This article is aimed at personal bloggers who’d like or have a business they would like to implement a blog. Therefore, businesses should take more consideration in the power of corporate blogging. A blogging strategy helps to plan your path ahead like a business plan. It will help you aim to reach where you want.
Though I’m blogging this for business owners, personal bloggers take note that you can also implement this if you’re ready to take your blog to the next level. Not to mention aim to make more blogging income out of it.
Here’s an initial list of what is in a blog strategy.
Blog Goals and Aims
Why are you blogging? What are you aiming to achieve from blogging? Be realistic and be specific when answering these questions. Like a business, if you don’t know what your business is then how are you going to sell your business?
Blog Competition Analysis
Who are your competitors? How are you different? A blog is created every second so do you know how you plan to compete with them? Sooner or later, just because you’re blogging in your own language will not be enough to be a unique selling proposition to your readers.
Blog Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats Analysis
Basically the idea is to know more about your blog than you think you do. Yes, your blog is about your personal life and observations but what other strengths can you contribute to it. Knowing where you’re weak is a battle and isn’t easy combating. Have you seen or figured what opportunities your blog can offer your readers? And lastly, what could threaten your blog performance? Maybe the Malaysia Internet pipeline again or even worst, God greeted you with a flash.
Blog Authors
Who is going to blog? How many bloggers are you going to need? What type of authors are you looking for? This would only apply for business blogs or blogs which want to associate with a group or community in relevance to the bloggers you’d like to have as authors. For example, I would invite YC to blog more about Web 2.0 or talk about social tools to improve the working performance in a company.
Blog Categories
What categories are you going to have? Are they going to be general? Will they be specific? Or would it be better for you to use tag clouds to categorize all your articles?
Blogging Consistency
How often will you blog? Can you consistently churn out the number you decided? Is it too little or too much? Many new bloggers overlook this and doesn’t have a schedule to follow on. They blog as they like and later think why they’re losing readers after a controversial article like; Why Malaysia is not talking about the iPhone?
Blogging Income
How much are you aiming to make? How do you plan to do this? Is it a realistic figure? I would highly advice to blog first then think of money second. And to remember, not to overdo it with the advertisements. If your readers start to complain about it, you must do something about it.
Blog Maintenance
How often do you backup your blog database? If you have never backed up your blog database before, it’s high time to so. There are free easy tools to help you do this – just Google.
Blog Hosting
How much are you paying now? Is it reliable? Do you think you need to move or upgrade? Moving to a new server has its setbacks but at the end of the day, it’ll not only benefit you but your readers.
Blog Marketing
Generating traffic to your blog is becoming more and more difficult. The trend is slowly heading towards actively being involved in forums or any community to help generate blog traffic. Online ad campaigns are still here to stay but eventually, your readers will want to get more responsive with you.
Blog Readers Loyalty
In my opinion, this is one of the toughest things to do in a blog. In order to keep your readers coming back, you need to keep on producing the expected content they may be looking for. How do you do this? With tools like StatCounter, Google Analytics or even the WordPress Global Stats (if you’re using WordPress), your job is to analyze the data your readers seem to be interested in. However, be cautious when selecting as it has to be align with your blog’s goal and aim.
A blog strategy helps you build a blogging path but you will have to always firmly believe where you want to be in 2-3 years. Not to mention, spare time to review the strategy every end of the year.
What was the most significant change in your blogging?
[tags]Blog strategy, blogging strategy, Blog marketing, Blog business plan[/tags]
i guess then, corporate blogging could be defined as the modern-day tech equivalent to press releases and real-time customer service… hmm…
Not in its entirety.
This is just but a short guide to whomever who wishes to take their blogging really seriously to consider ‘business’ factors if they’re aiming to monetize their blogs. :)
Except for the modern-day tech equivalent, corporate blogging does touch on the test.