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 went over my favorite ways to come up with fresh content ideas for your blog.
But just creating content for your blog cannot be as effective as it can be without a proper planning. With the right strategy/planning, the content you create can really 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 post planning process:
- Blog post schedule
- Purpose of each post
- Blog post content
- Post sharing methods
- Keywords
1. Blog Post Schedule
Having a regular schedule to publish blog posts is a great way to get more strategic about blog posts. Just 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 on that 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 that would encourage the participation via comments. Writing on a pain points that your audience might be experiencing and the presenting the solution that you offer could help you sell your products and services. Or sharing some great information leading to your opt-in offer could be great list building content.
You can of course mix up any of these, if appropriate, but just 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 inspirations!
4. Post Sharing Methods
After publishing a blog post, don’t just sit there and hope people with come and find it. Thanks to social media and other online tools, it’s easy to let the world know about your blog post. By sharing the link to your blog posts on social media, etc., you are also creating 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 main keyword/key phrase that you want to focus on in each blog post to optimize it for search engines.
Using keywords itself 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, there are some excellent plugins that 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 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!
This is a big help for me!! I have written way too many blog posts that just wander around without a focus and then I lose my passion and stop writing. Going forward I will plan and follow this guide. Thank you!!
Hey there 🙂
Your wordpress site is very sleek – hope you
don’t mind me asking what theme you’re using?
(and don’t mind if I steal it? :P)
I just launched my site –also built in wordpress like yours– but
the theme slows (!) the site down quite a bit.
Keep up the good work– and hope you all take care of yourself during the
coronavirus scare!
Glad you like this theme, Justin! It’s the Divi “Extra” theme by Elegant Themes. You can purchase it yourself by going to https://www.christinasresources.com/extra