How Do You Create a Content Strategy for Your Freelance Blog?

If you don’t have a blog showcasing your freelance skills, you should start one now.

But how to find time to write for your blog when you are always looking for more clients and delivering work?

You need a blog content strategy.

Here’s how to do that:

Analyzing Your Competitors

As the old saying goes, there is no point in reinventing the wheel. Chances are, you have plenty of competitors that have a business blog.

Your first goal is to look at your competitors’ blogs and take notes on what seems to be working and what doesn’t. In particular, look at the posts with the most engagement (social shares and comments) and see:

What topics are popular?
How often do they publish new posts?
How long are their posts?
Who writes their posts?
What tools do they use (comment systems, social sharing buttons, etc.)?

After you note these items for several blogs in your industry, you should start to see patterns of what works, what doesn’t, and what everyone (or no one) seems to do.

Finding Blog Topics

Next, you’ll need to start developing blog topics. The key is to think first about your blogging goals, second about your audience.

When it comes to blogging goals, are you looking to rank well for long-tail keyword phrases?

Are you looking for lots of social engagement? Do you want to create content that converts readers into leads or customers?

Do you want to become the go-to hub for a particular topic that interests your ideal customer base?

Once you’ve answered those questions, you’ll have a better idea of what type of content to produce. From there, you’ll want to generate some specific topic ideas.

One of the best ways to start this process is by using Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Simply enter a keyword, and it will give you about 100 keyword ideas based on that keyword or phrase. if you have a Google AdWords account, sign in with your account and you may get up to 800 keyword ideas.

This tool offers an option to download your keywords into a spreadsheet.

Once you do this, you can add an extra column for topic ideas.

Then next to each keyword, see if you can come up with a blog title that includes it. For example, the keyword phrase social media sites could be turned into 50 Social Media Sites for [Insert Your Industry Here].

After you’ve exhausted your list of keywords from GAKT, there are lots of other great ways to get content ideas. You can:

Monitoring Q&A platforms: Follow relevant Quora topics or similar platforms to see what questions are being asked within your industry.
Staying updated with industry blogs: Use an RSS reader (like Google Reader or Feedly) to subscribe to top industry blogs and stay on top of emerging trends.
Tracking Twitter conversations: Search Twitter for questions about your keyword or phrase to see what people are discussing.
Leveraging your sales and support teams: Ask your frontline teams about frequently asked questions from prospects and customers.

If you keep using these techniques, you should never run out of content ideas!

Determining Posting Frequency

Next, you have to determine how often to post.

Think back to all of your competitors and how often they post. Now think about how much quality content production your business could reasonably do. Note that you should never sacrifice quality for quantity – if you can only produce one solid post a week, do that.

Don’t try to do more unless you hire outside help which we will discuss in the upcoming Choosing Your Writers section.

Setting Up an Editorial Calendar

Once you have determined how often you would like to post, set up an editorial calendar to keep yourself organized.

You can use Google Calendar for that and set up reminders. Basically, you’ll want something that lets you add in due dates, publish dates, topics, and who posts are assigned to so everyone can stay on track.

Creating Editorial Guidelines

Now think about how you want your blog content to be formatted. What rules do you want every post to adhere to?

What audience does your blog target? How long should posts be? Are there special formatting tags you want adhered to (H3 for headers, one bolded sentence per paragraph, etc.)?

Do you need one featured image + one image per main section? Should images be grabbed from Creative Commons, your stock photography account, or limited to screenshots? How do you want sources to be noted?

Draft the answers to these and other rules into a document as your editorial guidelines. This will (hopefully) keep your blog’s voice and theme consistent from one post to the next and keep editorial headaches to a minimum.

Now, if you have friends or partners write for your blog, they will know the guidelines to follow.

Your blog is going to be your digital business card, so think about your guidelines, voice and style from the very start.

Finalizing a Pre-Publish Checklist

Last, but not least, make a pre-publish checklist for your content.

This checklist should ensure that each post is grammatically correct, has been spell-checked, follows specific formatting guidelines, has been optimized for SEO with keyword-based titles and meta descriptions, and has a plan for social media promotion

If you run through this checklist with each post, you should have quality content that is search-optimized and successfully promoted through the appropriate channels.