Whether you’re a small business owner or a multinational brand, having an effective blog content strategy is an easy way to make sure you’re getting the most value from the money and time you invest in your business blog.
For a long time SEOs and content strategists with limited imagination have leaned on the simple phrase “Content is King,” pedaling the idea that publishing terrific new content on your website was enough to enjoy organic search success.
The truth is that you need to have an organized content strategy if you want your blog to work for you and generate new business leads, sales, and expose your brand to potential customers.
Here are my tips to make sure you are leveraging an effective blog content strategy for your brand.
Decide Who Your Target Customer Is – And Then Write Content For Them
The most important part of a content strategy for your blog is to identify who you’re writing content for. What do your ideal readers look like? What are they interested in? When they arrive at your site to read your blog where are these individuals in the buyer’s journey?
By splitting up your target blog readers into unique customer personas, you can establish and maintain an effective strategy to publish the type of content each of your target readers is likely to be searching for online. In this way, your blog will attract different segments of meaningful traffic – users that want the products or services you provide.
For example, if you operate a website for a pest control or removal company your target readers might be:
- • Homeowners who know they want to hire a pest removal company
- • Homeowners who want suggestions about how to safely remove pests on their own
- • Homeowners who aren’t sure if they have a pest infestation, but think they might
- • Homeowners who don’t have a pest infestation, and want to make sure it stays that way
Each of these readers can interact with your business in a different way, and by creating targeted articles to address the unique questions each one of them has, your blog can successfully target search queries your target customers are typing into Google. Not only that, you can be sure that your blog content appropriately addresses their unique needs and you can control how you steer them toward the product or service that is most appropriate for them.
Provide A Range Of Article Topics – Don’t Let Your Blog Get Boring
One of the traps small businesses fall into with their blog is that they publish the same type of content again and again and again. Not only is this boring for readers, it limits your organic reach and is the best way I know of to burn yourself out on maintaining your blog.
By defining who your readers are, you’re able to effectively post different types of targeted blog articles to keep things fresh, while also effectively marketing your business to a diverse set of readers who all have value to your business.
Using the personas we’ve established for our pest control blog above as an example, here are a few different styles of posts that we could write to keep things fresh, while also marketing our business to the people we’ve identified as having value to our business:
- • Articles with facts about different types of pests, including how to tell if you have an infestation.
- • Articles comparing the cost and effectiveness of remediation strategies for different pests.
- • Articles about how to safely remove different types of pests by yourself, with links to products you sell which can help homeowners safely remove pests on their own.
- • Articles about the best ways to prevent pests, including lawn treatments you offer in the spring and winterization services your company offers in the fall.
- • Articles targeting geo-specific pest removal service terms so you can target content to the different towns your company serves.
- • Articles about pest removal strategies and services which are safe for households with children and pets.
As you can see there is a wide range of blog article topics you can publish, even in a very niche business like pest removal. If you have a blog publication schedule of 2-3 articles each week, you can see how multiplying the general blog topics above to cover different types of pests native to your area can quickly add up. It’s pretty easy to generate a year’s worth of rich, varied article ideas for your blog.
Market Your Blog Content To Reach Your Target Audience
Once you establish an effective blog content strategy, be proactive about marketing your content to make sure it gets in front of your audience at the right times. Focused advertising campaigns on Facebook or using Google AdWords can be a very effective because you can target the local areas and demographics you think are most likely to be interested in your company’s services.
Additionally, there are steps you can take to market your blog content without paying to do so. If you’re a local company like the pest-removal service used in the example above, you could reach out to your city or town office or to your local newspaper to see if they’d include your latest blog in their newsletter, or share it with readers of their Facebook page.
Many cities, towns and local news organizations have a small, but very active following and most of the time they are happy to support a local business (especially if the content is well-written and sharing it is low-effort for them).
Once You Establish An Effective Blog Content Strategy – Consider Outsourcing So You Can Remain Focused On The Big Picture
While some small businesses will hesitate at the notion of outsourcing the writing of their blogs, the truth is that there are numerous freelancing platforms where you can find and hire talented writers at a fraction of the cost of paying someone in-house to write your content for you. Most of these writers are skilled at researching the subjects they write about and capable of delivering expertly-written content which meets your standards and can help you achieve your business goals.
If you find a talented and reliable writer or two, assign a batch of articles so that you have your blog content ready for the coming month, or work with your freelance writers to assign articles and schedule weekly delivery.
By taking this approach you can focus on applying your energy elsewhere to help your business grow, while the time you’ve invested in establishing an effective blog content strategy for your business pays off.
Image: Blog plan puzzle
