Skip to content

Thirteen simple steps to planning a killer blog

If you’re going to start a blog, or want to plan a blog, here’s a useful 13 step blog planning worksheet.

If you think about these questions while you’re planning your corporate blog or personal blog you’ll keep your writing on-track. Good planning is the first step to success, so here’s what you need to consider.

Section 1: The basics

Q1. Audience: Who is your intended audience? In other words, who is your blog aimed at?

Q2. Purpose: Why will people read your blog? Examples include: for information, for entertainment, for relaxation, learning “How-To”.

Q3. Tone: What style of writing do you want? Examples include: formal, relaxed, conversational.

Section 2: Topics and categories

Q4. Topics: What general topic areas do you want to write about?

Q5. Categories: What categories will you divide your articles into?

Q6. The yawn test: Why will your readers care about each category you’ve chosen? If you’re struggling to think of a reason, ditch it!

Q7. Types of media: What media do you wish to use? Examples include text, images, video, audio.

Section 3: Ideas for articles

Q8. Sites to watch: Which sites are you going to regularly scan in order to get ideas for articles?

Q9. Life experiences: Which experiences in your day-to-day life are you going to use as a source of ideas for articles?

Section 4: Getting it written

Q10. Frequency: How often do you want to add a new article? (Once or twice a week is a good starting point).

Q11. Authors: Who is going to write your articles? Will you do this yourself, invite other contributors (free of charge), or pay people to write?

Section 5: Promotion

Q12. Announcing new articles: Where will you announce new articles? Publisha automatically posts to your Facebook wall and Twitter feed. Consider other specialist news sources, such as putting technical articles on Hacker News, and general sites such as StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg.

Section 6: Tracking and improvement

Q13. Tracking: How will you see which articles are most popular, and decide which direction to take your blog in future? Publisha has built-in analytics, and you can easily link Google Analytics. These are likely to be your best choices.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *