Creating Content for Your Blog
Building a blog isn’t enough. In order for it to help you achieve your marketing goals, you have to develop a plan for creating content.
This content should support your branding and marketing efforts while generating traffic to the blog. Increased traffic equals more readers, which should help you increase your revenue.
Before establishing guidelines for your content, you will need to identify your target audience and brainstorm what types of material will best appeal to them.
KNOW YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Who is your target audience?
This might be the most important question facing you as you move
forward with plans to build your brand through blogging. If you don’t know who your readers are, you will not be able to tailor content that is engaging and keeps them coming back.
There are a number of things you can do to determine your target audience. There are a variety of ways to conduct market research. From interviewing existing customers, conducting research on social media, various competitor pages and forums or paid research.
Here are some questions to help focus your efforts better:
Who are my products for? – If you are trying to build a brand name for baby care products, chances are you already know your target audience. You want to pull in young mothers and fathers and perhaps grandparents. Your blog posts will need to appeal to them and will need to offer them information and even advice they can use.
Who would I like my products to also appeal to? – Going back to those baby products, perhaps you have a great customer base of parents already, but would like to increase sales through grandparents and friends. In this case, your target audience would also include these people. That means you’d want to make sure your message and posts appeal to them, as well.
Am I going after an unusual niche? – Maybe you don’t sell products at all, but want your brand blog to appeal to a specific kind of reader. If, for example, you’re a woodworker and your blog will be about this niche topic, you’ll want to set your message to appeal to beginners, novices and even pros involved in this hobby.
Once you have a good idea of who your blog will target, it can help you better plan content. These are important for assisting
you in selecting and/or creating content that not only builds your brand, but also appeals to your desired audience.
TIPS FOR SETTING THE TONE AND STYLE
Having a basic outline of what can and cannot appear on your branding blog is very useful. You want to make sure posts are consistent and build up the brand while sending the right messages out to your target audience.
Some of the things to consider including in your guidelines are:
The basic writing style – Do you want your blog to be highly informal and conversational? Perhaps you’d like to create a news blog and establish yourself as an authority on a specific topic? You do have freedom in determining the writing style but keep your goals and your target audience in mind when doing so. Once you select a style, try to stick with it so your readers know what to expect when they visit your blog.
The types of posts you’d like to appear on your blog – With your target audience in mind, brainstorm a list of the kinds of posts that would be acceptable and those that might not be. If you’re selling baby products, you might want posts about your products, baby care in general and even health care. Related posts about how mothers can better care for themselves could also fit in quite well. You might not, however, want content that deals with raising teenagers. Keep your focus area fairly tight and you can establish your brand and your credibility much easier.
When you know your audience and focus your content toward your desired audience, you will be well on your way to creating and selecting content that serves your purposes perfectly.