4 Step Process for Planning and Writing Blog Posts

How often are you writing and publishing new blog posts for your company’s website? Despite what you may see or hear online, blog posts are an excellent way to build thought leadership and drive traffic back to your website, both of which will help you to increase brand awareness and generate leads.

Although it’s not critical to publish a high frequency of blog posts each month, it is important to publish them consistently and ensure someone on your team is writing at least 1-2 new blogs month after month. That may seem like a lot, but if you have a clear system and process in place, you’ll find yourself churning new blog posts out in no time.

Check out our four-step process that will make it easy for you to plan and write new content.

Brainstorm Topics Based on Customer Problems or Questions

It seems like the most difficult part with blogging is thinking of what to write, doesn’t it? Here’s a pro tip that will help with that: every time a customer asks you a question or mentions a problem you’re facing, find a way to turn that into a piece of content.

Whether the blog posts educate your audience, share your results, or give an inside look into your company, you can use the everyday conversations you have with your customers to guide the content you create moving forward. Be sure to keep a running list of ideas because it will prevent you from ever running out of what to say!

Link Back to Previously Published Content

Have you previously published a blog post, resource, or page that relates to the new blog post you’re writing? Link back to it within the blog post so your readers have additional resources to browse!

Also known as internal links, linking to your other content is known to:

• Keep readers on your website
• Help Google crawl your website easily
• Build your SEO
• Increase your tank for the right keywords

You can look through the archive of your blog or through your email marketing software to find the older blog posts and resources to link to, but if you want to make things easier for yourself and keep things organized moving forward, you can create spreadsheets that outline this information and keep everything in one place.

Promote It Once It’s Live

You’ve spent all of that time writing your blog post–now make sure you promote it to drive the attention that it deserves! Here are a few ideas for marketing your new content:

1. Write social media posts about it.
2. Share it with your email list.
3. Publish it in Facebook / LinkedIn groups and Twitter communities.
4. Run ads for it.
5. Send it to clients or leads who may benefit from reading it.

Not only will promoting your content increase your website traffic but it may also help to build your email list if you linked to lead magnets within the blog post that people signed up to receive.

Remember to share it more than once, too! Unless your blog post contains time-sensitive content that will no longer be relevant in the future, you can share it over and over again, which is helpful for driving traffic to older posts and giving you something to promote on social media when you’re running out of ideas.

Update It Over Time

Just like you need to promote your blog over time, you also need to update it over time. Updating previously published content helps to:

• Correct information that may now be outdated or irrelevant
• Adjust the keywords you’re ranking for
• Provide you with content to share
• Increase your internal linking if you now have other content to include
• Change your images to align with your brand

You certainly don’t need to update all blog posts at once, and in fact, it’s better to spread it out. We typically will start with updating older blog posts first and then working our way up to the most recent blog posts, updating anywhere from 1-2 old blog posts per month.

Do you feel like your blog strategy could use an improvement? Request a consultation with us to find out how we can help.