Developing A Winning Blog Strategy

First Step: Define Your Blog’s Goals and Objectives

If you want to build a successful blog, you must establish a solid blog strategy. And, yes blog still help build business, generate leads and bring traffic to a website. Part of your blog strategy is to establish the correct goals and objectives.

Here is a quick definition of goals and objectives. Goals are your general big picture endgame. Goals answer the question: what do we want to accomplish with the blog?

Strategic goals for your blog could be:

• To enhance our image as an expert in cloud computing
• To improve the efficiency of new business development
• To increase customer satisfaction

The goals for your blog should align with to your company’s marketing goals.

Objectives need to be SMART, meaning objectives are specific, measurable, actionable and time-specific. Objectives are milestones that help you reach your goals.

For example, if the goal of your blog is improving business development, you could set objectives similar to these:

• increase new visitor traffic by 15% in 3 months
• increase subscribers to our enewsletter by 20% within 6 months
• generate 25 high-quality business leads from the blog by the end of Q3

Step 2: Establish a Measurement System

To measure your goals, you must have some tracking mechanism to chart your progress. You should use Google analytics or similar web traffic measuring programs. Setup your measuring system before you launch your campaigns.

After setting objectives and putting a measurement process in place, develop your strategies for each objective.

For example, if your objective is to increase unique visitor traffic to your blog by 15% in 3 months, you strategies might be:

• build an well-functioning blog writing team
• establish strategic relationships with industry blog-partners
• create and SEO-based editorial calendar

Once you have your objectives in place, it is time for the nits, the tactics to make it happen.

Step 3: Develop Your  Tactics

Your tactics are the specific steps you will take to implement your strategies. This is where the rubber hits the road.

For example, if your strategy is to build a well-functioning blog writing team, your tactics might include:

• emailing staff and asking for volunteers,
• assign specific topics to each team member and set schedule of 2 posts/week
• set-up a Google+ account for each blog team member and connect to the blog
• providing writers with blog post topics and writing guidelines
• providing training on the blog platform and SEO plugins, etc.

Once you implement your tactics, measure the results and make adjustments as necessary.