Everyone seems to be doing it. Blogging is touted as the way of the future for successful business on the net. If only it didn’t have to be so time-consuming, exhausting and difficult.

Of course, your business blog doesn’t have to be a difficulty. There are plenty of business blogs out there which seem to be nothing more than a quick ‘had to take the cat to the vet, now my car needs a service’ kind of update that is cheap and cheerful. It’s also uninteresting, lacks any real value, and is boring for readers. This kind of blog comes from an on-the-fly kind of attitude, but for a business is ultimately a waste of time.

Good business strategy dictates that you take care of the little things, because little things don’t take care of themselves. Any business that decides to let some things go is taking a calculated risk, one that can backfire horribly. Failing to plan for your business blog will not have such dire consequences, but it can cause a lot of headaches. Particularly if you are sourcing professionally written search engine optimisation content, failure to plan your updates can lead to a confusing mess on your website over time.

When planning your business blog’s content, start with a schedule. How many days will you post? How many days will you take off? It may sound a little strange, but sometimes less is more with blog posts. Your site’s users can get tired of reading. Planning days off also prevents you from getting over-excited and posting blog updates in batches. A schedule ensures your fresh content is fed to your site in nice, easy-to-digest portions.

The next step is brainstorming for topics. Your SEO consultant can provide lots of assistance at this stage, and you can consult our experts at SEO Consult about content planning. The place to start is with major topics. Write down at least five major topics your blog will focus on. Your keywords can come in handy here, and it can be a good idea to assign groups of keywords to each of the major topics.

Next, flesh out ten ideas from each of your major topics. You may find the number daunting at first, but ideas swiftly build. For example, the major topic ‘cats’ could have articles on fleas, healthy diet, behaviour, growth, vets, and so on. For each of these ideas, jot down your initial thoughts and questions. Put together with your keyword list, you are already half-way toward an article.

If you are interested in further structuring your content plan, you can group topics within a schedule. For example, if you plan on posting content on the five business days of the week, you could assign a major topic to each of the days, so that Monday would be ‘cat day’, Tuesday would be ‘puppies’ and so on. You could also plot out a theme for the month and post content on that theme throughout the month. Keeping to this kind of schedule increases your site users’ familiarity with you and helps to build your relationship.

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