Here’s the second part of creating an effective blogging strategy. In the first part called “Your Blog Will Fail Without a Strategy” we said you should focus on creating a consistent and distinctive “brand”. Your blog should be viewed as a “Channel” which you use to send information to your readers and visitors. And that information – that “content” – should reflect a unique and consistent character, point of view and style.
But I find it is very easy to lose track of what I’m doing if I don’t have a clear plan. There’s a great temptation to start going off on tangents in response to the hot topic of the moment. Or, just as bad, I can get in a rut and just talk about the same things over and over again.
If you’re blog is about real estate investment, for example, you’ll find yourself tempted to spout the same “Five Rules for Smart Investing” over an over again in different words.
One effective technique for channeling your thoughts and encouraging yourself to cover a range of interesting and relevant material is to use what I call the C & C method – Categorize and Cycle. Here’s what I mean:
First, you choose a series of categories which you will try to write something about on a regular basis. And then you cycle through the categories.
Wordpress and other blogging platforms lend themselves very nicely to the idea of “categories”. In fact they almost force you into that approach. Choosing interesting categories gives you a way of organizing your blog, and organizing your thoughts too.
Let’s say you are a real estate agent. Your categories might be
- Buying Real Estate
- Selling Real Estate
- Real Estate Investing
- Local or Regional Information
- National Real Estate News or Trends
Or say you’re creating a blog about Golf. Your categories might be
- Golf swing tips
- Golf travel destinations
- Golf course reviews
- Golf equipment reviews
This might be too broad. You might want to focus on just one of these areas, say, “Golf Swing Tips”:
- Putting tips
- Driving tips
- Bunker tips
- Short game tips
You may be temtped to go too narrow or too broad. Try to settle on a range of categories that cover what you think your target market will be interested in, and which will reinforce the “brand” identification you have selected.
For example, if you want to be known as the “golf swing tips guy”, then don’t get sidetracked talking about golf travel. Or on the other hand, if you want to become a resource for “golf travel”, then focus on that. And stay focused.
And don’t choose too many categories because you want to use them to help you decide what to write about. You want to write something about each of them on a regular basis. So four or five is probably good for starters.
Once you’ve chosen your categories it’s just a matter of “cycling” through them on a regular basis. Not only does this give you a much clearer idea of what to write about, but it also suggests a practical posting schedule.
For example, if you have five categories then you may want to write something about each of them every week. That would be five posts a week – not an unreasonable schedule if you want your blog to be taken seriously by your readers.
If you think coming up with interesting material to write about every day is way too difficult, then back it off to every other day. But before you draw that conclusion, read the suggestions I make in the next post where I disuss: “What to put in your posts and where to get the ideas.”
It’s not as difficult as you might think.