How to Create a Content Strategy for the Online Business

If you own a website, it needs to have content. However, you can't just throw up any content that you want. You need to plan it. This means coming up with a content strategy. Thankfully, this isn't too difficult. We are going to walk you step-by-step through the process of creating a content strategy for an online website.

Know your target market

Before you do anything, you need to have an idea of who will be reading your content. This will tell you the type of content you need to produce. Who are you trying to cater to? Content produced for lawyers will be drastically different from content produced for parents. Have a look at competing online websites to see how they are doing their content. We do want to point out at this stage that you shouldn't be copying other websites, but you can use them as a guideline.

What type of content do you want to produce and where will you publish it?

Any content strategy for an online business will need to consider the type of content that is being produced. Yes. Written content is going to go a long way when it comes to getting eyes on your business, but you shouldn't forget about videos and images. In fact, it is probably good to have a mix of them. Don't forget to think about where you will be publishing your content too. We assume that some of it will be going up on your website, but a key part of an online content strategy will be to also post your content on social media.

Brainstorm Ideas

You are going to be spending a lot of time at this stage. When you are putting content online, you need it to stand out from the crowd. If it doesn't, then nobody is going to look at it, and it is going to be virtually useless for your business. This means creating unique content. There are plenty of ways in which you can brainstorm your content here. As we mentioned previously; you can look at what your competitors are doing. Do not copy them, but you can use them for ideas. See which content seems to be getting the most views for them, and then you can do a little twist on it, maybe make the content longer. Something which makes your content your own.

There are plenty of tools that you can use to brainstorm your online content ideas too. For example; you can do a bit of keyword research to find out what people are searching for in the search engines (this is going to be important for your SEO), or you can look at Google Trends to see what is popular at the moment. You could even look at recent news and reviews in your industry and write about that. An example in the content writing industry will be these paper writing services reviews.

Come up with a lot of ideas. Dozens and dozens of them. It doesn't mean that you will use every idea that you have, but you will certainly enjoy having them there. It will help to generate new ideas going forward.

Plan your content

One of the hallmarks of a quality online content strategy is to post regularly. You need people to know exactly when you are planning to post content on your website or social media. Come up with a plan. You should have new content going up multiple times per week.

Obviously, your plan will also go towards the actual writing of the content. The message you want it to deliver, the research that you need to put into it. It is likely that you will already be thinking about this, because you will for every piece of content, so we won't go into much depth on the actual planning of your content here.

One thing we do suggest is to try and group your content together. Have content that is roughly the same type of content being posted at the same time It helps to keep people reading. If you post tons of content on different subjects in the same week, people will get confused, and the search engines will have a hard time deciphering what your site is about too.

Analyze Content Statistics

Once your content is out there in the online world, you can't sit back and relax. You need to know that it is working for you. Keep an eye on the content. See which content is performing well, and which doesn't seem to be generating leads and clicks. You can then tailor your future strategy by focusing more on the content that is going to make you money.

Planning a content strategy is not an easy task, but if you want to succeed online then you do need one. We hope that the information on this page has given you a decent overview of how you should be accomplishing it.