As a business owner, you know it’s important to have a strong blog strategy that helps educate your audience about your offerings and drive traffic to your website. But what if you have no idea where to start? Although you understand your business inside and out, sometimes it can be challenging to translate that knowledge into a robust blog strategy. That’s why we’ve compiled the best practices for building a strong blog strategy so that you can master creating engaging content that drives traffic and engagement to your website.

Topic Selection

The first thing you must consider when building a blog strategy is your topic selection. One tactic is to look at your past content to see what performed well and sparked the most interest and engagement. If you don’t have access to past insights, you could consider using an online tool to help you generate ideas or even just ask your audience directly. But no matter how you slice it, selecting proper topics for your blogging endeavor is critical. So, ask yourself questions like What’s important to your audience? What are some areas you feel they could use some further education? and How can you highlight your main offering in an informational format (rather than a solely promotional way)? When you’re able to not only answer these questions but translate them into an engaging blog post, it becomes easier to establish yourself as a thought leader, resonate with your target audience, and increase your website traffic.

Targeted Writing

Now with the topic selection complete, it’s time to start the writing process. But you don’t just want to slap some information on a page and publish it as a blog. No, you need to engage in targeted writing that speaks directly to your prospective client’s pain points. If you struggle with this, consider building an ideal “persona” or fictional character to stand in as your ideal customer and then write to them. So, for example, if you owned a print and digital marketing agency (such as Tulip Media Group), you might write a blog post for business owners (like you) about the best practices for creating a robust blog strategy for their business—see what we did there? Other things to consider are being empathetic to your reader—showing them you understand and can solve their pain points—and cutting out the jargon. Even if your business provides high-level solutions for complex problems, you still need to be able to speak fluently and, more importantly, be understood by your audience. If you’ve integrated these suggestions but still struggle with the writing aspect of your blog strategy, you might consider taking advantage of our custom content creation services at Tulip Media Group!

Keyword Optimization

So, the topic is selected and you’ve started the blog writing process, but now you need to think about keyword optimization. Keywords help your content rank in search engine results so that it can be found by prospective clients, meaning the selection and utilization of your keywords is critical. However, before you start drowning in keywords, you’ll be happy to know that every blog post should be optimized around only one keyword. Now, we’re not saying you can’t include secondary keywords (in fact, that’s a great idea), but if you optimize your post around too many different keywords, you can confuse the search engines that crawl your page, affecting your post’s ranking. To ensure your blog post is optimized for your specific keyword, try to use the main keyword in your title, headers, and URL, and focus on making your headline and link as clickable as possible.

Content Planning

Promotion

Finally, the question you’ve undoubtedly had on your mind while reading this article: How do you promote your blog? Well, if you follow all these steps and optimize your blog properly, you can start seeing organic engagement and traffic thanks to the power of search engine optimization (SEO). However, for that extra promotional push, you could also post about it on your social media, alert your networking contacts, seek out backlink opportunities, or maybe even work with an influencer (if applicable). Beyond this, you could use your email list to drive traffic back to your blog, become a guest writer for another blog in a similar field, or make your blog post sharable for further reach and engagement. And if there’s a trending topic within your industry—jump on it! When you’re able to follow online trends with your blogging, you not only get to join the conversation and have your voice heard but you can also establish yourself as an industry leader while driving traffic to your website.

Bringing It All Together