Surprise! I have a podcast! I’ve been working with my good friend Mike Miello on the Brand Ballers Podcast for some time but I’m not sure why I’ve never posted the show here… until now, anyway! This is episode 23 and it’s part of series we’re doing about blogging for business. I’ll get the other episodes up, but in the meantime, here’s a link to them on Soundcloud.
https://soundcloud.com/brandballers-podcast/episode-23-planning-your-blog

Podcast Show Notes:

In last week’s episode (Episode 22: Blogging for business) we talked about 6 different blogging topics and goals you should strive to achieve with blogging. So we’re going to talk about each of those over 6 episodes. And just to mention those six topics again:

  1. High-level planning
  2. Find a content form that your audience will like
  3. Find a tone of voice
  4. Find a process
  5. Find a process to promote your blog after you’ve created something
  6. Find out if what you’re doing is actually any good (measuring if it’s working)
    And today we start with high-level planning.

The importance of high level planning for blogging

  • Define: High level planning to us is about creating a mindset, a habit, a structured process to produce blog content over a certain time period. Rather than being spontaneous, you have things set out. Making it a regular thing to do.
    • The importance is that you need to be accountable (publisher’s mindset)
    • Being consistent
    • Length
    • Determine how to separate from competition, value, building leads
    • Audience – think about what is going satisfy their needs
  • Defining roles
    • Writer
    • Marketer
  • Examples:
    • Carl with his presentation videos
      • Challenge – Had let it go without updating it for almost 2 years; start again or not? And how, if I did?
      • How I overcame it – Saw the numbers on the site and YouTube; saw a post on another presentation site that said my site was inactive; pissed me off a bit
      • Result – Publishing weekly since March 1; from 5-6k visitors to over 12k; easier to come up with ideas than before
    • Mike with podcasting
      • Challenge – We want this podcast to be action oriented and fast, and without planning we were rambling
      • How we overcame it – we decided to make short bullet point notes about topic areas we want to talk about
      • Result – faster production time and the podcasts are shorter…more aligned with what we set out to do in the first place. No numbers to brag about yet

What goals and action steps you should you strive to achieve high level planning?

  • List out your goals that you want to achieve with blogging
  • Choose your audience
  • What tone works for them
  • What if you don’t know? It’s similar to dressing up for your meetings
  • The style and length that is best for your audience
  • Identify the amount of time you can commit
  • Get into that frame of mind.
    • Blogging for your business is about finding ways to bring business to you. And so this is a serious thing. Try get yourself ready to be in this, committed for a long time

Ok so that wraps things up for this episode on high level planning. In next week’s episode we’re going to talk about finding a content form that your audience will like in greater detail.

Thanks for listening! If you’d like us to touch upon a particular topic on an upcoming podcast, send us a message with your question or suggestion.

Have a great day!