There was a time when blogs were all about answering people’s questions and writing stories. Nowadays, however, they’re used as sales and growth tools. That’s why so many bloggers are interested in scaling up their blogs to turn them into assets that can generate income for years.
But how do you achieve that as a solo blogger? How do you compete against sites that publish hundreds of posts per month and dominate their niche? You’ll be happy to know that you can, and it all comes down to quality content and following a set of content marketing strategies, which I’ll share with you in this post.
Before you start, though, there are a few things that you need to get in order before you start thinking about scaling up your blog.
#1 Targeted Audience
Before scaling up your content marketing, you’ll want to define your audience clearly. Avoid trying to reach everyone with your content because if everyone is your audience, then no one is really your audience. When speaking of an effective content strategy, it’s essential to find your tribe, no matter what your niche is. Your tribe could be limited by demographics, such as country of origin, or by industry, such as construction. This has two major benefits:
- First, it lets you tailor your content to a specific group of people with similar characteristics, making it much more relevant to all of them.
- Second, it lets you focus your time and resources on the audience that matters instead of wasting time and energy trying to appeal to everyone.
That’s why having a particular audience to deliver your content to has a significant impact on your blog. It’s a way to ensure that the audience that receives your content is the right one for your brand.
#2 Value Proposition
Now that you know who your audience is, you need to know how you can help them. That’s your value proposition, and when it’s done well, it can specifically show your audience what it is that you can do for them. Helping others solve their problems through your content is how you build long-term loyalty among your followers.
It also creates a strong customer relationship, which is why it’s vital to be aware of your audience’s needs and questions so that you can provide the right solution.
#3 Goals & Purpose
Other points you should have defined by now are your goals, objectives, or your plan. What do you want to achieve through your blog? What’s your purpose?
Having your goals straight will help you define a strategy for your blog. It will also be helpful in the process of content creation.
#4 Create a Strategy
Creating a strategy that details every little process in your content creation is vital for the proper management of your blog. As a minimum, these are the aspects of a content strategy that you must consider if you want to grow:
Create a Content Calendar
If you don’t already have a content calendar, this should be a top priority for you. Planning your upcoming post is a strategy that’ll work amazingly for you. It’s a great way to manage your blog!
Establishing your content programming into a calendar will help you keep accountable with your blog since you’ll already have everything planned down. Also, it’s a great “checklist” alternative to be aware of how much progress you’ve made.
Having a content calendar also reduces the stress around finding new topics, keywords, visuals, etc. You only have to do it once and tweak it now and then. In addition, it will help you keep track of everything you’ve done and everything you need to do.
Define Your Process
Your content creation process is undoubtedly unique and 100% yours. This means that only you know how to define it. You may not realize it by now, but every time you release content for your blog, there is a specific path to everything you do.
Documenting your writing process is an essential part of developing and optimizing every aspect of it to the max. However, knowing how to execute it most effectively depends on how you elaborate your strategy.
Visual Identity
As we mentioned earlier, maintaining a great visual guide for your blog is essential to developing excellent customer engagement. In that sense, your blog, social media, and content formatting should always be harmonious.
Creating a post template could be helpful for this specific point, no matter what kind of content you’re releasing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a video, a blog post, or infographics. Having a design and style guide for each of your posts is vital to scale up your content marketing.
SEO Research
Improving your SEO is a vital step in scaling your content marketing. Developing a keyword research method is necessary to establish a great SEO strategy. This keyword research should be the beating heart of your content calendar, as it lets you prioritize which articles should be written first.
Many online tools can help you find the most popular keywords in your niche, specifically those you’re missing out on. That way, you can create and lead your content to the right side of the internet, to obtain more traffic to your blog. It’s also advisable to hire an SEO expert to help you initiate the keyword research if you’re not experienced.
Find a Good and Relevant Topic
Having found the right keywords, you can elaborate on a good and interesting topic for your niche. Make sure to choose something that adds value and solves your reader’s problems.
Develop a Suitable Format
After choosing what you’re going to talk about, you should find the form in which you’re going to deliver your content. Blog posts are an obvious choice, but you can also choose other formats such as newspapers and others, for which you’ll even find great templates that will make publishing quick and easy.
The Content Creation Process
While it may vary depending on the format of your specific content, once you have the right keywords to target, you’ve defined your topics, and you’ve decided what format you’ll use to deliver your content, a typical content creation process looks something like this:
Step 1: Do In-Depth Research
This is probably the most crucial step in your process. You should never start writing or creating anything without doing good research first. When doing your research, make sure to find yourself some credible and appropriate sources.
Step 2: Outline Your Post
Create a scheme of the most relevant points on your topic and what you want to cover.
Step 3: Start Writing Or Creating
Only begin with this step when you’ve passed through all of the above. Remember, you must always create original and relevant content that answers readers’ questions or solves their problems.
Step 4: Editing
Take some time to double-check and proofread what you’ve created. Always run your text through spelling and grammar checkers to catch any stray errors you may have missed.
Step 5: Visuals
Always add beautiful and high-quality images or screenshots to your content to break up big blocks of text. If you have them, adding videos is also a great choice.
Step 6: Assembly
Put everything together. Make sure that it’s all perfect.
Remember, this isn’t set in stone. You can always modify your process according to your needs. However, I find this specific method convenient for creating a stable content output and scaling up my own blog.
Boosting Your Content
Besides high-quality and unique content with gorgeous images, there are other ways to scale up your content marketing and create more engaging posts that readers will love. Here are some tips for you to start improving your blog today:
Use Interactive Content
You need to start making your content with a “two-way” strategy. Giving your readers the ability to communicate anything they need to express is an excellent and engaging method to scale up your blog.
Many experts mention that developing interactive content is one of the most beneficial strategies to boost your content marketing. There are many ways to have your audience communicate with you through chatbots, quizzes, surveys, etc. If you want to build up genuine relationships and bonds with your public, you should create a way to communicate with them.
Guest Posting
A guest post is an article written and published in someone else’s blog to get recognition and embed backlinks. This is a strategy used by many content creators since it allows you to generate leads and traffic to your site while promoting relevant content on another blogger’s website.
Discovering blogs that accept guest posts in your related niche isn’t a difficult job. So start reaching out and put your content out there!
Visual Data
Remember that many people would rather watch a video than read a whole post. Based on that premise, it’s essential to remember to create excellent and high-quality visual content to keep your audience engaged.
Not only will you create a beautiful design that will add value to your page, but you’ll also transcend from the writing format and provide your audience with much more. Some ideas may be infographics, short videos, professional featured images, etc.
Repurpose Your Content
One of the main strategies in content marketing is reusing your content, modifying it, and giving it a new face. It’s also one of the easiest ways to generate unique content. For example, you can expand a particular point of an article and make a whole new post with it.
Splitting more prominent posts of your blog into tiny pieces is one excellent and secure strategy since you’ll be using a topic that’s already relevant for your niche. If you want to see this in action, the people at Backlinko explain how they grabbed an old post and made a new video with that same content.
Things To Avoid
These are some common mistakes that content creators tend to make when trying to scale up their blogs:
Adding Unnecessary Content
It’s not unusual to see many creators releasing tons of content to their pages without having a sound strategy first. That isn’t a recommended tactic since it isn’t going to be beneficial at all.
To start creating content, it’s vital to have a visibility and growth strategy first. If you don’t have this, you’re wasting time and quality content that could be spent focusing on actually relevant content.
Lack Of Visual Identity
Not having your brand’s formatting and design defined is a terrible mistake. When you don’t have identifiers that immediately make people think about you or your brand, you’re basically failing in marketing.
When you don’t have a stable identity within your content, people may get lost trying to find you. Also, you may lose credit for your own creations since it’ll be hard to relate them to your brand.
Subject Ignorance
The most criticized mistake when creating content is ignorance. That’s why, when choosing topics and keywords, you should always keep in mind that you have to have some specific and relevant knowledge of that topic if you want to write about it.
This can also take the form of using inaccurate information for your content. This will make you seem unprofessional and will harm your credibility.
The Bottom Line For Any Solo Blogger
As you can see, developing an excellent marketing strategy to deliver great content to your audience is a lot easier than many people think at first. All you have to do is make a plan following these suggestions and stick to it. I know that as a solo blogger, this process may seem complicated. However, keep in mind that there are tons of online tools to help you go through it, like online content calendars, time management tools, keyword researchers, etc. The key takeaway is to remember to:
- Create a strategy using a content calendar where you can plan out your upcoming posts.
- Maintain a stable visual identity.
- Improve your SEO.
- Define your content creation process.
- Boost your content through interactive content, sound, and quality visual data. Also, try out guest posting and repurposing your content.
- Avoid common mistakes, such as adding lots of unnecessary content, writing without knowing the topic, and publishing content that doesn’t identify your brand.
Scaling up your blog’s content marketing requires strategy, planning, and organization. Once you have all that in place, don’t be surprised if the traffic starts pouring in.
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Jordan Bishop
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