Blogging Plan

What is a Blogging Plan?

Blogs are a great way to consistently put out relevant, helpful content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. A blogging plan is a way to organize content and plan ahead to make sure your team is consistently writing, editing, and publishing content at the right time.

A blogging plan consists of a number of blog topics, the keywords associated with those topics, and a publishing schedule for each post. Your blogging plan may also include things like the targeted buyer persona for each post, the stage of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision), or posts associated with a specific campaign initiative.

Why You Should Have a Blogging Plan

When it comes to creating content, a plan is necessary to avoid those times when generating ideas is difficult. With a blogging plan, you’re never scrambling trying to figure out what this week’s blog will be about—you’ll have ideas and topics planned out in advance. Having a blogging plan also allows you to publish posts more strategically, such as focusing content around a product launch or new campaign.

How to Create a Blogging Plan

A blogging plan is more than a list of ideas. It builds out and organizes ideas and topics to create a cohesive content strategy. Here’s how to get started with your own blogging plan:

Research

Coming up with ideas in bulk can be daunting. While you can stretch the process over a few days or a week, you’ll need to do some research to make sure you’re creating content your customers want. Research can come in the form of keyword research or topic research. For keyword research, you would use a tool like SEMRush or Moz to look for keywords related to your products or industry to form ideas. For topic research, you would look at industry forums or Quora to see what questions people have about your industry or products. You may also look at your competitors’ blogs to see what they’re talking about.

Develop Blog Ideas

Once you have some topics and keywords to go off of, start building out your topics with titles, and a short description of what the blog will cover. Include any additional information like strong articles to link to, what buyer persona the blog targets, and any keywords you’re looking to rank for with the blog. This gives you a good base to jump off of when you start writing the actual blog article later.

Organize into a Schedule

Take your list of blog ideas and organize them into a posting schedule. Take into account things like upcoming campaigns, seasonal trends for your products or services, or current events that can make a blog more timely or helpful. Additionally, not all blog ideas will take the same amount of time to write, edit, and publish; space out longer blogs with shorter ones for a more balanced load.

Don’t Plan Too Far Ahead

Planning ahead is helpful to keep content flowing, but planning too far ahead can be ineffective. Things may change in your company or industry that will impact what content should be published on your blog. Planning content for a month is a good place to start, but planning for longer than a quarter can lead to lots of changes down the road. Even when planning for a quarter, leaving some space for change can help if something changes rapidly or unexpectedly.