Whether your blog is new or has been around a while, there is no better time than now to create your blogging strategy. In fact, if you don’t already have one, the time is definitely now when it comes to creating your strategy. Just like you wouldn’t start your day on the nursing unit without a plan, you don’t want to blog without a strategy.
To determine your purpose
To have a successful blog, it’s important that you know your purpose. Why are you here? How are you different? What do you provide for the reader? Your blogging strategy helps you determine your purpose and narrow your focus.
It is critical to determine your focus, because your content should relate to this in some manner. You audience must have an understanding about why you’re in this online space, creating information for others to consume. What void are you fulfilling? What’s your purpose behind your words?
To outline what you will do
Your blogging strategy is an important and useful way to outline what you do and highlight when you will post, what you will post, and how you will get your topics out there to your readers. It’s a game plan, so to speak, for everything that you will do on your blog. It can be hard to be productive when you don’t know what your next steps will be.
Think back to school when you were assigned a paper to write. What was the first thing you did? Created an outline. This outline guided what you wrote, and makes the process of completing the project much smoother because you know where you’re going and why. You aren’t just struggling from sentence to sentence, because you know the purpose behind each section. When it comes to planning, a blog is no different.
(However, keep in mind, blogs are much more informal and causal than an official paper for school. Make sure you’re being relatable to your audience! It’s hard to relate to a textbook or research paper.)
To help people find you
When you have a solid blogging strategy, it will help you pinpoint your target audience. Then you can create posts that will attract those people to you. You will be helping the people you want to read to find you.
Next steps
If you’re new to blogging, don’t fret about having the next year planned out day by day. However, it is helpful to plan what you will write and when you will publish it, all focusing back to your ultimate purpose and goal. This presents the most cohesive and valuable message to your audience.
And don’t forget to check out The Nurses’s Guide to Blogging: Building a Brand and Profitable Business as a Nurse Influencer where we dive deeper into depth practically how to use SEO to strengthen your blog and platform.
Now that you know these three reasons you really need a blogging strategy, there’s nothing left to do but get started creating yours today.
