Now that your mom blog is properly set up, the real work begins. To make money from your blog, you must have excellent content.
However, the concept of “Content is Queen” is flawed in that it leads some to believe that all you need to do is create great content.
That, of course, is not correct. Along with great content, you must be able to effectively promote it.
The more effectively you promote your content, the more people you will reach and the greater the earning potential of your mommy blog.
In this section, I’ll show you how to develop a content strategy, create a social media strategy, create high-quality content, and effectively promote your content.
Create A Content Strategy
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Rather Than Producing Content Right Away, It’s A Good Idea to First Come Up With A Content Strategy
I understand the desire to jump right in and create your first piece of content. And, to an extent, you really should work on getting some content up on your site sooner rather than later.
However, before you start producing content left and right, it is a really good idea to sit down and come up with a bunch of content ideas that your target audience wants to read.
The easiest way to explain this would be to say that you need to imagine what your site would look like if it answered every question your audience could ever ask if they wanted to learn everything about your niche and the products/services you are promoting in that niche.
What content would your site have in order to answer every question about your topic?
That is what you’re trying to accomplish: building a one-stop resource for your audience.
The First Content You Should Create
Before you start pumping out content, there are a few different pieces of content you should come up with first. They are:
- A contact page.
- An about page.
- A terms of service page.
- An Associate’s disclaimer page (if you’re promoting Amazon products.)
- An opt-in incentive
The first four pieces of content aren’t too difficult to put up and usually you can get them done in a day. But, they are necessary and every new blog or website should have them.
The fifth piece of content, the opt-in incentive, will help you get people to subscribe to your email list. Your opt-in incentive should be some really helpful piece of content that your audience will be willing enough to give you their email address in exchange for it.
An opt-in incentive could be an “Ultimate Guide” to your niche, or it could be something like “10 Mistakes Most People Make in [your niche].” Whatever it is, it needs to be a quality piece of content, fairly in-depth, very helpful, and somewhat enticing.
By starting off with an opt-in incentive, you will be putting yourself in a good position to start collecting emails right from the get-go. Once you have your opt-in incentive ready to go, then you can start creating the rest of the content for your site.
How to Come Up With Content Ideas
There’s nothing too tricky about coming up with content ideas. I mean, if you followed Step 2 and you searched around the related keyword ideas for your main keyword on Google’s Keyword Planner, then you already have a good idea of what people are searching for in your niche.
So, Google’s Keyword Planner is probably the best place to start when coming up with content ideas. Here are some more places to look as well:
- Use Google’s Keyword Planner to find keywords that are related to your main keyword.
- Go to your competitor’s site and see what some of their best content is.
- Do a Google search for your main keyword and some of the related keywords and see what content shows up.
- Use SEMRush to see all of the keywords a competitor is ranking for and what content they are targeting those keywords with.
Every time you find a new content idea, write it down in a spreadsheet. That way, as you work on your blog, you’ll have an extensive list of content ideas to keep you busy.
Your ultimate goal will be to produce content around every idea you come across. That may mean a separate piece of content for each idea, or it may mean an enormous guide that merges all of those topic ideas into one post. And, ideally, the content your create should be better than the same content that your competitors are putting out.
If you are in a niche with a lot of competition, the one downside is that it will likely take you longer to rank for your main content, simply because there is too much competition for it. However, I do have a strategy that you can use to help you find some content opportunities that would be easier to rank and get traffic for.
Produce Content
In my opinion, there are two main components of being a successful mom blogger: creating good content and promoting that content well.
Obviously, before you can promote your content, you first have to create content that is worth promoting. And, the better your content is, the easier it will be to promote it.
So, the main goal with your content is to create something that your audience loves.
You also need to create content on a regular basis. And, while the new consensus is to not write content for the search engines, but rather to write it for people, it’s still a good idea to target popular keywords with the content you write.
In this section I’ll give you a general run down of how to produce quality content for your blog.
Your Content Schedule
We talked a little bit about how to come up with a list of content ideas in Step 6. Now that you have some keyword focused content ideas, it’s not a bad idea to schedule them all on a calendar.
Having a content schedule can keep you on track and help you write content on a consistent basis.
As a general rule of thumb, there is no special number of posts you need to post within a certain amount of time. On some of my blogs, I rarely post any new content. Instead, I just update the main guides I have already created on those blogs.
On other websites I try and come out with a new piece of content every week.
Some websites post new content every single day, while others push out multiple pieces of content per day.
If you’re solo like me, though, it’s probably not a good idea to try and knock out multiple posts in a day… especially since you should try and produce lengthy posts.
Fortunately, though, even if you produce one new piece of content every month, as long as you promote it well, you can still achieve really good results.
How to Create Amazing Content for Your Blog
There are whole books that discuss how to create amazing content. And, while I can’t give you an advanced course on content creation, I can give you a general overview to help you get started.
Before we dive into some ways you can make your content great, I should explain that when I’m creating content I’m trying to do a few things…
First, I’m trying to create content that answers a specific question my target audience wants the answer to. To do this, I find keywords within my niche that my target audience is searching for, and I try to create a piece of content that so thoroughly answers that query, that the people who do read it do not need to go anywhere else to get a second opinion.
Second, I’m attempting to create content that appeases the technical side of Google. Or, in other words, I’m trying to write an SEO-friendly piece of content.
The algorithm that determines what content ranks where for a given search term is comprised of many different facets. Things like title tags, sub-headers, word length, keywords in the body of your content, etc. are all factors that Google uses to try and determine the ‘quality’ of the content in relation to the search query.
So, I try and write a piece of content that meets Google’s technical criteria (or, at least, doesn’t violate it.)
Finally, I really want to produce a piece of content that people want to share. And, yes, part of creating content that people want to share is tied together with my first goal: create content that provides a thorough answer.
However, it takes really great content to inspire people enough to get them to share it. So, even if you do answer a question a visitor is looking for in as thorough of a manner as possible, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is share-worthy, because, in my opinion, share-worthy content has that extra ‘wow’ factor.
With all of that being said, here are a few strategies that will help you meet each of the three-point criteria listed above…
Five Strategies for Creating Amazing Content
- Write lengthy content. The average length of a post that ranks on the first page for a given search term is over 2,000 words. That’s all great, but do you want to just meet the existing status quo? I don’t! So, I say forget that… I try and produce content that is at least 4,000-5,000 words long and I have a few guides on my sites that approach 20,000 words. (This guide is well over 10,000 words long.) Longer content is typically more authoritative, answers your audience’s question more thoroughly, and targets more long tail keywords (which means more traffic).
- One-up the competition. This strategy, called the Skyscraper Technique by Brian Dean, is great in that it basically gives you a blueprint for the kind of content you need to create. First, you find whatever piece of content is ranking on the first page for the keyword term you want to rank for and then you create an even better piece of content… which will give you leverage when you go to promote it, thus resulting in more shares, mentions, and backlinks.
- Create an outline before you write a post. Creating an outline of the content you are about to produce will help you create a much more thorough and better-organized piece of content. It will also help the writing process go much more smoothly as you will have all of the key talking points already planned ahead.
- Use plenty of sub-headers. Sub-headers break up the content and prevent it from looking like a big blob of text. They also give Google a better idea of what your content is about.
- Images and visuals take good content to the next level. Remember when I said that I try and create share-worthy content? Well, one of the ways to do that is to accompany each piece of content you produce with a handful of really nice images. Like sub-headers, images can break up a big piece of content nicely and help it become more manageable. If the images are good, it can also give the content that “wow” factor that is necessary for getting a ton of shares and mentions.
