A Simple Blogging Plan to Grow Your Business

Are you looking for a simple blogging plan that you can sustain over a more extended period to grow your business? 

Building a blog is complicated & a lot of decesion making is involved. 

For example, 

1. Choosing a best blogging platform 
2. Figuring out your blogging story & niche 
3. Researching winning keywords 
4. Best & practical way to produce quality content 
5. How to promote the blog content

In this post, you’ll learn the simple blogging plan that will help you: 

1. Know precisely, why you should start a blog 
2. Understand why it is crucial to figure out Google’s business 
3. Give you a clear idea about the importance of research
4. Explore why it is critical to go small first to build a popular blog 
5. Set up a blog using the best framework and tools 
6. Channel all your knowledge into a concrete action plan to create a detailed and scannable online content hub
7. Find ways to promote your blog without being lucky

I have made all the blogging mistakes that you can name it and took me years to figure out the simple blogging plan, which I can sustain to grow my business. 

What I learned through trial and error is that there aren’t any secrets or tricks behind any successful blog or an online business.

Instead, what all successful bloggers have in common is that they: 

• Are inspired not motivated
• Practice timeless habits and traits
• Have extreme focus and discipline

It’s a pure hard work behind any blogging success story. The blogging world is complex, and there is no single path to success.

However, you can quickly look for patterns that are repeated across many successful blogs over and over again.

You are lucky that the crucial lessons of blogging success have already been figured out, and you only need to pick that fits into your circumstances and take massive action.

If you are up for working hard to improve your blog using proven lessons, I’m confident that this simple blogging plan will help you immensely achieve your blogging goals. 

Let’s get started! 

1. Why Start A Blog

A business blog is a great tool to help you:

1. Explore your business’s “why” inside out by sharing with others 
2. To record “what you do” and “how you do it” in details
3. Acquire “Google love” while doing the above two

Google love is the by-product of doing a great job at 1 & 2. However, if getting Google love is your top priority, you are doing it all wrong. 

Getting free traffic from Google is the ultimate goal for most business blogging efforts. However, you can use a blog to improve your business in several ways, which will eventually help you get more and better quality traffic from your blog. 

For example, your business blog can be an excellent tool for managing your business content, such as:

• Recording frequently asked questions from your customers
• Explain the benefits of your products or services in details
• Share case studies 
• Record your continuous learning and improvements 
• Document your community events 
• Get feedback on your ideas

By doing all the above well, results in building rapport and establish you as an authority in your niche, which ultimately results in more traffic and business.

Peter Cashmore started Mashable in 2005 when he was only 19. In his interview, he mentioned that he worked 18 hours a day on it before it became successful, and took him six months to get his first advertiser. 

At the time of writing this post, Mashable receives over 7 million organic traffic from search and is one of the most visited sites in the world. 

 

2. Understand What is Google’s Business

Do you want to know how to get traffic to your blog without getting lucky?

Here is the secret! 

“You must understand Google’s business before you start creating any content.”

Google’s business is to provide the best results for any query their users search in the search bar.

If Google users:

• Don’t find relevant answers to their question in search results 
• Are not happy with the user experience of the top listing websites 
• Had to wait too long before the clicked page loads

Google can lose its search business to its competitors, which they don’t want to happen for obvious reasons. 

Therefore, before Google can help you, you need to help Google with the following:

• Provide the best possible answers for Google users 
• Ensure your website or blog is easy to navigate
• Optimize your pages for speed regularly 

To achieve this goal, it is vital before you start writing any piece of content, do a quick Google search for your ideal keyword and review the first 3-5 organic results and ask yourself the following question. 

Can I create a better content/page (in terms of content, user experience, speed) than these existing top five results?

If the answer is yes, start your content creation quest. If not, continue working on your keyword research until you can answer yes to this question.

3. Keyword Research

Detailed keyword research is the best way to choose your business blogging battle wisely. 

Picking your blogging battle without “solid keyword research” is like playing a lottery.

The key aspects of solid keyword research are:

1. Reasonable search volume (depends on the niche)
2. Commercial intent (higher CPC the better)
3. Ranking difficulty (lower the better)

For example, if you are a business coach and looking to rank for a “business coach” term on the first page of Google.

“Business coach” keyword has:

• 6600 Monthly Search (good search volume)
• It is a generic term
• It is difficult but possible

However, “business coach online” has:

• 480 Monthly search (reasonable search volume)
• Specific commercial intent (higher chances to convert)
• The difficulty is less so more chances of winning this battle if you do everything correctly 

4. Blogging Niche Selection

This part should be easy if you have done the keyword research well. 

Do you know what is the most significant mistake people do when it comes to selecting their niche? 

They aim to please everyone and try to blog about everything.

Search engines prefer to rank subject matter authorities to ensure the best possible results for their users.

Is it a lot harder to become an expert in the following vast and competitive niches:

• Digital marketing
• Personal development
• Technology

When you compare to:

• Become an SEO expert for wedding planners
• A business coach for e-Commerce start-ups
• A life coach for women over 40’s 

Category selection is the most critical part of your blogging success in my experience. Choosing your blogging battle wisely can give you an enormous advantage to become a go-to authority in your category. 

A trick to growing a big blog is to go small first…

• Pick a small group of 10-100 people
• Create content to help them
• Get feedback and improve

If you can create helpful content for 10 or 100 people to improve their lives, chances are it will help many others who have similar needs.

On the contrary, if your blog content can’t help 10 or 100 people, how will it help the masses?

Picking up the smallest viable niche can be the best choice to grow a big blog.

Every master once a beginner. Don’t wait to become an expert before you start a blog in your category.

Blogging is all about documenting your learning!

Don’t wait for tomorrow to become an expert because tomorrow is not guaranteed and start documenting now.

5. Best Way to Set Up a Blog 

I believe the best way to set up a blog is to consider your blog as your online home base. 

Your ideal home is never the result of a single choice. It is built up through good choices over time. A successful blog set up is never a choice; it is a series of choices.

For example, to build a dream home, you need to choose:

• Location  
• Number of bedrooms you need
• Living rooms and best layout 
• Number of Bathrooms
• Working kitchen design 
• Parking needs 
• Garden size

You usually decide what you like, need and most importantly, what you can maintain. 

Similarly, the trick to having the best blog setup is to: 

• Stick to your niche
• Only have posts, which you need to describe your niche in depth
• Having less, but quality posts is a challenge 
• Create fewer posts, which help you update/improve regularly 
• Promote your posts easily 

A 6-step process for the best way to set up a blog:

1. Home page: Best place to share your why, how and what.
2. About page: A place to share why people care about your blog and you can also list down your accomplishments here as well.  
3. Services page: A summary of your services and products with links to pages, which has full details of your services. 
4. Contact page: A simple way to get in touch with you.  
5. Blog page: A gateway to all your posts.
6. Single post page: Most of your content will be published using this page. 
7. Legals page: It is important to be compliant. 

Regular review and optimization of the above pages to help you orchestrate what works and eliminate the rest. 

Pro Tip: Don’t create any pages or posts, which you can’t review and update regularly. 

6. Detailed But Scannable Content

How often should you blog or how long your blog posts should be? 

These are popular questions, which every new blogger has in mind.

I would say it depends on the niche and the competition. 

If you look at it from a statistical point of view:

• Around 2500 words are the ideal blog post length nowadays  
• And publishing at least once a week is a great publishing schedule to aim for

Having said this, achieving the above two things is a lot of work to produce quality work consistently for most of us. 

My preferred solution to this problem is that you take all the energies you spend on:

• Worrying about your blogging frequency
• Worrying about the number of words on your posts
• Worrying about using the best images

And channel all this energy into crafting following blogging framework:

1. Consider your blog your book
2. Blog categories your book’s chapters
3. Content in your category pages your posts

The success of this simple business blogging framework depends on the following:

• Picking your niche wisely
• Expert keyword research 
• Clarity of your book’s title
• Details of your book’s chapters
• Simplicity and helpfulness of your content in posts

Before you start focusing on maintaining publishing frequency, it will be much better for most small businesses to keep updating, improving and promoting their existing pages and posts.

For example:

In 2007, Mehdi started Strong Lifts, and his goal with his website was to help his readers gain strength and muscle by lifting heavyweights.

As per my understanding, he used the following simple (not easy) blogging plan:

Blog Title

Strong Lifts: Help you gain strength and muscle by lifting heavyweights

Category Pages 

• Squat
• Bench Press
• Deadlift
• Overhead Press
• Barbell Row
• Pullups
• Dips

Content

He has written over 250,000 words (almost three books) within the above category pages, and you can see the results of its labour in the image below.

It all starts with the clarity of your blogging category. Do you have the clarity of your blogging category? 

If yes, please feel free to share in the comments below to inspire others. 

7. Blog Promotion

Getting 100,000 monthly blog visits is a dream.

Getting 50,000 monthly blog visits is extremely hard.

Getting 25,000 monthly blog visits is difficult.

Getting 10,000 monthly blog visits is realistic.

Getting 1000 monthly blog visits is possible to achieve by most of us following this simple business blogging plan.

And guess what?

Most small businesses don’t need 100,000 or even 10,000 monthly visits to:

• Have enough leads
• Pay their bills
• Be profitable

Most small business can achieve this with 500-1000 targeted monthly traffic by following this simple (not easy) business blogging plan. 

After doing all the hard work from step 1 to 6, it is crucial to promote your content until you start seeing organic traffic from search engines. 

A few must-have ways to promote your blog:

• On-page SEO
• Internal linking of your posts
• External link building (Significant for higher search rankings) 
• Sharing on social media and with your email list
• Networking in relevant niche forums and groups

Promoting your content is more important than creating it to see traction when starting a blog. 

Conclusion 

It is a simple (not easy) blogging plan, which will give you a solid foundation for your online content management. 

It might take time to complete all chapters of your book. However, I have no doubt that you’ll be proud of your creation once you’ll achieve that goal. 

I don’t evangelise blogging for traffic; I evangelise blogging to achieve the following, which results in organic traffic as a bonus if done right.

A goal here is to write down:

• Why you do what you do
• How you do what you do
• What problem you solve  

The first benefit of doing above well helps you and your team understand:

• Do you really know your why?
• Do you know the details of how you do what you do? 
• Do you have the clarity of the problems, which you are solving? 

Feel free to ask if you have any questions about this blogging plan in the comments below.