Content is the key driver that ensures your success when starting a new blog. It helps you connect with a relevant audience and generate traction for your site.
This calls for an efficient content strategy tailored to your needs and preferences. However, coming up with one may be easier said than done. It requires thorough research, competitor analysis, and trial and error until you figure out what works for you.
A well-thought-out content strategy helps standardize your content creation process and ensures that you never deviate from the path that leads to your destination.
Here are a few useful tips that can help create an efficient content strategy for your blog when getting started.
1. Identify Your Niche
The first step when creating a content strategy for your blog is carefully identifying your niche, which often gets overlooked by aspiring entrepreneurs.
A common mistake many make is selecting a broad niche, thinking it’d help them target a vast audience. Others target a niche so narrow that it becomes difficult for them to find suitable topics for their content.
Another mistake is selecting a highly competitive niche which makes it impossible for you to keep up with the giants in the industry.
There can be different issues you may come across when identifying the niche best suited for you. And it’s important to go for one that aligns with your passion, has decent traffic potential, a favorable competitor landscape, and ample monetization possibilities.
2. Set Clear Goals
To create a content strategy for your blog, it’s essential that you identify your goals clearly to ensure a seamless content creation process.
Without a clear target to pursue, it would be difficult for you to gauge your performance and assess the progress you’ve made over time.
This helps you come up with fitting metrics that quantify your content’s performance with respect to suitable indicators such as organic traffic which is used by 76% of content marketers to measure their content’s performance.
3. Choose the Right Keywords
Once you’ve chosen the best-suited niche and set clear goals, the next step is exploring the right keywords for your content.
Did you know that 67% of people click on the top 5 results displayed by search engines?
Creating content around the right keywords has a positive impact on your SEO. It helps fuel your search engine rankings, which in turn boosts your online presence and makes it easier for your audience to discover your content.
Therefore, choosing the right keywords and creating content around them helps you drive relevant traffic organically and ensures the long-term success of your blog.
4. Study Your Competitors
Researching your competitors not only helps you find fitting keywords for your blog but also enables you to explore promising strategies.
Since you’ve just gotten started, taking inspiration from your competitors helps as they’ve perfected their strategies through trial and error. This saves you a lot of time as you come up with an efficient content strategy for your blog.
Plus, it’s a no-brainer that you should benefit from the experience of your competitors as they may be acquainted with the ins and outs of your respective industry and ways that can help attract relevant traffic.
5. Create Relevant Content
A performing content strategy requires that you create content that generates value for your readers. To make it happen, you must know your audience and be familiar with their needs and preferences.
It’s essential that you take an audience-centric approach and create content that helps your readers find answers to their questions.
This enables you to gain the trust of your audience and build authority in your respective niche. As you facilitate readers’ access to relevant content, they start considering you as a reliable source of information and keep coming back for more.
6. Stay Up-to-Date
The content that you create becomes obsolete over time. And there are many things that contribute to it, like the change in preferences of your audience, industry dynamics, data changes from information sources, and so on.
Therefore, it’s best to revise your content from time to time and update it to ensure that it stays relevant.
Google considers freshness of content as one of the key factors when ranking your site. So, keeping your content up-to-date helps you keep up with ever-changing search engine algorithms and score higher rankings than your competitors.
Plus, sharing outdated content with your readers has a negative impact on your brand image and severely affects your authority. So, it’s highly recommended that you make changes to your content as and when needed.
7. Get Your Site’s Basics Right
It doesn’t matter how awesome your content strategy is, you won’t be able to find success with your blog if you don’t offer easy access to information.
Just attracting a relevant audience with your content isn’t enough. Your website needs returning visitors to grow and keep up with other players in the industry. And that won’t be possible if you offer a clunky user experience.
Therefore, it’s important that you identify things that affect your website’s performance and make the required improvements.
For example, improving your website’s load time can be an excellent growth hack. It’s reported that 57% of visitors exit the site immediately if it fails to load in 3 seconds or less. So, improving your website’s speed can help ensure the effective implementation of your content strategy.
Plus, make sure that your website doesn’t have any broken links or images along with poor navigation to facilitate easy access to information and ensure a seamless user experience.
It’s a Wrap
There you have it. The 7 useful tips to create an efficient content strategy for your blog. The recommendations are best suited if you’ve just gotten started or having issues attracting a relevant audience through your content.
So, if you wish to increase your blog traffic organically, try sticking to the recommendations provided when designing your content strategy and see if it works for you.
—
Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.