Running a blog page comes with many pleasures and the opportunity to express yourself. But it is important to ensure that your blogs are posted on time, have interesting topics, are engaging, and have a good SEO ranking.
To ensure that these elements are all met, there is just one thing you can do: create a blog plan.
Sandrine Coosemans from Smart Alpaca Marketing shared some tips on how to ensure that you create a blog plan with a purpose. She highlights that for some people it helps to have a list of inspiration. Other people work better if they have a plan that they can reference to ensure they meet deadlines and create the correct content. She says “how you work with that plan, is up to you.”
First on the list is looking at the different types of blog posts.
Different types of blog posts
There is a large variety of blogs that you can write. It all depends on what your goals for the blog are and who you want your target audience to be. For instance, if you want your blog to be about anything related to the arts you can write about art history, fashion, writing, or cinematography.
However, blogs can also be more focused on a singular topic, for instance, if you are passionate about animation, you can write about the different types of styles, the history of those styles, and what differentiates them.
Today there are blogs dedicated to food, fashion, lifestyle, personal finance, sports, religion, politics, religion, and even personal ones where you can write stories that you have experienced.
What is cornerstone content
Cornerstone content usually consists of the foundational content on your website that has high search engine optimisation (SEO) ratings. This type of content is long, informative, and has a focus on a specific topic that is relevant to your business and website. Having cornerstone content also serves as a way to determine the overall tone and voice of the blog itself.
The purpose behind cornerstone content is to gain traffic to your website and this is done through the use of SEO’s. To have your website be more visible to search engines is by having a high use of keywords in the blog and also by having links to other articles or blogs.
Another reason to create cornerstone content is to create a positive image. Being able to convey the image that your content is reliable, trustworthy and provides relevant information is a sure way to gain loyalty from your target audience.
A way to easily establish cornerstone content is by setting blog goals you want to achieve.
Setting up blogging goals
In order to determine what your blog goals are and what the purpose behind them is. This is done in order to provide a source of motivation.
Specific
This means you need to first get into the specifics of your blog. Deciding how much you want from various elements of the blog can be a good start. How much traffic do you want to come to your blog? How often do you want to write for your blog? If the blog is going to be a source of income, how much do you want to make from it? These types of questions can help with determining what you want out of your blog.
Measurable
Another way to stay motivated with your blog is to have objectives in place to reach in order to measure your progress. One of the challenges of having a blog is that as it is all online it is not easy to see visible progress or results. Having objectives can help keep track of how the blog is doing.
Achievable
That being said, another point is ensuring that these goals and objectives are achievable. Depending on what your goals and objectives are, these achievable goals can be writing one blog a week to being able to write a blog post every day.
Relevant
After determining the specifics of a goal, how it is going to be measured, and whether it is achievable, you need to determine whether the goal is relevant at the time. If there is a goal that can only be achieved in a few years, you don’t have to discard this goal, you can keep it for the long run. Whether a goal is relevant or not can make blog goal setting less overwhelming.
Time-bound
Another point to consider when making blog goals is the deadline for when these goals should be achieved. For deadlines with blogs, they should be spaced out to give yourself enough time to achieve them and to avoid feeling overwhelmed by goals being back to back. Having deadlines can also be a form of motivation and a way to track progress.
Having goals and objectives in place can be a good way of gaining motivation but a common challenge that many bloggers face is trying to remain inspired by writing about different or similar topics. This is why getting inspiration can be beneficial to bloggers.
Getting inspired by having a plan
Finding different sources of inspiration can help overcome writer’s block when blogging. For different websites, depending on the content of the blog, Pinterest can be a source of gaining inspiration. Similarly, you can gain inspiration on what holidays are taking place on the day, and looking at other blogs can help with gaining different ideas or inspiration on what to write.
Websites are not the only source of inspiration as reflecting on your hobbies or what took place during the day can help with sparking inspiration, as can taking a look at current events around the world.
There are occasions where writer’s block occurs because of spending too much time writing and feeling stuck. If that is the case, take a breather and spend some time away from your desk or writing.
Creating a blog with a purpose can be a great creative outlet while simultaneously being a place of information. Being able to actually write and create a blog can be a challenge but it is one that can be overcome with a smart set of goals, motivation, and inspiration.
