Tutorial

11 Guilt-free Tips For Writing A Business Plan For Your Blog

Writing a business plan of a given year for your blog is as important as it is for any other business. It is not necessary to create a plan only if you are a money blogger. Whatever is the ultimate objective of your blog you must take it as your business?

Even if you distribute everything for free at your blog, actually you do a business. You give your contents and get in return at least appreciation; so you sell your contents at the price of praise. This is called business.

The main goals of a blog generally are:

  • To earn money with it
  • To support already an established business
  • To promote the brand online
  • To serve a community
  • To contribute for a noble cause
  • To share views without any barrier
  • To get fame or to enjoy

To achieve any of the above goals you need to do two activities must:

  • To create products or services to earn money with your blog and to create contents to attract people to visit your blog.
  • To sell your products or distribute your contents or help a community; depending upon the type of your blog

Most people take yearly planning so casually. Sometimes they boast they have in their mind what they need to do for the upcoming year. This is their overconfidence because no normal human being can retain in his mind all the things which he thought at the beginning of a year.

So a plan must be in writing. Not only that but he must be fully clear on how to make a business plan of a given year with the help of the following tips.

11 Tips For Writing A Business Plan For Your Blog

To do both the above jobs of production and sales you need people to receive whatever you offer at your blog. This is the main challenge for every blogger to bring the right people at his blog. So he needs to get an answer of the following questions for writing a business plan of a given year for his blog.

A plan is a list of actions arranged in whatever sequence is thought likely to achieve an objective

John Argeni

01. What To Produce?

It means you need to decide which of the following items you will produce for your blog.

  • Text base contents
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Podcast
  • Products including tutorial, system, plug-ins, templates
  • Services relating to your expertise

02. For Whom To Produce

This question specifies the level of your each product. A tutorial on “how to start a blog for teenagers” will be quite different from the one that is created for retired people.

So identify your target audience before writing a business plan of a given year for your blog and successfully sell your products to the right audience.

03. What To Sell

Decide if you like to sell all the above products or will sell a few of them and supply a few for free to promote your blog.

If you distribute anything for free, it means you are doing sales promotion to boost the sale of your main products. In addition to creating the above items, you can also pick affiliate products to sell at your blog.

04. How To Sell?

Set your priorities to sell your products with the following options:

  • Product review
  • Linking of affiliate products in your text
  • Display of banner ads
  • Email marketing

05. Understand The Length Of Time Of Your Plan

Many people mix all types of plan. They think a yearly plan specifies things-to-do for a year and a monthly plan specifies steps to take in a month. It is the biggest misconception.

There is a big difference between them.

  • yearly plan broadly lays down the things-to-do in a year. It also identifies the areas where one needs to work more for achieving the ultimate goals of his business.
  • quarterly plan points main things-to-do in three months to help execute the annual plan and guides also to make a monthly plan.
  • monthly plan sets targets for the month to achieve them and offers guidelines for the weekly plan.
  • weekly plan mentions the weekly chores of each day.
  • daily plan means how many hours you work in a day and what you must do and what you try to do within that time period.

So never be confused over the length of time of a plan and stick to your annual targets with their broader specifications.

Example: If you publish weekly post it doesn’t mean that your annual plan simply sets the target of 52 posts in a year or one post in a week.

It must specify the ideal posting frequency of your blog and how to create a backup in case you increase your posting frequency and also in which situations you may decrease or increase the frequency.

So set broader targets while writing a business plan for your blog for a given year and be flexible to decrease or increase them if a situation demands so. Otherwise, you have to revisit your entire plan.

06. Situational Analysis

This is the most important step before setting the key targets for the year. These two questions cover the whole process of your situational analysis.

6.1 Where You Are?

It means how much you have achieved after following your annual blogging plan of the previous year. What you have missed achieving and what are the reasons of missing the targets.

6.2 Where You Should Be?

Just assume if you had achieved all your targets of last year where you would have been presently.

If you had set the target of 1,000 daily visitors, but now you have only 700 daily visitors, it means you need first to cover 300 visitors target in the coming year and then achieve the new target as well.

This is called robust planning and those people love to do that who never compromise on any deficiency and put themselves to offset their past mistakes.

The defensive approach, on the other hand suggests covering up the past missing targets first and then trying to achieve as much more as possible.

By Failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail

Benjamin Franklin

07. What You Must Do?

Specify in clear terms what you must do in next year. It should neither be so overambitious nor so conservative. Decide this on the basis of your real potential.

If you don’t have flair for writing you can’t plan to publish a post daily for the whole year. Here you need to specify the options to must do daily posting.

The option may be of outsourcing content writing if you can afford it or publishing guest posts to fill the gap whenever you don’t have an idea to write your next blog post.

For example, the things you must do may be:

  • Giving more time to research for writing unique contents
  • Giving maximum time to craft a magnetic headline to make more people click on your blog post
  • Expanding your social media presence by regularly being present at your selected social media sites to interact with your friends and followers organically which means without any automation
  • Building your email list and if you have the one then making big increase into it. You may specify doubling or tripling it depending upon the time and other resources you have
  • Visiting a certain number of blogs daily to get more visitors from there
  • Visiting a number of blogs daily to learn more about blogging or about whatever is your niche

08. What You Must Avoid?

These are the things you can’t afford to face if they happen in your blogging journey during the coming year. These things vary from blog to blog and niche to niche.

There are no definite guidelines for writing a business plan for your blog. Otherwise, there will be so many blog plan templates to pick the one for your blog for the next year.

For example, the things you must avoid may be:

  • A gap in the posting schedule
  • Lethargy to create your own product
  • Not taking much interest to find sellable products
  • Frequently changing your blog design
  • Shallow research instead of extensive one

09. What You Try To Do?

These are the things without them you can continue your blogging journey successfully. If you do them, it will further boost your blog. For example:

  • Be in connect with at least a certain number of influencers
  • To publish your guest posts at 10 to 20 blogs that are quite higher than your blog in rank, reputation and value
  • To include one more social media in your priority social media list for the enhanced social media optimization of your blog posts
  • To buy blogging products like Long Tail Pro or Power Suggest Pro to write targeted contents to get more traffic
  • To explore and avail one more source of blog traffic preferably without spending money

10. What You Try To Avoid?

Contrary to above point these are the things which you may continue but avoiding them will benefit you more.

For example:

  • Focusing more on just one blogging chore like at social media at the cost of other important tasks
  • Failing to reply comments at your blog regularly
  • Keeping everything in mind and don’t note down maximum points for future reference
  • Thinking “it is enough” if you do a lot sometimes, instead you should try to do more to be ahead of your targets

11. How To Monitor Your Yearly Blogging Plan

Just guesstimates or opinions of your friends are not sufficient to monitor your performance. For this purpose, you must take screenshot of each month’s report of your Google Analytics of all types of performances.

The curve of your daily blog visitors, bounce rate, average time on a page, unique versus loyal visitors, keywords ranking on a monthly basis is the foolproof evidence to check how you are going.

Create an excel sheet and check at the end of each month how are the average analytics of all the metrics of your Google analytics.

In addition to that, pace of expansion in your social media presence and rise in number of comments at your each blog post is another measure to know how you are doing.

After that, you need to check what others are saying about you. Please remember, great marketers don’t talk bluntly and even point a blunder in a mild tone.

So here you need not to be much happy if someone verbally lifts your performance to the sky while appreciating it. Just be realistic and note his points keeping in view of the analytics of your blog.

So these are the tips for writing a business plan for your blog for any given year. There is no rule of thumb for making a business plan for your blog. It all ups to the level of your blog, your niche and your blogging goals. We simply mentioned the main points that will help you to do successful planning for your blog.

Over To You

Do you already have developed a plan for your blog or yet to do it? What are the main points of your annual blogging plan? Do you still want to further improve it or just started executing it? Share your views to make me learn more with your experiences.