Pat yourself on the back if you’ve decided to have a proper content strategy for your blog. This simply indicates that you’ve taken a step in developing thought leadership, increasing online visibility, and ROI. Blogging requires a lot of hard work, but it’s a rewarding one, literally and figuratively.

In today’s competitive market, being consistent with your blogging is also vital to your business success. Think of it in this way; it only takes one blog post with a steady stream of traffic to generate more leads for your organizations (through embedded links, for instance). When followed diligently, a content strategy informs, educates, establishes your authority, and creates awareness for your brand.

If you’ve started off a new business blog, you already have to deal with plenty of competition. And the ideal way to ensure your efforts pay off is to get started with a well-executed plan. This is when the need for effective content strategy comes to prominence.

Step #1. Focus on the objective of your content strategy

Insights: Determining the objective of your content strategy will help drive the kind of content you create. It will also help you understand whether what you’re doing is successful or not.

Also, try and make your objective tangible, if possible. This means you need to decipher the following:

Do you want to raise awareness of your brand?

Want to elevate your SEO rankings and drive more traffic to your blogs?

Want to become distinguished as a thought leader in your industry?

When you know what you want as the outcome, you’ll be able to craft your content to fit that goal.

Step #2. Create content depending on buyer personas

Insights: The buyer persona is the profile that describes your ideal consumer. The main purpose of creating a buyer persona is to understand what kind of consumers you want to reach out to through your content. Once you determine a buyer persona, you can begin planning your content depending on that profile, and you'll be able to cater to your ideal audience.

For example, if your ideal audience is a 25-year-old entrepreneur who’s planning to venture into a startup business, you can develop detailed blog posts with beginner-friendly tips for starting a business and also about the problems entrepreneurs face in this field. Similarly, if your audience is a student seeking assignment help, you can create blogs consisting of exam tips and steps to prepare academic papers.

Planning ahead is the appropriate thing to do in this case. Ideally, you should plan for three months worth of content to maintain consistency and add a flow to your blog publishing schedule.

Step #3. Check out your competitors

Insights: It’s highly likely that there’s someone in your industry already doing great stuff with their content (it’s kind of obvious, considering the popularity of content marketing).

Checking what your competitors are doing; can be an excellent way to understand what’s working. It’s likely that similar brands will have a similar target audience, which indicates that the people reading their posts are also the kind of people you want to read your posts.

BuzzSumo is an amazing resource for keeping tabs on the most popular posts on your competitors’ sites. You just need to enter the domains of your top competitors and see which of their posts have been shared the most.

Step #4. SEO shouldn’t be forgotten

Insights: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing are intimately connected. You need to ensure that your website is optimized for search engine algorithms to find a place in the SERPs. This means more and more people will see what you have to share.

Ideally, an essential aspect of content marketing is making sure you use the appropriate keywords. If you want your blog to appear up there at the top of SERPs, you have to adopt a qualitative approach and present relevant text.

For the past few years, SEO practices have veered towards “long-tail keywords.” Now more people use 3 or 4 specific words in their searches, like “cheap black bootcut jeans.”

Step #5. Brainstorm content ideas for your blog

Insights: Now that you have a fair understanding of the kind of content that will work, and who you want to reach, it’s time to ponder over some content ideas.

After you’re done with your competitor research, you’re probably going to have to create authentic content focused especially on the pain points of your target consumers.

There is a multitude of ways you can do this. Some of the ways are listed below.

Browse pertinent SubReddits to check the important questions your target consumers are asking, and learn what other content marketers are posting around that topic.

Leaf through Quora to look at questions that people have around the topics in your industry.

Step #6. Make visual content a priority

Insights: It's more dynamic, viral, and easy to retain than most other content formats. It also allows you to make your online messages easily understandable with a higher impact on the targets. But videos aren't just an excellent way of raising awareness of your business - they also have a major impact on the conversion rates. Creating relevant videos as part of your content strategy allows you to engage with your clients, increase your online visibility, and generate meaningful leads.

Integrating videos into your content marketing strategy enables you to engage with your consumers, increase your visibility, and generate leads.

Speaking of engaging video content, you can take Reebok’s 25,915 days video as an example. The message conveyed by the brand is clear: Life is short, live every day to the fullest. The title, 25,915 days, is a reference to the lifespan of an average individual.

Step #7. Publish and manage your content

Insights: Your content marketing plan should move beyond the kind of content you'll put together. It should also cover how you'll organize your content. With the help of a detailed editorial calendar, you'll be in the right direction for publishing a balanced and diverse content library on your website. You can also create a social media content calendar, so you can promote and manage your content on other sites.

Many of the content ideas you think of will be evergreen -- they're just as relevant months from now as they are today. Having said that, you shouldn't ignore timely topics either. While they may not be as frequent in your editorial calendar, they can help you generate considerable traffic.

Step #8. Update and repurpose your old content

Insights: Ask any established blogger or marketer, and they'll always tell you to create “evergreen” content to make the most of your blog.

Some topics can provide more results in the long run than the others. However, even these evergreen posts need to be updated and repurposed from time to time.

In this case, you need to conduct an analysis of your blog content every 2-3 months and find out which blog posts come up with lower results. Then revamp these blog posts by enhancing the quality and optimizing them for better keywords.

Parting thoughts:

These insights will be helpful for you to create a content strategy. However, you must understand that the outcome of your efforts will depend on the consistency and the quality of the blog content you create. 

Mr. Hales, a professional content strategy expert. He works for Allessaywriter.com and Tophomeworkhelper.com. Hales, even if the results are slow, keep churning out excellent content and follow the content plan you’ve created. Eventually, it will present you with a significant amount of ROI in the long run.