It’s no secret that creating great content is a necessity to succeeding online. With Google always looking for fresh, relevant, and quality content, missing out on this opportunity will result in poor search engine rankings. On-site blogging is often seen as quick win...

However this is only the beginning when it comes to a content strategy. In order to create a successful blog that both the search engines and your audience love, you’ll need to put together a plan and strategy. Here are a few of our tips on how to get started:

Set your objectives

Easy. Have a real think about what you want to achieve from your blog. Increase your search engine rankings? Improve engagement? Show off your brand as a thought leader and influencer? Set yourself some objectives and you’ll be able to tailor your content around this.

Know your audience

Before you start planning your articles and posts, you need to understand who it is that you’re speaking to. There’s no point in creating content that your audience will simply ignore. You need to work out what’s relevant to them as well as how you can worm your way in amongst the hundreds of other blogs out there.

Speak like a human

Blogs give you a real opportunity to communicate with readers on a more personal level. Show off how you’re actually human and grasp the opportunity. Whether you’re informal, educational, or witty, make sure that you’re consistent and show the voice behind your brand.

Keep your content varied

Always keep your content varied on your blog. Visitors don’t always want to read walls of text so look at creating different pieces. Think case studies, Q&As, photo collections, infographics, news, latest work etc. You can easily be really creative with your blog and end up with a load of engaging content.

Always use a content calendar

We’ve written about how important content calendars are before, but without this you’re pretty much just making things up as you go along. Content calendars allow you to effectively plan what you’re going to post, when you’re going to do it, spot gaps, and see opportunities. Planning monthly will help you to latch onto current affairs, industry highlights and calendar events.

Know your influencers

Connecting with influencers from within your industry will help to get your content shared across the web. These people are the ones that continually post engaging content, share opinions, retweet, reblog and promote content that’s relevant to their followers. You’ll probably have an idea of who these are already, but why not use an application like Wefollow to search for influencers? You’ll be able to see their followers and social activity allowing you to put those that are suitable into a database for future outreach.

Distribute your posts

You could have written the most informative article in the world, but if nobody is seeing it then it’s not going to have the same effect. Whilst it’s good for SEO, it’s still vital for your content to engage your audience. You’ll need to distribute your content across social including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, depending on your audience, as an organic way to reach your followers. Remember to outreach to those influencers that you’ve identified early on.