How to Create a Blogging Strategy in 2023

Many bloggers don’t have a transparent blogging strategy. They jump from task to task, testing the freshest ideas they hear about… without getting very far.

If this sounds like you, don’t fret. Even among B2B marketers, only 65% (just over a third) have a documented blogging strategy.

You may have already tried to adopt a strategy for your blog, but it all seemed overwhelming: it’s about getting an idea about monetization, traffic, and everything it takes to create a blog and make money.

Or maybe you tried to clearly define your content strategy, but all your plans fell apart as soon as you were busy and couldn’t find the time to write.

What is a blog strategy?

A blog strategy is not as formal as a business plan. It usually doesn’t focus on small details (such as exactly how you will close each blog post). Instead, your blogging strategy is a road map of how you are going to achieve your goals.

Your blogging strategy can cover many different areas, such as when you’re going to build products, what type of affiliate programs you’ll be promoting, the blogging tools you’re going to use, and more.

In this step-by-step guide, I will focus on a key part of your blogging strategy – your Blog Content Strategy. It’s all about the articles (and/or other content) you post on your blog. Your content ties into every other area of your blogging strategy, making it a great place to start.

Step 1. Find your target audience (find out who to promote your blog to)

Before I can learn How to Promote Your Blog, you must first determine who you are talking to. Finding your target audience is essential to developing a great blog marketing plan before you start implementing these strategies.

So how do you find your target audience? Fortunately, there are many very innovative and useful ways to determine who your target audience is, so let’s look at some of the more reliable methods below.

Use Social Media to Find Your Target Audience

people pass a beaucoup time on social networks. Some statisticians have found that people around the world spend an average of at least 144 minutes per day. This number has only increased in recent months due to COVID-19 and closures.

In addition, social media is a great place to learn more about people’s interests, beliefs, demographics, and more, which will be helpful in your blog marketing efforts.

If you want to know who might be interested in your blog… join the Facebook group in your blog niche. I also recommend following the hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to see what’s going on with specific keywords in your niche. You can find out what’s hot at the type of people interested in the content you create on your blog.

Discussion forums (like Quora )

Yes, chat rooms still exist, and they can indeed have a huge amount of information about people who consider themselves interested in your niche, making them one of the best candidates for your marketing efforts.

You can find chat rooms in almost every niche imaginable. The best part is that you don’t have to sift through thousands or millions of people to find someone interested in your niche when you’re on these types of sites (like social media). This is already a carefully selected group of people who are interested in the same things as you.

I have personally used Quora to find an audience of people interested in learning more about blogging. Here I can easily see who (at least part of) my audience is, what their main pain points are, and what topics are trending, which inspired some of my most successful blog post ideas.

Discussion forums like this one can also be an opportunity to promote my blog in terms of branding by simply answering many questions for a few months, thereby building my credibility in my niche.

Browse the comment sections of competitor blogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts.

Want to learn more about your target audience? Start by looking into where they are already spending time online. Go to the comments section on any relevant website or social network. There are tons of free information out there to find out who your audience is, what they like (and don’t like), and what content they connect to.

You can find these comments on competing blogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts in your niche as a starting point.

If you were my competitor, just by reading one of my comment sections, you can get a pretty good idea of the comments on my videos here, as well as take note of the questions, statements, and opportunities that arise from them.

Learning (and delivering) what your audience wants is an important foundation for successful blog promotion.

Talk to people in your blog audience (in person, by phone, or via Zoom)

I know I know… are you actually talking directly to another person? You must be crazy!

Perhaps one of the most underrated ways to define your target audience (and therefore solidify your overall blogging strategy) is to meet your readers on the phone, via Zoom, or in person. Bloggers spend a lot of time online, but getting out there and meeting people in your industry is another way to get to know your audience on a much deeper level than usual.

You can find your target audience at places like conferences, seminars, local interest groups, meetups, and anywhere people in your niche gather to talk. Start conversations, network, and find out what really motivates them.

You can then go home and start turning your ideas into actionable blog marketing work by creating content that meets their needs on an intimate level, and you’ll do much better by showing your audience that you understand them.

For an even deeper dive into this topic, my guide How to Find Your Target Audience covers all of this and more (in more detail) to help you learn as much as possible about your target audience.

Step 2. Guest blogging (become a guest blogger on other sites)

guest blogging has been one of the most successful blog marketing strategies that I have consistently implemented, so naturally I would recommend it to anyone starting a blog to at least consider, especially since it is very effective for both new bloggers et experienced bloggers, regardless of where you are today.

What is a guest blog? At a high level, a guest blog is a form of building relationships with other bloggers, websites, or publications in your niche. You will contact them and invite them to publish an article (written by you) that is relevant to their audience, where you can also link to your own blog (and thus continue building your blog’s domain authority). The best part is that this is a win-win blog marketing strategy:

As a guest blogger, you get a link (or two or three) from the most authoritative site to your blog.
The publisher of a blog gets a high-quality, free publication to keep their blog up to date and benefit their readers.
The guest article reader gets a relevant and valuable article to read and review.

Because guest blogging is so important in the overall blog marketing scheme, it deserves its own section on how to implement this repeatable strategy for Promoting Your Blog. So let’s make an introduction to how to start guest blogging strategically.

Find the right blogs to guest post

Before you can start writing great guest posts, you first need to find another blog, post, or website that will accept your content. You want it to be mutually beneficial for both of you, so you also need to be selective about who you write for. Here are the criteria I use when writing guest posts for other blogs:

Introduce someone you already have a relationship with (if possible): It’s easier to write guest posts for people you already have some sort of relationship with.
Choose a bigger blog than yours (5-10 times the size of your blog). : Technically, you can promote any blog that thinks your post ideas are great (and it can help increase your readership and domain authority).
Guest blogging for sites in your niche (or related to your niche): Yes, you can always guest post for people who aren’t exactly in your niche, but you won’t interact with your target audience. It won’t be as profitable for you or your blog host to go down this path, and search engines like Google usually don’t reward these links in the same way as a quality link from a more relevant site.
Find a blog in a style similar to yours: If you choose a blog that matches your own content style, you won’t have to work as hard to write something that its audience (and your editor) will enjoy.
Write guest posts for blogs that offer a go-to link: Sometimes when you write a guest post for someone, they won’t let you add a follow link to your blog, depriving you of some of the SEO benefits (in your blog marketing efforts) writing this article in the first place.

Some sites may offer you a nofollow link, which basically tells search engines to ignore it. Even though you’re still exposed when you write for a higher authority blog, it doesn’t make much sense to write for someone who doesn’t let you include a link from a follow or two since your blog marketing goal is to build your own site’s domain authority (with quality links from other sites) in the long run.

Create a good pitch for your target guest blog

Once you’ve made a list of places you’d like to write for, the next step is to introduce yourself (if you’re not already familiar with them) and show them what you have to offer by writing for their blog.

Here are three principles I use to effectively showcase guest posts as a scalable blog marketing strategy:

Keep it simple: Keep your opening letter simple. Their time is limited, so let them know as briefly as possible why you would be a good choice to guest post on their blog.
Show that you understand their blog: Tell them what you like about their blog, and consider mentioning a few articles that you liked from them (this shows that you know their content well).
Suggest guest post ideas they’ll love: After researching their blog, try to think of topics that you know well but that they haven’t covered on their blog yet. Suggest 2-4 good ideas that they could grab onto.

Don’t be afraid to contact me if you don’t hear from the recipient within a few days. Once your offer is accepted, the real fun begins.
Write a guest post you’re proud of (and they’ll love)
When you get a guest blogging opportunity, take your time to write something that suits your style. Write in a way that fits well with their blog, but you also take pride in your name.

Your guest post is about getting to know you and your content, so it’s worth it. From my point of view, I would also recommend not to worry about writing very long guest post posts (unless it’s a high-profile post and it’s been asked for), but it’s important to write quality content that represents you well.

Promote Your Guest Post (Blog Meta Marketing)

Once your guest post is published, you have a great opportunity to showcase your value to the blogger who takes the risk of posting your content. Do your best to promote your blog post with social media sharing by emailing your followers and contacting everyone you mentioned in the article to request a post.

Your hosted blog will appreciate the extra visibility, social activity, and traffic. Also, it will only add credibility to your blog (especially if your hosted blog has more audience than you).

Doing the extra work of promoting your guest posts will also open the door to asking your host blogger if they are comfortable introducing you to another blogger or two in your niche who might also be interested in taking a guest post from your post. especially if you’re already able to demonstrate your own blog marketing techniques.

3. Use SEO (search engine optimization) in your blog marketing.

SEO (search engine optimization) is something you, as a blogger, will hear over and over again. Indeed, ranking your content in the results of major search engines like Google can be the only difference between a few people who find your blog and literally millions of people who find your content.

If you can find the right keyword phrases and place them on the first page of Google search results, you are almost guaranteed to get a significant amount of organic traffic to your blog daily.

Step 4: Do Keyword Research

The next step is to identify keywords that people in your target market might use related to your blog niche.

“Keywords” are not difficult. These are just words or (more often) short phrases that people type into Google.

You can probably come up with a whole bunch of keywords that come to mind. For example, if you blog about knitting patterns, some keywords might be:

Knitting
Knitting patterns
Free knitting patterns
Dress knitting patterns
Sweater knitting patterns
How to knit a Christmas sweater.

… And so on.

Keyword research is the process of finding keywords and determining which keywords you should base your content on

Basically, it’s looking for keywords that (a) a lot of people are looking for, but (b) is not so popular that you never have a chance of your content appearing at the top of Google.

There are a number of methods and tools that you can use to help you, and I have a detailed article here with everything you need to know about keyword research and a detailed guide on how to improve your Google rankings too.

Step 5: Create a Content Calendar

The content calendar is simply a list of upcoming dates and content that you plan to post. With a calendar handy, you can find tons of blog post ideas in one go, do keyword research, and even schedule an entire batch of products.

There are many different options for creating a content calendar. Many bloggers use a simple spreadsheet to manage their content calendar. Others use a task management system such as Asana.

You can even use a sheet of paper. The important thing is that you plan in advance what you are going to post and when.

Your content calendar might include more than blog posts. You can include newsletters, guest articles, and any other content you want to create regularly.

You can even schedule more detailed free resources to be created, perhaps once a month or quarter.

It’s also a good idea to include content promotion in your schedule, as it’s part of your blog’s marketing strategy.

It could be as simple as scheduling multiple social media posts to share your content, or a list of people to email about certain pieces of content.

To speed up your content planning, you can choose a specific topic or post type for different days or weeks.

For example, you could write a beginner article every Monday and a tips article every Friday. You can also write an expert article in the last week of each month.

Step 6: Plan Your Blog Monetization Strategy

If you’re hoping to make a living as a blogger, you should think a bit about monetization when choosing your niche. But now is the time to think about how best to incorporate monetization into your overall blogging strategy.

Here are some of the main ways people make money blogging :

Using Affiliate Marketing: Promote other people’s products/services and earn commission on sales.
On-air advertising: often paid per view or per click, works well if you have a lot of traffic.
Sponsored Content Posting: Articles written by (or on behalf of) an advertiser that you are paid to post on your blog.
Create and sell your own products: often virtual products (such as e-books or software), but physical products are also possible.
Services offered: Freelancing, coaching, and consulting are common activities.
Offer Online Courses: Often through platforms like Teachable or Udemy.
Many bloggers use a combination of methods, although some blogs only monetize with one method.

It’s important to think about how you plan to monetize your blog so you can fit it into your content plan.

For example, if you are promoting affiliate products, you can write review articles, but you can also look for opportunities to mention these products in other articles.

So! you just learned how to create a blogging strategy. If you have any concerns, we will make an appointment for you in the comments.