How To Create A Blog Posting Plan Based On What Your Audience Already Likes And Responds Toby Tiffany Johnson
by Tiffany Johnson
By now you’ve seen different blogs showing their goals from last year with updates on whether or not those goals were met. It’s good to look back and see how far you’ve come and where you need to go moving forward.
If you’ve been writing blog post up to this point, it’s a good time to evaluate what content worked best for your audience. Each week you publish a new post they are able to vote yay or nay on your topic. And it may not even be the topic they like but the headline that gets them to stop and take a second look. One thing for sure I plan to focus more on headlines that are specific, to the point, and clear. I do have tendency to use catchy instead of things that always make sense. I don’t plan to redo old headlines, but will make revisions to them for posting on social media.
How Does Your Audience Place Their Vote?
Your audience votes by liking, tweeting, commenting, and sharing your blog posts. Clicking “like” at the top of your post is like them giving you a High-5 or saying “alright now!” as a way to show they agree with what you’re saying. It’s rare, if ever, you click “like” for something that you “kinda” agree with.
As you are planning your blog posts for this quarter (I like breaking things up in quarters, makes it easier to digest), see what topics got the most votes.
Identify topics that your audience engaged you the most.
From within your WordPress dashboard, look at all of your posts. In the top menu, click on the icon for Comments so that you are viewing the posts with the most to least commented.
What topics were commented on the most?
What topics were commented on the least?
Is there a common theme?
For example, with our website I considered the blog posts with comments in the double digits to be the higher rankings posts. Of course this will vary based on how long you have been blogging and the size of your audience.
I copied all of the headlines that were in this group so I could go back and evaluate the subjects. Choose the option that works best for you. You may want to copy and paste the titles, grab a screenshot of them, or take note of the topics as you are going through the list of most commented posts.
For the blog posts that didn’t get a large number of comments, it doesn’t mean the information was bad, it good just be the headline or your reach was too small. Don’t give up on the topic instead expound on it more as an update and see how that goes.
Do the same thing for Facebook and Twitter, see which got the most likes and ReTweets. If you’re getting a lot of votes on everything you do, then you’re definitely giving the people what they want. Keep doing it and take it up a notch. Plan your topics in advance. Mix up your media by using audio, video, and text.
I hear video is in, however is anything ever really out. There are days you feel like reading, days you feel like watching, and days you’d just rather someone tell you. You never know when that day will be and for whom. Mix it up and at the end of the quarter you can check to see which was most popular with your audience.
Give More Of What Your Audience Wants In Your Blog Posts
I read an inspiring post about a mom and meal planning. It surprised me how much I enjoyed it because I’m not a mom and I don’t meal plan. However I could easily see how it translates to planning blog post.
If you choose meals based on type like Meatless, Seafood, Pork, Beef, Chicken, you can do the same for blog post. Plan your blog posts topics as if you were planning a meal. Decide which day or week you’ll address a certain topic. Repeat until you know which topics you’ll discuss for the next three months. Now you’ve got a plan. Write it on your calendar or checkout the Editorial Calendar plug-in.
Leave Room For Flexibility and Spontaneity
Of course you should plan for the unexpected so when inspiration strikes you’re not waiting until second quarter to publish the information. Let your editorial calendar be there for the times when you need something to draw from. I do suspect that once you known the specific topics you’ll write on you’ll find inspiration everywhere you go.
Now it’s your turn. How do you plan your blog posts? Is it spontaneous or already mapped out?
