This is a guest post by Olga Lonel from ThemeFuse.com
Deciding that you want to become a professional blogger is an exciting career step that can welcome you into a life of enjoying your occupation, maximizing your free time, and generating a very comfortable income all online.
You may quickly find, however, that just owning a blog is not enough to get you settled into a career as a successful blogger.
Of course, you do not have to have the goal of being a professional blogger in order for a blog to be a beneficial feature of your business activities. In fact, many companies are now integrating the use of blogs as a key feature in their larger promotional strategies.
Whether you want to generate your income purely from blogging or if you are using a blog as a support platform, it is essential that you learn to handle your blog well so that you can maximize its potential for growth and success.
Like all bloggers you will start by building your blog. You have chosen your niche, have an audience in mind, and may even know what you want your first few posts to be about.
What now?
For the most effective blog you can have you will want to focus on developing a page that is visually appealing and cohesive. Premium WordPress themes instead of free one’s are a fantastic way for you to build your blog so that it starts out looking impressive, and remains easy to manage.
An incredibly useful feature of WordPress is that you can prepare blog posts well ahead of time and schedule them for publication at a later date. This allows you to prepare your content and ensure that you are constantly providing fresh, valuable material even when you do not have the time to write new posts every day. To make the most of this feature, and handle your blog in the most effective way possible, you should dedicate some time to creating a thorough content plan.
What is a Content Plan?
A content plan is a thought-out, strategic approach to what you will publish and when. While this does not necessarily require that you do the actual writing ahead of time, it does give a clear concept of how your blog will unfold over a period of time and lets you do as much of the writing as you would like to in advance.
Why Have One?
Having a content plan for your blog is beneficial for many reasons:
- It aides in time management, which can be especially beneficial if you are building several blogs.
- It gives you a distinct outline of the information that will be presented, when, and how. This can let you coordinate specific content with product releases, holidays, and other considerations.
- Providing consistent, high quality content on a regular basis gives your blog reputation a boost and will encourage readers to become loyal.
Tips for Developing Your Content Plan
Preparing your content plan can take a couple of days, but the benefits are well worth this time. Your first step in developing your content plan is to ask yourself the following questions:
- How often will you publish content?
- What is your specific niche?
- What is the purpose of the content?
- How will you choose keywords?
- How can the content be repurposed?
Once you have answered these questions you can actually develop the plan. These guidelines can help you to create a content plan that will help you to manage your blog effectively for the long-term:
- Write your plan on a large calendar that you can consult often.
- Determine how your content will work with your other marketing strategies.
- Create content that supports new products and services as well as existing ones.
- Remain flexible and leave room for adjustment if you suddenly get inspiration for new posts.
- Get ahead of your schedule and develop a bank of posts that can be used when there is a gap or you do not want to write on a particular day.
Blog publishing frequency must remain consistent if you really want to mark your presence in SERPs. At the very same time there are specific time frames when these content if shared on social media platform are reshared and retweeted.
I did not know that wordpress had a feature where you can automate your postings to a particular schedule. I am going to really start a plan to become a blogger.
Hi Marianne,
WordPress is a really powerful tool, beside this feature it has a lot of advantages that can help you to create a very useful and interesting website. And it is very easy to learn WordPress.
hey Marianne. WordPress has an amazing time-saving feature indeed. It really takes blogging next level – just imagine, you spend a week to create content for a whole month, and you submit the posts in advance via the “schedule” option.
Now you have enough time to focus on guest posting, commenting, and other promo activities. That’s how email autoresponders work as well.
I also know of a tool called BufferApp hich enables us to schedule messages to Twitter and Facebook — did you guys hear about that? I’d love to hear how well does that work for you.
I’ve been advising other people to write content plans for an age but must admit I’ve not written one myself. Your post has made me realise that I really MUST! Thanks
Very informative article. Content plan is indeed the first thing need to be consider. As a blogger I find it hard on what niche to choose. I consume lots of time just thinking what niche I really want that would appeal to the readers. Thanks to your post, I learned a lot.
I wish I had seen this before I started my blog. My head is still spinning with so much to learn. I am going to practice better planning going forward. I like the calender idea, I might use Outlook for this.
Thanks for the advice Olga..The take-away here is prioritizing in advance, my missing piece…Starting today will put all my top priorities in descending order of importance on my to do list
Hello Svetlana, I’m happy that you follow my advice.
I am sure this will help you to fulfill more tasks.
I wish I’d seen this post when I first started working on my blogs. It was only fairly recently that I started really planning out what I wanted to say on my blogs ahead of time – much of the time I’d just write whatever popped into my head right that second.
While I still think I came up with some neat posts, it only worked when I was actually thinking about the blog. If it slipped my mind or I got busy, nothing would get written because I didn’t have a plan for what I was going to be talking about!
Now I have a list of thoughts and ideas at my fingertips, laid out in the approximate order that I want them published in. I also have a few pre-written posts saved as drafts whenever possible – that way if I’m crunched for time I can just hit the “publish” button, and there’s fresh content on my blog!
Since I’ve been doing this, I worry about my blog a lot less. “Winging it” is certainly not an effective or relaxing way to run a blog. 🙂
Not having a long term plan like this is probably the biggest killer of blogs. Too many blogs are started with a short sighted idea that can provide content for a few months or so, but the information eventually runs out, and blogs die. There needs to be a steady, long term plan to continue to develop new content that will keep readers interested, as well as writers themselves.
I wish I had seen this before I started my blog. My head is still spinning with so much to learn. I am going to practice better planning going forward. I like the calender idea, I might use Outlook for this.
I am agreed here with you! There is very importance of long term content planning for a blog. I have seen or you can say that I have experienced a blog with short term content planing, and after the work of six to seven months. I dropped the blog. BTW, thanks for highlighting the real imprtance of content planing.