Planning your blog posts is something that every website owner wants to do but does not always feel they have the time to accomplish that.  Earlier this year, I shared an article called, “5 Simple Content Creation Ideas for Your Website.” In it, I reviewed my favorite ways to develop fresh content ideas for your blog. In this article, I’ll share 5 tips for planning your blog posts.

But just creating content for your blog cannot be as effective as it can be without proper planning. With the right strategy/planning, your content can make your website work for you!

Why You Want to Strategically “Plan” Your Blog Posts

If you are a business owner with a website, you probably already know writing blog posts (“articles”) is one of the best website tools you can use to drive traffic. You can provide your website visitors with helpful information while establishing yourself as an expert in your field and building a community. And your blog posts help you market your products and services.

So don’t just write random articles! When you write something, you want it to work as hard as it can to achieve the results you want from it. So take a moment, and first think about the BIG GOAL of your website, and hence the goal of your blog posts.

Elements of Planning Your Blog Posts

After clarifying your website goal, you are ready to create specific plans for your individual blog posts. Here are the elements that you want to consider during your blog article planning process:

  1. Blog post schedule
  2. Purpose of each post
  3. Blog post content
  4. Post sharing methods
  5. Keywords

1. Blog Post Schedule

Having a regular schedule to publish blog posts is a great way to get more strategic about blog posts. Add your editorial schedule to your calendar (I use Google Calendar for this) and mark the dates when you want to publish your posts. Do you see any events in your calendar you’d like your website audience to know about? Make sure you’ll have a blog post scheduled in your editorial calendar. Do you want to do a series of blog posts on a certain topic? Schedule them in your editorial calendar at the right interval.

Remember also that search engines like websites with frequent updates. Take advantage of the ease of blogging to keep your website with fresh content for search engine optimization, too.

[tweetthis]Tips for planning out your blog post content in #WordPress [/tweetthis]

2. Purpose of Each Post

Think about how you will integrate your blog post content into your business strategy. Are you planning the blog post content that supports the goal that you are trying to achieve?

If you are trying to build a community, write something encouraging participation via comments. Writing on pain points that your audience might be experiencing and presenting the solution that you offer could help you sell your products and services. Sharing some great information leading to your opt-in offer could be great list-building content.

You can mix up any of these but remember to be strategic.

3. Blog Post Content

Once you know the purpose of the post you’d like to create, it’s time to put on your creative hat and plan the content! Add your blog post topic to your editorial calendar.

If you need to get over writer’s block, read my post, “5 Simple Content Creation Ideas for Your Website,” to get inspiration!

4. Post Sharing Methods

After publishing a blog post, don’t just sit there and hope people come and find it. Social media and other online tools make it easy to inform the world about your blog post. By sharing the link to your blog posts on social media, etc., you also create incoming links to your blog post, increasing the chance of the post being indexed and ranked by Google.

If you publish an email newsletter, you can share the article in it, too.

5. Keywords

Decide on a keyword/keyphrase you want to focus on in each blog post to optimize it for search engines.

Using keywords is a big topic in the SEO (“search engine optimization”) world, and I’m not going into this in this article. However, if your website runs on WordPress, some excellent plugins help you with keywords and other SEO-related items, such as Yoast SEO (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/).

Planning your blog posts might seem like a big job at first, but once you start, you’ll most likely find it very helpful and become a part of your business strategy planning process. I highly recommend starting with using an editorial calendar (See my article here on “How to use Google Calendar” for planning), which I’m sure will open up your eyes about the blog post planning!

 

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