Lesson 2: How To Plan The Perfect BloggingStrategy?

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Blogging is all about using the right strategy and you already know that though the f irst lesson. Ifyou have missed that out, it is all about The Art of Blogging for Beginners and I strongly suggestto dive into it as well (af ter reading this post).

Lesson Two in Blogging University would be all about planning the perfect bloggingstrategy. Yes, not your usual strategy but the perf ect one.

You know, the one that actually kills your opponent and shooting you straight into the top spot.Yup, that’s the one!

The perf ect blogging strategy consists of several parts:

1. Product

2. Potential buyers

3. Marketing strategy

4. Social media strategy

5. Outreach

6. Guest posting

7. Backlink building

8. Monitoring and benchmarking

There you go f olks. The top 8 important rules when it comes planning your blogging.

Disclaimer: While I could probably write 20,000 words with these 8 points and boreyou to death, I will explaining all of these in a very simple form. In the coming lessons,these will be divided into several parts for even deeper analysis and case studies. Sostay tune!

Blogging strategy #1: Understanding your blogging products

Good products usually make more sales and good blogs get more love f rom readers.

Blogging product is your blog post. From the blogging topics to the quality of each blog posts.You need to nail it every time … or at least try to create that uber or epic article.

If you can’t write great articles, you are in trouble. In blogging, your blog post will determine yoursuccess.

Don’t f orget, an uber or epic article is useless if you have a boring headline.

So, the combination of a great article plus eye catching headline will be a huge winner.

One of my case studies was so successf ul that until now, it is still generating traf f ic. Take a lookhere.

The t it le was “How I increased Google+ Traff ic By Over 700% Under 7 Days”.

In the perf ect blogging strategy, you need to have a great blogging product and in this case, it is ano-brainer case study. The goal was to achieve as much traf f ic as I possibly can under 7 days.

Do whatever it takes to maximize the power of the article and summarize the inf ormation af terthe test period. The second last step is to compare the inf ormation (bef ore and af ter) which isrelatively easy.

The last part to make this whole blogging strategy f its perf ectly is the tit le. The tit le I createdabove has two meanings; utilizing human’s want and mysterious.

Increasing Google+ traffic is probably everyone’s dream and improvement of 700% under 7 days is

def initely a mystery.

Actionable blogging strategy: Know what you can ‘sell’ as a blogger. Determine the topic, t imef actor and human’s reaction will prove to be a huge win-win solution.

Blogging strategy #2: Building a blog that involves your readers

As I have said in the f irst lesson, knowing what your readers is important.

But hold on a moment. If you have just started a blog, you would probably have problem f indingout what your readers want to read.

And thus, you need to play a litt le guessing game which involves two steps:

Topic selection

Research

In topic selection, you need to decide on the topic you would to write on. Let’s take an examplewhich is blogging tips.

With that inf ormation, you need to f igure out what is the popular topics that is driving traf f ic andthere are several tools to work on it namely Google search, Google Keyword Planner, Long TailPro and Scribe SEO.

Google search – Cheap and f ast way to get the top 5 or top 10 results. It doesn’t give you thenumber of searches but it gives you an idea what are trending and who are your potentialcompetitors.

Google Keyword Planner – Excellent tool f or bloggers who are starting up. You get all theinf ormation you need under one roof and it doesn’t cost you a dime.

The below is a video on how to use Google Keyword Planner the right way.

Long Tail Pro – One of the f astest tool when it comes to keyword research. You can f ind thetype of keywords which are trending as well as the chance of ranking f or the keyword.

Did I mentioned that this is one of the most af f ordable keyword research tool f or bloggers?

Scribe SEO (some call it Scribe Content) – The only SEO tool which I had used f or a very longtime. Created by CopyBlogger team, it helps serious bloggers and marketing agencies plan theirstrategy. For me, this is a great tool to help create the pref ect blogging strategy.

This is how the back end looks like (analysis part).

Blogging strategy #3: Laying out your marketing strategy

Imagine the movie, The Italian Job.Plans are laid out, recheck and evenpracticed to ensure that the robberyplan will work using f ully customizedMini Coopers.

The same concept goes f orblogging.

Write great articles (and headlines)are just the starting point but noone is going to know what you haddone, if you don’t tell.

Have you ever tried writ ing a coupleof articles a day f or a month straight just to realize that you are getting less than 500 traf f ic aday?

I did that and I was demoralized, big t ime. The problem lies in me!

Strangely, I was hoping that Google will ‘spot’ me writ ing great article and shoved me up the topspot.

Yeah, right! Keep on dreaming.

The truth is, you need to market it.

Adam Connell f rom Blogging Wizard (a very close buddy) did told me this, “If you are putting 100%into writ ing an article, you need to put the same ef f ort or twice as much into marketing”.

Actionable blogging strategy could consists of :

Blogging approach (tutorial based, case studies and blogging series like BloggingUniversity and interviews)

Utilizing social media to your advantage

Outreaching and community works

Guest posting and collaborations

Blogging strategy #4: The importance of social media in blogging

Social media is growing and the numbers are increasing nearly double yearly. Like it or not, socialmedia is already playing a role in your blogging strategy.

Let’s take a look at the largest social media platf orm today; Facebook.

Credits to Statistic Brain

People say social media ROI is crap. You get a mere 3% outreach (max) if you do it right. So, thismeans that you have the chance to reach up to 18,864,000 active members. And let’s say only0.5% of them who will actually respond to your social update.

This means that you have a chance of reaching out 94,320 people in a single day.

While 94,000 plus is the maximum outreach you could get, even reaching a f raction of them wouldprove to have a crazy impact in your blogging.

There are dozens of platf orms you can choose f rom today. One of the biggest mistake manybloggers do is that they are putting too many eggs in various baskets.

Unless you have 48 hours a day to spend, you need to maximize your social media strategy f orbetter ROI. Focusing on 3 (example) platf orms could easily be much better than f ocusing a dozensites at one time.

Actionable blogging strategy: Choose the right platf orm to start working. Always f ocus inhaving one primary and two secondaries. If you need help choosing, here are the top 7 socialmedia platf orms f or bloggers.

Blogging strategy #5: Increase blog traf f ic using bloggers outreach

If you are blogger who wish to have more traf f ic or looking f or ways to build authority, you needto practice outreach.

Outreach is a blogging strategy to reach out to other bloggers (in most cases, popular bloggers).The concept is pretty easy.

Create a chance of building a relationship by including them in:

Case studies

Interview series

Round ups

In return, they would probably share the article or even f eature you on their blogs. Now, if theyhave 5,000 f ollowers, you have just increased the chance of reaching out to another 5,000readers.

If you are planning to perf orm outreach, the rule is to be humble. Avoid contacting them justbecause you wanted their help but instead, be their f riend and f ollower f or at least a period oftime.

Once the path is set, all you need to do is to ask.

Actionable blogging strategy: Focus on inf luencers who are highly related to your niche.Sometimes, the number of f ollowers they have are not that relevant.

Blogging strategy #6: Using guest blogging to your advantage

Google hates guest posting like children hate their veggies.

Back in those days, you start asking around (randomly) on guest posting and that’s it. Nowadays,the tide has turned and you need more than that to be saf e.

Advantages of guest posting:

Good chance of building a name

Reaching out to the f ans in the particular blog

Building a better readership

Fostering relationship with other bloggers

Disadvantages of guest posting:

A huge red f lag if you are not caref ul

Easy penalization by Google

While it is absolutely f ine to do guest posting, you have to be saf e and the only way is to bechoosy.

If you are interested in the new guest posting methods, I strongly suggest you to dive into thisarticle, How to do guest postings while avoiding Google penalization?

Actionable blogging strategies: Choose to work only with bloggers you really know and thewebsites are NOT guest posting hubs. Here’s a simple guest posting checklist you can start with.

Blogging strategy #7: The meaning of backlink and how it af fects SEO

Backlink is still important and SEO is not dead.

The rule of the game is simple. The more backlinks you have, the better chance f or you to obtaina better PageRank score (plus ranking). But take this with a pinch of salt since having 1 backlinkf rom PR6 blog is much better than 100 backlinks f rom PR1 blogs.

As a blogger, keep in mind that backlink is very important. For every article you publish, make sureyou have ‘backlink’ in mind.

The easiest way f or backlinking is ‘shared to be shared’ concept. Linking an external link f romyour blog could easily trigger and link back to your site (trackback f or example).

Of course, backlink is an extremely lengthy and I will continue my preaching in the f ollowinglessons.

As f or SEO, bloggers who are starting up do not need to have those epic SEO tools. All you needis to practice the basic SEO f undamentals and you are probably good f or the next couple ofmonths.

The video below explains everything you need to know about SEO.

Actionable blogging strategy: Keep in mind the power of backlinks and SEO. While SEO isalways overrated, you should not underestimate the power of it.

Blogging strategy #8: Monitoring the blog progress and keeping an eye on yourcompetitors

This is a tedious process and what you’ll be reading below are just the icing of thecake.

Monitoring works in several ways; f rom monitoring the process of your own blog to visitor ’sreaction to colours and your competitor ’s ranking.

In blogging, monitoring allows you to gain an upper hand advantage. For example, Google

Analytics and Webmaster Tools give you data on the location of your visitors, click through ratesand how your blog is ranking on search engines.

These are good inf ormation f or you to analyze and amend your blogging strategy to keep up withthe current trend.

Benchmarking on the other hand relates closely to your competitors’ scores. You need to know:

Why they are ranking

How they are ranking

For me, I consider myself in the middle of the league table and I of ten benchmark myself withothers. At t imes, it is really cool to see some bloggers contacting me via email and sharing stats.

In this blogging technique, you f ocus on two very simple things; Personal and competitors’ blogs.

What does it felt like when you know a lot about your competitors? It felt like having anUAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) preying on your target from 5 miles away and theyhave absolutely no clue about it.

Actionable blogging strategy: Start a simple blogging strategy f or a month. Compare yourstats with your competitors and af ter that, setting up benchmarks f or you to achieve. The goalhere is to ensure that you are creating logical and achievable goals f or yourself .

Wrapping up the perfect blogging strategy for bloggers

Using a single blogging strategy doesn’t really make the cut in today’s world. With the amount ofcompetit ion, you need to have various strategies and the above are 8 very simple ones that youcan execute in no time.

It would take a f ew adjustment and amendments to be able to create the perf ect bloggingstrategy. That’s why it is important to ensure that you learn f rom every strategy you have used.

Now, it ’s your turn. What do you think and what was your blogging strategy bef ore reading thispost?

Stay tune for more and the next lesson in Blogging University would be ‘Finding Profitable Niche AndTopics To Blog’.