You can’t guarantee a blog’s success before you launch it, but you can set it up to fail.
Just because you can sign up for a WordPress or Medium account in a few minutes and start blogging right away doesn’t mean you should.
A successful blog takes planning. You need to ask the right questions and find the right answers before you start.
Here are 4 of those questions.
Who will host this blog?
This is one area far too many bloggers overlook.
If you’re trying to get your blog live quickly and inexpensively, you may be tempted to simply go with the cheapest host you can find. This is a mistake that can really set your blog up to fail. If you’re still in the planning phase, you should click the following link to find WordPress hosting in Canada that you can count on.
Cheap hosting is bad hosting, with slow speeds and frequent downtime. Your blog simply has to load quickly. According to Google, pages that load in 5 seconds see 70% longer sessions and 35% lower bounce rates.
Why are we doing this?
You would be amazed how often you may get different answers from within the same organization. One person may tell you this blog is there to generate leads, while someone else may say it’s to help your SEO, and someone else may say the goal is to generate a social following.
It’s unreasonable to chase all 3 of these goals at the same time. Your blog should really just serve one main purpose when you start out, whatever it may be.
There is always room to scale and create different blogs for different purposes once you have a content process in place. However, when you’re just starting, choose one primary goal and hold yourself accountable to it (and only it).
What is Our Niche?
The more specific you can be when defining your target audience, the more you can lock in on pain points and create content that resonates and performs.
For example, if you’re a real estate agent, targeting people in your city or town is pretty good. However, targeting first-time homebuyers is better. This allows you to create more targeted content.
Instead of trying to be all things to all buyers in your city, you can position yourself as the go-to for starter families.
What is our process?
A lack of a planned and documented process can really hurt your blog.
Undefined roles and ad hoc work can lead to deadlines being missed, blogs sitting in draft mode for months at a time, and low-quality content.
Map out what your ideal workflow would be. Clearly define who is responsible for:
- Ideation and planning
- Keyword research
- Writing
- Approving
- Optimizing and publishing
You may find that your workflow has to change because someone doesn’t have the time or bandwidth to contribute as expected. That’s fine, simply update your plan and recirculate it. Don’t abandon it completely.
There are many more questions to be asked, but these 4 can make or break your success. You need to know who will host your blog, how you will measure its success, what it will reallybe about, and what your workflow will look like.
Answering these questions today will lead to a higher probability of success tomorrow.
