We are pleased to have Pilar Galiana as a guest blogger. She is a digital marketing strategist who has worked with brands like Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Nokia Canada and TD Bank to mention a few. These days she runs her own small business, you can find her mobile site here, www.ellasays.ca.

Am I stressing you out each time I say that good blogs need a lot of targeted regular content? Well don’t stress and plan instead. In addition to your goals, having a plan is going to be one of your greatest assets for achieving blogging success.

There are a lot of elements to a good blog plan, but for now let’s just look at what blog posts you will create. 

Most blogs are set up with categories, on the YWD blog, we have a long list of categories - “Paul’s SMB Tips”, “YWD News”, “The Weekly Stuff”, “HowTo”, “Mobile”, “Facebook”, “SEO”, “Testimonials”, “Blogging”, “Social Media”. All our categories reflect our overall objective, to help our customers achieve on-line success.

If you know what categories you want to create, then this exercise will help you develop a list of posts.

5 steps to creating 35 blog posts

This exercise assumes you have already defined the primary subject of your blog and defined what you primary audience wants to know. If you haven’t done that, now is a good time to give that some thought.

Step 1 - establish your theme

Step 2 - come up with 7 categories that fit into that theme

Step 3 - create 5 sub categories within each of your categories

Step 4 - assign post styles (interview, video blog etc.)

Step 5 - create working titles for each post

Brainstorming blog posts

If you are a less structured sort of person, this process may be better for you. Simply start creating a list of potential blog posts and for each just come up with a simple working title. Don’t stop until you develop 35 different post ideas. Once you have 35 post ideas see if you can fit them into categories. 

Repurposing content

When most organizations start to think about blogging, the first reaction is almost always, “ugh, one more thing to do”. The reality is, for many organizations, it is often a different way to do something you are already doing.

At YWD for example, we were already spending a lot of time Tweeting, now, each week we turn our top weekly Tweets into a Twitter round-up style blog post.

What do you have or what are you doing that can be repurposed into a blog post? For example, do you have a newsletter you are already mailing to customers? Why not repurpose that content as blog posts? Or maybe your restaurant has weekly specials, you already print up that content, why not take that same content and make a blog post? Or perhaps you have a new product - why don’t you consider introducing the product with a blog post. Do your customers sometimes reach out and tell you how much they like what you do? Testimonials from clients make great blog posts too. 

Spend some time, and think about all the content or communications you are already creating - what can you re-purpose for your blog?

Before you write a single post, I strongly recommend you first come up with a list of 30 - 40 potential post ideas. This planning process will help ensure you have the correct categories set up on your blog, and it will give you and idea of what you already have that you can reuse and how much time you will need to set aside to create new content. 

Your Guide to Starting a Blog the right way:

Week 1 - learning from those who have gone before you
Week 2 - setting goals
Week 4 - Types of blog posts
Week 5 - Writing for the web
Week 6 - Building traffic through Blogs
Week 7 - Never stop learning

Are you blogging? You should be.

The Blog tool is included with YWD’s “Small Biz” and “The Works” packages. It can also be added to the “Basic” package as a separate tool for just $10/month.
Learn more about YWD Blog

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We are pleased to have Pilar Galiana as a guest blogger. She is a digital marketing strategist who has worked with brands like Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Nokia Canada and TD Bank to mention a few. These days she runs her own small business, you can find her mobile site here, www.ellasays.ca.