Congrats On Your New Blog!

 

Many people like you feel that they’re going at this process single-handedly, but you’re not alone! We’re here to show you that with proper planning, you can ease into this transition of consistent blogging.

Hopefully at this point you’ve defined your audience and know who you are writing for. You’ve probably gone through the first few steps of starting a blog – choosing a theme, linking your blog up to your website, and publishing a post or two.

 

But what’s next? How do you take your blog to the next level and sustain your blogging?

 

The key to a successful blog is consistent, quality content. You want to write frequent blog posts that your audience enjoys reading and are too good not to share. The way to get your blog to a successful place is to set yourself up with a plan.

 

Plan

Create a blog post calendar – Decide how often you want to publish and set up a calendar to keep yourself on track. You’ll want to blog at least 4 times per month if you’re going to attract more visitors to your website. Determine when you want to post and put it on a calendar to hold yourself accountable. Try posting on Wednesdays if you’re blogging once per week, or Mondays or Wednesdays if you’re blogging twice per week.

 

SHORTEN YOUR URL

 

This step used to only apply to post links on Twitter, but with the addition of analytics (click-through tracking) on many of the URL shortening services, posting a shortened URL on any of your social sites is a smart strategy.

 

 

Here’s how it works:

Copy your new blog post’s URL, paste it in a URL shortener that offers analytics (Bit.ly, Ow.ly, Cli.gs).

Use the shortened URL in any status update, link posting or teaser you plan on executing.

 

Check your URL shortener account for click stats, geographic and referring site data after your link has been up a while.

Rather than rely solely on search engines and a handful of subscribers to pump up your organic volume, content publishers need to establish syndication connections and plan for some targeted promotion to ensure that each piece of content gets noticed by key influencers and your ideal customers.

 

Discover topic ideas – Come up with some key topics you want your blog to cover. Base these topics off of what is important to your potential customers and talk to your sales team to get an idea of some questions they get frequently. Keyword research using either HubSpot’s Keyword Tool or WordStream can help you turn one phrase into a variety of topic ideas.

​

 

Generate post titles – Use your blog topics and keywords to create post titles. Come up with some compelling, actionable titles that include the keywords that you’ve chosen. Don’t stress if they’re not perfect, there’s always room for tweaking after you’ve posted. You can use HubSpot’s Page Performance Tool to hone in your blog posts for greater SEO value.