Develop a Blog Plan
Building a blog is one thing… effectively communicating with visitors is something else altogether.
Planning the future of your blog is an essential element for overall success. A solid plan will allow you to see a more fluid layout, guide you in content writing, and help streamline popularity.
A good way to begin (using paper and pencil) is to write down what your blog is about and what you are looking to accomplish, for example: provide a service, advice, sell product (s), promote a business, etc.
This is simply the overall concept and you should KISS it (keep it simple stupid). The details will follow. (Be sure to write everything down.)
You want to begin with a list of …
- WHO is your target audience?
- WHY would they want your product/service?
- WHAT benefits does your product/service provide?
- HOW will your product/service improve their lives?
Answers to these questions will give you plenty to write about. Give them a reason to stay on your site with personalized, interesting content.
Put yourself in their place and think about the type of information you would like to see when first visiting a site.
Research
Use Google to find out what your future customers want or need, and what your competition is doing. This will give you more ideas to add to your plan.
Message boards and review sites are very helpful when it comes to peoples opinions of what’s good or bad – use them.
Join a few forums and ask questions about your product/service. The responses you get will be invaluable.
Knowing what others want, and do, is key.
Strategic posting
Make a list of all the information you have gathered so far and do a keyword analysis – Google Adwords keyword tool is most beneficial for this.
Decide on a posting schedule. How often can you consistently post to your blog… daily, weekly, or monthly?
There are no standards but you should try to maintain some consistency, and let your readers know what to expect.
You can now begin creating posts using the above information.
Lead your visitors with posts that relate to one another while using keywords and product/service links in the content. These should be fairly short, but informative.
NOTE: A good idea is to set up a “Page” that describes your product/service, then refer to this page in the content of your articles. By doing this your blog posts are meeting the customers wants, needs, and desires, while giving them a single location to view the product, detailed information, and make their purchase (or whatever).
WordPress allows you to create posts and save them as drafts, or schedule them to publish at a future date. It is highly recommended that you NOT publish many posts at one time as the search engines frown upon this.
Good strategy would be to create your posts, save them as drafts, review for perfection, then schedule them for staggered dates to publish. See “Write a Post” in our WordPress Tutorials section.
Promote your post
Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to let the world know your blog is alive and has something to offer.
There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites where you can “suggest” your articles (posts), such as: Digg, Technorati, MySpace, Twitter, and maybe a few more. A little investigation will reveal where your target audience hangs out.
Sign up to 5 or 6 of the most popular and submit every post you create to each site. Consistency, along with good content, will make your blog popular.
It is accepted practice to submit your own articles and should be included as part of your plan with every post made.
Conclusion:
The above steps should get you well on your way to a successful blog.
Please keep in mind that your blog should be fully optimized before initiating the above steps.
Optimization (SEO) tips and strategies can be found on our sister site – asiteable.com.
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Dolly