What does it take you to maintain your blog?

Starting a blog is often an exciting prospect, you’re putting your brand and thoughts out there on stuff. It’s cool. However, something we recall is that starting your blog is easy, but maintaining it to become an authoritative presence and raise your brand value as a thought leader is another thing. Especially as you get busier.

In this article we’ll go through some helpful tips around how to maintain your blog apart from the obvious “be consistent” message that is all over the place. We’ll identify the things that enable you to consistently produce quality content.

You Need a Content Marketing Strategy 

Yes, regardless of your business size, age or industry. It doesn’t matter if you’re Amazon or a one person company. You need a content marketing strategy. A content marketing strategy is a key pillar to the success of your blog. This ensures that your article writing is focused and efficient. 

So what does a content marketing strategy look like?

A Content Plan is the baseline of your Content Marketing Strategy 

A content plan is key to sticking to your audience and ensuring you are providing relevant content for them. This should identify all things from your target audience to their awareness levels of your brand and should be continually reviewed to ensure it remains relevant. Your content plan is where you can identify guest blogging opportunities and where these fit into your content marketing strategy. 

It goes without saying but if you don’t provide something your target audience wants, your blog will never succeed. Give people what they’re after and offer real value to their web browsing experience. What does this mean? Well, value is demonstrated in the content you publish. If your content isn’t valuable people won’t read it or return to read more. With that being said, really think about what you’re putting out there and give the people what they want. You wouldn’t just launch your new product or service without any planning, so why do that with your content? A good content plan takes care of a lot of the effort for you so you’re not aiming in the dark and gives your blog longevity. 

A Content Calendar optimises your Content Marketing Strategy

As well as having your content plan in place, you also need a schedule to align with your content plan. One of the best methods of doing this is via a content calendar. A content calendar is a shareable resource that details the planned release date of publications, social activities and relevant announcements. The basis of a content calendar is to enable you to look at your content marketing strategy and determine if it needs further resourcing. It also means you don’t have to do as much thinking throughout your year as you have done your organising up front. 

A Distribution Plan enables good SEO content marketing and focuses your Content Marketing Strategy

Okay, so you’ve put all of your hard work into writing good and relevant blogs and maybe you even developed a content calendar to go with it. The cherry on top of this is your distribution plan. 

A content distribution plan plays a very important role in your content marketing strategy. Put very simply identifies and optimises your relevant communication channels as well as creates a baseline of communication channels so you can begin monitoring what works and what does not. Your content distribution plan will of course depend on what you’re writing about and your target audience. But the options range from facebook posts to content repurposing such as converting your podcasts to blog posts. 

What other things can I do?

Do Some Guest Blogging

We are huge fans of Guest Blogging, especially because we have had the pain of having a new website with low Domain Authority (DA). If you’re doing relevant Guest Blogging, it can be a really good bang for your buck. If you can find guest blogging opportunities and write good content for another highly ranked website and in return get a backlink to your site, that content will continue to draw traffic to your site over time further increasing your own presence.

Accept Guest Blogs

Another very efficient method to maintain your blog is to accept guest blogs by other sites. This may be challenging to attract people in the early days of your blog, however, you’d be surprised how many people would simply love a chance to contribute and if it aligns with your content marketing strategy then why the hell not? Be Kind. 

Accepting guest blogs is great because it gives your blog some variety. You can get a completely different viewpoint and type of content. Furthermore, you can also use guest bloggers to leverage experts in their field for example. This would give your audience amazing value and you’d be doing something unique for them.  

Get Freelance Writers or Content Marketing Agencies

If you’ve read this article and you think it sounds like a load of effort, then you’re right,  content marketing is not easy, especially when you’re doing your day job of what brings business in. 

With this, it is important to realise the benefit of utilising expert services such as freelance writers or content marketing agencies that you can pass your blog writing on to. These services exist to enable you to continue to focus on what you’re good at doing be that auditing, designing, painting or massaging. 

With this, many blog owners’ concerns come to surface about retaining and disseminating the message they want to communicate to their target audience. It is often a worry that because the blog is out of the hands of the company that the message will be lost. However, like anything, outsourcing SEO content marketing to a freelancer or content agency simply has to be managed. If you’re using a content marketing agency then the management is much less as they should do everything that we’ve discussed in this article and you shouldn’t have to worry too much. However, freelancer writers despite their flexibility do tend to require more management upfront and typically you have to provide them with everything and they simply write your articles. 

Conclusion

It’s great that you’re looking further ahead of maintaining your blog as well as have made a start on it. So to summarise:

1. Your content marketing strategy is a critical part of ensuring that your blogging activity is not subject to a short-term whimsical project. 
2. Leverage higher authority domains that accept guest posts, these will boost your own site and give you greater visibility. 
3. Accept guest posts from guest bloggers and seek to generate different types of content on your blog to give your target audience variety but still relevant and valuable content.
4. Do not be afraid to leverage external expertise from freelancers and content marketing agencies to assist you in maintaining and growing a successful blog. 

Want to put your blog writing onto autopilot? Find out more how we can help scale your business with blog writing.

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