get all the answers that they are looking for
Representation matters, so present your blog posts in a way that it’s easier to skim and pleasing to look at. Here are some formatting tips for your blog:
- Use short sentences as well as short paragraphs
- Use headings and subheadings to better organize the information
- Keep the font clean and large enough to ensure better readability
- Use images (photos, screenshots, and infographics) to break up the giant wall of text
- Add 5-6 internal and external link references, but do not overdo it
- Highlight your CTAs for better conversions
- If possible, use bullet points and tables instead of a giant block of text, and
- Make the posts engaging to read (it shouldn’t be like an academic research paper)
I recommend publishing fast while maintaining the quality.
You can also use programmatic SEO techniques to create 100s of pages targeting long-tail keywords. The technique can help you drive highly targeted traffic who are ready to make a purchase.
4. Distributing
Let me provide you with 2 scenarios:
- A person hitting publish on 1 blog post every day
- A person hitting publish on 1 blog post every day and then sharing the blog posts through other channels
Now, who is giving their content better chances of success?
The 2nd one! Right?
Yes, just publishing is not enough. If you want your blog posts to reach their full potential — repurpose, redistribute, repost, and reshare.
The idea here is to repurpose your blog posts into several other formats like social media posts, podcasts, videos, images, email series, ebooks, etc., and then redistribute them to the other channels associated with your business/brand. And then reshare and repost your content numerous times on social media.
Your blog posts might still reach their potential even if you don’t repurpose and redistribute, but doing so increases the chances. Furthermore, sharing on social media can earn you notable mentions and even get you powerful backlinks that would benefit your whole website.
Final words
To develop a robust blog content strategy for your blog, you just need to:
- Research and plan
- Make an organizational system
- Create useful content, and
- Distribute through multiple channels
Make standard operating procedures for your team, keep learning and improving your process, and you will have a perfectly optimized blog driving tons of quality traffic to your website.
