We’ve now reached the point where we guide you through writing your first post! In this section, we’ll cover not only the basics of conceptualization and organizing ideas but also planning your content within a specific time frame.
Building a good content strategy is crucial since your readers will come to your site for the benefit that you’ll be offering through your posts. As such, you’d want to write about stuff that your target audience will be interested in and gain value from.
Content planning and strategy
Developing a compelling content strategy is critical in producing great content. Doing this first and foremost will help you streamline your writing process and ensure that you’re producing useful, relevant, and engaging material for your readers. To help you with this, we’ve simplified this process into four steps:
1. Know your target market
A great plan starts with knowing who your audience is. Analyzing your target market’s characteristics lets you tailor posts according to their preferences and needs. To do this, start by studying your niche. Think of possible posts you might write under this topic and ask yourself what type of reader would find them helpful.
You can also use Facebook Business’ Audience Insights to know more about the interests and demographic profile of your audience. To use this, you can simply input the Facebook page of a site with a similar niche as yours and you’ll get info about your potential readers’ age, gender, education level, lifestyle, and more.
Think with Google also has a neat tool for segmentation called Find My Audience which you might also find useful.
2. Generate content ideas
After familiarizing yourself with your audience, we’re now moving over to brainstorming content ideas. Here, you’d want to list as many post titles or topics as you can. Don’t worry if you’re unsure of including some of them as you can easily edit them out later. To help you come up with ideas, try to use these tools by HubSpot and Impact to see if they work for you.
3. Measure demand
To ensure that there’s a sizable number of people who are interested in the topics you listed, it would be best for you to examine the interest volume for each. You can use Answer the Public and Ubersuggest to aid you with this.
4. Create an editorial plan
Once you’ve narrowed down your list to the most interesting, relevant, and useful, then it’s time to create a schedule of all the post titles you came up with. Figure out your preferred posting schedule then use this as a basis in building a timetable for your blog posts. This editorial planning template might be helpful.
Writing your first post
Now that you have a list of carefully selected and planned content ideas, then it’s time to turn them into compelling blog posts. Writing a blog post might seem intimidating at first but just like any skill, you’ll find that you’re getting better as you keep doing it. To get you off to a flying start, let the following steps guide you in crafting your first post:
1. Figure out the ideal content format for your topic
2. Research the topic
3. Write an informative and catchy headline
4. Start strong by writing an introduction that will intrigue your readers
5. List the main points of the body then build on them
6. Edit and proofread your writing
7. Publish your post
If you’re planning to make money from your blog as soon as possible, then I would recommend that you prepare 10-15 blog posts before you launch. This is ideal because most ad networks and affiliate programs review content when evaluating blogs for eligibility.
Publishing your post
Publishing a blog post on WordPress is very easy. To do this, simply follow these steps:
1. In your dashboard’s left side bar, go to “Posts”, then select “Add New”
2. Input your post’s title and content
3. Customize the format of your text
4. On the right side bar, you can edit the post’s category
5. Upload a featured image
6. Provide an excerpt for the post
7. In the upper right side bar, hit “Publish”
That’s it! To check if you’ve successfully published your post, simply go to “Posts” > “All Posts” or preview your site.
Your Turn
Brainstorm post ideas for your blog. Try to come up with a list of 30-40 blog post topics then use this as a starting point in creating your editorial plan. After developing your editorial plan, write the first 10-15 blog posts that you want to publish in your blog. Delivering this initial flood of posts will come in handy later in lesson seven, as we get you into creating a stream of revenue for your blog.
Summary
To recap, this lesson has taken you through the process of developing a content strategy for your blog. We also outlined the basic steps in writing and publishing your first post.
That’s all for now, check back soon for ideas on how you can attract readers and promote your blog!