Defining your purpose

Before coming up with a plan for your blog, you need to identify its underlying purpose clearly. These are the things that you need to determine:

• The purpose that your business wants to achieve.
• The story that conveys its purpose.
• The people that have the same passion for your company’s purpose, and if they are aligned to its meaning.

Once you have determined all of these, you can organize them into a solid defining statement that can help you build strong support for all your blogging and marketing decisions in the future.

Find a niche that you’re passionate about

For blogs to be successful, it is essential for them to appeal to the masses and have a focus that’s wide enough to guarantee that bloggers will have plenty of topics to write about. However, whether you want to podcast, create videos or write, make sure to do it on topics that you and your target audience will find relevant. Blog about something that you truly like and enjoy, if you don’t, you will find yourself quitting sooner than later.

Value comes in several forms based on the niche of your site. The key to providing value is to create content centered on your interests and passions in life. By doing this, you will do a better job and come up with more quality content over time. You will also not get tired, bored or quit before your blog takes off.

Buyer Personas

A blog is an excellent tool for lead conversion. Ideally you will customize your content to your target audience who are most likely to purchase from you. But do you know who your ideal customers are? Answering this question in detail will aid you in writing blog content that is better suited to their needs and interests.

A buyer persona is the description of your ideal customer that is based on actual data and market research on your current customers. It includes the behavior patterns of your potential customers, demographics, goals, and motivations among others. It can provide your business with tremendous insight and structure.

Once you have detailed information about your ideal clients, you will need to do market research on their behaviors. You can then adapt and tailor it  your blog posts for their vital interests and challenges.

Customer research can be costly, but there are some free places where you can start:

• Quora, Fluther, Yahoo Answers, and other Q&A forums.
• Social media channels such as Google+ Communities and LinkedIn Groups are great resources.
• Read blog comments from other sites that your target audience might find interesting. You will be able to learn the kind of content that engages them.

Establish your credibility

Just about anyone with internet access can launch a blog. However, not everyone has the reliability and credibility to create one that is meaningful. You don’t have to be a certified fitness instructor to publish a fitness blog or have a Ph.D. to start a blog about health. The most important thing here is to offer your readers with helpful, interesting, relevant, and engaging content.

Providing your target audience with the information they are looking for is a way to build trust with them. This trust will grow over time which will result in your audience coming back to your blog over and over again. Before you know it, your site will become their go-to place online for information, and there’s a high chance that they will recommend it to their family and friends as well.

Build an email list

Google updates its algorithm regularly, and when it does, sites and blogs are affected. You may be ranked first on its search result today for specific keywords, but your ranking may slip overnight without a word of warning.

Coming up with a backup strategy is vital when this happens, and this is when an email list comes in. Building an email list from the day you launch your blog is crucial. Not only will it help you generate organic traffic to your blog, but you can also utilize it to sell your products and services directly to your leads.

You can set up an opt-in email form or a pop-up message in your posts to help increase your lead magnets and convert the visitors of your blog to leads. Bloom by Elegant Themes is an excellent plugin you can use which allows you to display some pretty cool opt-ins in pop-up forms.

Know your competition

If you are in a big niche with intense competition, your chances of succeeding are slim. But no matter how big or small your niche is, it is crucial to identify and assess your competitors.

Start by doing a Google search to find out which are among your most relevant competition. Common sense will tell you to forget about those subjects with too much competition. Here is how you can assess the level of competitiveness in your niche:

• Take note of the number of established blogs that are out there.
• Find out how many blog posts your competitors have already published, how often they post, and if they are individual bloggers or a huge online publishing company.
• Evaluate their content’s overall quality.
• Use the best SEO tools.

Remember that your market should be big enough to achieve the profit goals you have in mind but small enough so that you can get the attention of the audience on that niche and retain it.

Set up measurable goals

Your blog should have goals with an established timeframe for accomplishing them so that you will have a way of measuring its success. Build a one-year plan that includes a checklist where you can measure your site’s overall growth and assess whether you have reached your goals.

The key metrics you need to include and focus on are:

• How much organic traffic your site is generating.
• The number of email list subscribers.
• How much income you are making.

Quality over quantity

One of the biggest mistakes most bloggers commonly make is to believe that the more blog posts they publish, the more traffic and leads it will generate. This is far from the truth. What will drive more traffic to your website is providing readers with high-quality, relevant, and unique content. Whether you publish once a week or twice a month, as long as the articles you post are in-depth, you will get more desirable results than when you are publishing on a daily basis.