Have you ever tracked how much time it takes to put a blog post together? Maybe you wonder if blogging is really worth the time? Whelp, I’m here to tell you it can help change your business, but only if you create content that resonates with your audience and provides value.
I also get there seem to be two types of people in this blogging world: ones who love to blog and ones who hate it. Very rarely do you find a middle ground for blogging, kinda like yoga or running (two of my favorite activities).
Maybe you hate blogging and do it anyway because you already know how valuable it is to your biz. But just how much time should you be putting into creating blog content? A lot goes into it, right? You have to:
- Come up with content ideas
- Take pictures or pull work that can be featured
- Edit or cull the photos
- Write the content
- Edit the content
- Optimize the post for search engines
- Schedule the content in your editorial calendar (oh wait, you don’t have one of those?!)
- Schedule your post to get distributed on your social channels
It can be a lot to manage and slightly overwhelming, especially if you try to tackle all of these tasks at once.
Gone are the days of blogging to simply journal about your life.
In order to see results, you have to be strategic.
Your blog needs to be the gateway to your services; if you are going to spend your precious time creating and distributing blog content, you need to make sure the content you are creating feeds the services you provide.
This is the first natural step in your potential client’s journey to answering their questions about who you are and what you do.
And at the end of your blog posts, you should guide them to the next logical step to learn more about you and your services. You can’t just dead-end them at the end of your post.
This is what it means to develop a blogging strategy.
Creating a funnel and natural progression for them to learn more and map it back to your services is how you can leverage your blog to fuel and help you grow your business.
Because the reality is, when someone is “Googling” something, they are looking for an answer. And surprise! Your blog content can answer their questions and be the gateway to learning more about you, your business, and your services.
3 TIPS TO MANAGE YOUR BLOGGING WORKFLOW
While blogging can be overwhelming, especially when trying to do all of those steps mentioned above at one time, it’s easier to break it up into smaller pieces and batch work the deliverables. Here’s how I recommend breaking up the various tasks for blogging so you can streamline your efforts!
BRAINSTORM ALL OF YOUR IDEAS AT ONCE
Before diving into the actual to-dos of creating a blog post, I highly recommend brainstorming 1-3 months’ worth of content at a time.
I love using my whiteboard to brainstorm ideas, but do what works best for you to get it all out of your head and on “paper”. The most important thing to do when brainstorming is to focus on ideas and topics that align with the services and/or products you offer.
Make sure your topic ideas map back to your services and are a natural first step for someone to gain insight into your expertise and knowledge.
I know Imposter Syndrome is all too real, and it’s easy to feel like you’re not worthy of blogging about your area of expertise because you don’t feel like “the expert.”
This is not about ranking you to others in your industry. Instead, blogging about your expertise is about showing your ideal client you can help them with their problems (why they need to hire you!).
PRO TIP:
Think about the questions your clients are asking and see how you can turn those questions into blog content that you answer!
CREATE A BLOGGING EDITORIAL CALENDAR
Now that you’ve identified topics and blog post ideas, put it into a calendar with due dates to help hold you accountable. During this stage, I like to see how I can group these blog post ideas to create a journey of content that makes sense.
Sometimes I focus on themes for the month, such as branding, and align those blog post ideas to that month.
Let’s say you’re a health and wellness coach. You can create themes of nutrition, fitness, and mindset for each month, and then schedule supporting content for each of those 3 categories within the respective months.
Now that you have your blog post ideas on the calendar with due dates and publish dates, you can actually start creating your blog content!
BATCH WORK YOUR CONTENT
Before we continue down this path of recommending batch working, I think it’s important to clarify that batch work is different than block scheduling.
I attempted the block scheduling thing and I failed miserably. It just never seemed to work for me.
But batch working is different.
Batch working is grouping similar tasks together and allows you to avoid task switching and be more efficient.
And, when it comes to blogging, it’s really helpful to batch work. I think most people would just lump blogging as a whole into batch working, but I highly encourage you to break it down into the following buckets:
- Keyword research
- do all of you keyword research for your blog post ideas at one time (check out this Chrome extension to easily identify keywords!)
- Copywriting
- draft your copy for each of your blog posts for the month or week – depending on your schedule and cadence at one time
- Imagery
- Select or take any images needed for your blog posts at one time
- Edit and rename all of your images ahead of time
- Create all graphics for your blog post at one time, including versioning out graphics for social distribution
- Editing + Optimization
- Format and add your blog post content into your platform at one time
- Go through and optimize it for SEO by adding in Alt Text to your images, adding in headers, outbound, and internal links
- Schedule Your Posts!
I find batch working is the easiest way to get ahead of your blogging efforts. It maximizes your time to really make blogging worthwhile!
If you’re looking to turn your blog into a marketing machine, I’m launching The Blogging Workshop, this fall! Sign up to get on the waitlist and be the first to know when doors open!
