Create a well-researched editorial calendar
1. Create a well-researched editorial calendar
The backbone of every successful content marketing strategy, and I cannot emphasize this enough, is the editorial calendar.
As we all know by now, the fundamental pillar of any great content marketing strategy is your ability to produce high-quality content at a consistent rate. Increasingly, that’s what the major search engines (like Google) are rewarding, so it’s an important tenant to learning how to grow your blog.
In order to find your target audience (and bring them to your blog), you’ll need to be able to produce content that they find valuable. To keep those readers, you need to be able to create, develop, and publish that valuable content on a regular basis.
While on the surface this sounds relatively simple, even the best bloggers in the world will often struggle to meet this seemingly innocuous requirement.
Too often, bloggers take an ad-hoc approach to producing content. While this strategy might work for a while, it will inevitably lead to problems and stall out efforts to grow a blog—such as eventually running out of creative steam and not knowing which blog post ideas to pursue next, losing sight of your overall content marketing strategy, or missing deadlines and opportunities for promotion.
Without an editorial calendar, you’re never quite able to look beyond today and tomorrow. And how are you ever going to be able to grow a blog if you never get the chance to move beyond the short-term?
A well-structured editorial calendar solves all of those problems by keeping your content organized, focused on your audience, and constantly flowing. Believe me when I say that your editorial calendar (or lack thereof) will be the one thing that makes or breaks your blog’s ability to grow.
Thankfully, I’ve spent the better part of a decade perfecting my editorial calendar template—both to manage content as I grow my own blog, and in growing the blogs of the world’s top startups like LinkedIn, Google, Zendesk, Adobe and more. You can grab my template for free right here:
Free Download: My Editorial Calendar Template
2. Collect email subscribers and engage them
Every online business lives or dies by the size and engagement of its email list.
If you’re already getting readers but don’t make an effort to collect their email addresses, it’s going to be difficult for you to grow your blog in the long run.
Next to your blog, your email list is going to be the most important asset you have in your marketing arsenal to grow your blog—in terms of traffic and revenue.
For one thing, you actually own your email list. By building an email list of engaged fans, you can worry a whole lot less about Google or Facebook suddenly changing their algorithms one day, and finding yourself without an audience overnight. It’s one of the most long-term, sustainable ways to grow your blog and bring back repeat readers.
Email is not only the best way to consistently bring visitors and readers back to your blog—it’ll also be your primary method for reaching out and communicating with your audience on a personal level. Even something as simple as a newsletter that provides updates on your latest content and what you’re working on, will go a long way towards building that sense of know, like, and trust that your audience has with you.
Start exploring different tactics to grow your email list, such as lead magnets, pop-ups and content upgrades (don’t worry, we’ll be getting into these a little later). Make sure you’re also managing your email list with the right blogging tools like ConvertKit (or evaluate the best of the best in my comparison of ConvertKit vs AWeber vs Mailchimp).
3. Develop a content ecosystem for your blog
While your blog shouldn’t strive to be everything to everyone all at once, it does need to be a place that your target audience can rely upon as the ultimate authority on a specific topic. And to achieve that, you need to create a content ecosystem in order to really grow your blog.
Everything you publish on your blog needs to relate back to something else that you’ve previously published—creating a web of related content that satisfies your readers needs and answers their most pressing questions.
On a practical level, what this means is that instead of sending your readers to an external site whenever you want to link to a more comprehensive resource on a topic, you can instead direct them to a different post on your blog.
This way, as soon as someone finds a piece of your content, just by clicking on most of the links in your article, they’ll continue to stay on your blog and within your sphere of influence—which is why this is such a great foundational strategy to grow a blog.
To achieve this, you’ll want to adopt a hub-and-spoke model with your content.
The hub-and-spoke model is essentially a visual graph of your content ecosystem, like mine right here.
At the center—or hub—you have your content pillars. These are your authority pieces, your evergreen content, the in-depth mega guides that cover your major topics. Here on my blog, there are authority pieces on topics that cover every major segment of what my audience is learning about—like how to start a blog, the best web hosting plans for bloggers, the best affiliate programs for them to join when they’re ready to monetize their blogs and more.
From there, you create your—spokes—the pieces of content that are designed to drive more traffic back to your major hub guides.
Whenever you’re publishing a new piece of content, whether that’s on your own blog or someone else’s in a guest blog post, you want to link back and build authority for your central hub pieces. Not only will this help grow your blog in the long run, but it’ll greatly improve your blog’s SEO and help you to gain a better understanding of how all your content ties together within your content ecosystem.
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