How to Create a Winning Blog Content Strategy in 7 Steps

 What is a weblog content material method?

A weblog content material approach is a imaginative and prescient and a plan which you have on your blog. Much like a enterprise approach, a weblog method will point your blog within the right course and guide you closer to what you want to gain together with your blog content.

Your blog content method need to be aligned with your commercial enterprise desires and your usual content approach. Your commercial enterprise goals should be the primary driving force of your content material.

For a higher concept of where your blog approach sits inside the large photograph, right here’s a easy diagram:

Why do you want a blog content method?

There are greater than seven million weblog posts posted each single day. In our observe, we found that the majority (ninety.63%) of all web pages get no monthly natural site visitors. At all.

Without a clear strategy, you might become creating weblog content material for the sake of creating it—with out it getting any visitors and doing any accurate for the boom of your business.

A stable weblog strategy will help you be in the 9.37%.

Now, let’s get to growing one.

How to create a blog content material strategy

Here’s a step-with the aid of-step manual for constructing a weblog method that will help you get more site visitors to your commercial enterprise and produce new customers your way.

Define your “why”

Research your competitors

Do thorough key-word studies

Build a content material plan

Create your blog’s identity

Track your achievement

1. Define your “why”

Forget the metrics for a moment and think about the huge image. What is the cause of your weblog? Why must your blog exist? Your answers to these questions shape the essence of your blog content strategy, so try to placed it into one sentence and let it guide all of your blog efforts.

At Slido, for example, our overarching aim is to become the number one resource for people who want to run better meetings.

If you’re struggling to locate your weblog’s reason, this easy “help-to-through” framework (inspired by way of the “get-to-by using” version from advertising and marketing) may additionally help you. Just fill in the gaps.

The motive of my blog is to assist [audience with a specific problem or JTBD] to [the desired outcome] by [the means].

At Ahrefs, our assist-to-via strategy can be as follows:

Help marketers and website owners to get higher at search engine marketing and pressure extra site visitors to their web sites with the aid of publishing in-depth tutorials and how-to courses.

If you’re constructing a blog to your online yoga accent store, your weblog’s cause can be to:

Help people beginning with yoga to reach achievement by using offering them with the first-class practices and the quality guidelines for equipment.

It’s important to set your “why” proper off the bat as it facilitates maintain every different issue of your weblog content approach on track.

2. Research your competitors

Competitive studies is a useful supply of proposal in your weblog content. It uncovers which key phrases convey them visitors, what kind of content material works for them, what they’re doing well, and wherein they fall short.

You must research two varieties of competitors:

Business competitors

Content competition

Business competitors

Business competition are the businesses/manufacturers that provide comparable (or the identical) products or services as you do. They’re notably smooth to become aware of, as you’ve in all likelihood been privy to them from the very beginning of your business.

For instance, in case you’re promoting yoga mats, then liforme.Com is your commercial enterprise competitor.

You can take a look at your competitor’s quality-acting content in organic search the usage of Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

Enter their domain or blog

Go to the Top Pages file

Here, you may see that liforme.Com gets a variety of natural site visitors to their posts approximately seated yoga poses and yoga poses for flexibility. They also rank #1 for each of those key phrases in Google, as you can see from the “Top Keyword” and “Position” columns.

This file is great for speedy locating a few initial subjects and key phrases that might be well worth writing about. If you want more, simply repeat the method for more commercial enterprise competition.

Content competitors

Content competition are websites you’re competing towards in organic seek however that don’t always compete with you in a enterprise experience.

For example, considered one of our content material competition is backlinko.Com as it competes for a few of the identical key phrases. But it’s now not our business competitor because we each sell different things.

You can find content material competitors easily with Keywords Explorer:

Enter the key phrases you discovered while studying business competitors

Go to the Traffic Share via Domains document

This file indicates the web sites with the most anticipated organic traffic from the keywords you entered:

3. Do thorough key-word studies

Now that you recognize what your competitors write about and where their site visitors comes from, it’s time for key-word studies to discover what humans are looking for on your niche.

First, identify your seed keywords. Seed keywords are essentially the important thing subjects that you’ll be writing approximately for your blog. The easiest manner to do this is to write down the principle words that define what your commercial enterprise is set or what you promote.

For example, in case you’re beginning a blog in your coffee store, they could look something like this:

Coffee

Espresso

Cappuccino

Latte

Aeropress

Coffee beans

If you plug these into Keywords Explorer, visit the Matching phrases record, and transfer the in shape type to “Questions,” you’ll see loads or lots of question-centered key-word ideas:

four. Build a content plan

Now which you have heaps of ideas to your weblog, it’s time to prioritize and construct your content material plan. To do that, you need to recall those 3 metrics:

Traffic capacity – How typically a month is that keyword searched for in Google?

Ranking issue – How tough is it to rank in organic search outcomes for that keyword?

Business fee – How applicable is your product in connection to the subject?

The first-class subjects are those with high visitors capability and commercial enterprise cost and coffee opposition:

In Keywords Explorer, you could get a tough experience of site visitors capacity by looking at the key-word’s month-to-month search quantity. However, we advise paying greater attention to the predicted visitors of the top-ranking web page—as most pages get traffic from more than one keywords.

For example, the search quantity for “a way to make french press coffee” is 20K/month, however the top-rating page gets around 60% extra traffic:

Bringing this all together, it’s clean that if you promote awesome coffee beans on-line, then a keyword like “the way to make iced coffee” need to be to your radar as it:

Has high visitors potential – the pinnacle-ranking pages receives ~46K month-to-month seek visits.

Is low opposition – its KD score is particularly low (28), and some of the top-ranking pages are from tremendously small web sites.

Has excessive business price – your coffee beans can assist searchers make a higher cup of iced coffee.

Once you’ve located a group of relevant topics to cowl, the subsequent step is to group your topics and address them in batches, otherwise known as “clustering.”

For example, while doing key-word studies, you might note that many humans are attempting to find ways to make different sorts of coffee, like:

the way to make iced coffee

how to make bloodless brew espresso

a way to make french press espresso

how to make whipped coffee

a way to make matcha latte

So it would make sense to organization these right into a “cluster” and tackle them simultaneously. You may additionally also be able to use the equal template/outline for all topics in a group, in an effort to significantly enhance the efficiency of your content material advent efforts.

You also can interlink these posts to create what’s known as a content material hub, which some people accept as true with facilitates each put up to rank better in Google:

5. Create your blog’s identification

Think of your weblog in the identical manner as you suspect of your brand. What differentiates it from other similar blogs? What might be your weblog’s extraordinary voice, tone, and fashion?

Put together a hard and fast of editorial recommendations so as to define your blog’s fashion.

The maximum critical aspects of your blog’s suggestions are:

Visual pointers

Voice & tone

Writing rules

Visual pointers

Visual suggestions are there to create consistency inside the first-class and style of weblog publish imagery. It’s vital because your weblog is an extension of your logo, so that you shouldn’t underestimate the visual side.

There’s often plenty to remember here, so a good start line is to discover a way to make your header illustrations distinct and recognizable.

For example, at the Ahrefs weblog, every put up capabilities a custom example with a unique visual fashion:

Voice & Tone

Voice and tone pointers outline your blog’s persona and values. For example, in case you had to describe your blog with adjectives that you might commonly use when describing someone, what might they be? Simple and clever? Friendly and bubbly? Humble and useful?

Your blog’s voice and tone will probably derive from it in case you have already got a strong emblem identity.

However, keep in mind that your weblog is a separate entity. Define how it will sound, what it will stand for, and what emotions you want the articles to rouse. Be unique approximately jargon, formality/informality of the writing, the level of quirkiness, the use of humor, and so on.

Writing rules

While voice and tone guidelines are extra about the “soul” of your blog, writing policies define the “frame” of your weblog content. These encompass spelling (e.G., British vs. American), formatting, the duration of paragraphs, capitalization, headline formats, and so forth.

Having those varieties of tips will assist you hold the same stage of high-quality across all of your weblog posts and onboard new writers extra effortlessly.

6. Track your achievement

Having a weblog content material approach is all well and properly, however you also want a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to song how nicely your strategy is operating throughout time. You also can show this to your boss in the event that they’re curious about your weblog’s overall performance.

If you’re starting out together with your blog, traffic might be the most viable KPI to tune—which you can do with Google Analytics. It might also sound fundamental, however you clearly need to write content material, spread it, and benefit traction inside the early ranges.

Once you get to that level, it’s smart to interchange to measuring a higher KPI like your organic proportion of voice. This tells you the way visible your brand is in organic seek relative to the opposition.

You can get a feel of your organic proportion of voice using Rank Tracker:

Add the keywords you need to rank for

Add your competition

Go to the Competitors Overview report

Check your Visibility

Final thoughts

Building a winning blog content method takes effort and time, however it’s worth it. If you’re entering into running a blog, you need to be in it for the lengthy haul. You won’t see consequences right now, but with the help of Ahrefs and this academic, you’ll build a quality weblog with a purpose to endure fruit inside the shape of greater eyeballs and clients your way.

PS: If you hear human beings say: “Do humans still examine? …Isn’t the blog dead?” Don’t listen. As lengthy as humans are still trying to find statistics on search engines like google, running a blog isn’t dead.