Want to launch a blog? Or you’re looking to earn more from your existing blog? If you’ve landed on this article, you’ve already taken the first step to launching a successful blog: having a business mindset. Step two? Creating a business plan for your blog.
A blog business plan is an all-in-one roadmap to creating, launching, and implementing a successful (read: profitable) blog. This comprehensive blueprint helps you set blogging goals, develop your content strategy, build a marketing plan, and deploy your monetization strategy, so that you can stay on track and earn as much as you can from your blogging career.
Ready to start raking it in as a blogger? Then read on and check out our Blogger Business Plan Template, which includes helpful step-by-step instructions, handy writing prompts, and fillable tables that speed up the process of plotting out your business blueprint. Get it for free!
Why create a business plan for your blog?
So, why should you create a business plan for your blog? First of all, reframing your blog as a business will help you actually run it like a business. By making business-oriented decisions about your blog, you’ll be able to better target your ideal audience, create content more strategically, and ultimately earn more money.
It may be tempting to just start writing blog posts and marketing your content. However, the truth is that creating a well thought-out business plan actually makes it easier to run and maintain your blogging business for the long haul. In other words, creating a business plan makes your business more sustainable for you, as a content creator. Because does anyone really love burnout?
Benefits of having a blog business plan
Besides the aforementioned, there are tons of short and long-term benefits to developing a blogging business plan, including:
- Create better blog posts: Planning your posts strategically ensures you’re creating content that’s aligned with your goals and your audience’s interests, which in turn boosts your engagement and grows your subscriber base.
- Reach your dream audience: Developing a solid marketing plan helps you better target and reach the people who will love — and want to subscribe to — your blog content.
- Build a strong personal brand: Identifying your target market and strategically planning your content help you build a strong personal brand, which boosts your credibility and brand recognition within the crowded blogging market.
- Get a leg up on the competition: Solidifying your personal brand and creating content in line with your goals sets you apart from competing bloggers.
- Achieve your goals faster: Setting clear objectives helps you plot out your roadmap to influencer superstardom, so you can keep on track and reach your goals.
Sure, each of these benefits are great on their own. Altogether, however, they ensure you’re making the most out of — and earning the most from — your blogging business.
How to create a blog business plan
Now that you’re aware of all the income-boosting benefits of creating a blogging business plan, it’s time to dive into the nitty-gritty and actually start building your own plan. Here, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to creating a successful blogging business, from finding your niche to building your budget:
- Define your blog
- Identify your target audience
- Develop a content strategy
- Build a marketing plan
- Develop your SEO strategy
- Create a monetization strategy
Want to speed up the process? Our Blogger Business Plan Template lets you press fast-forward, helping you build your business plan in minutes so you start earning more, like, today.
Step 1: Define your blog
Before you can start writing blog posts, you’ll need to cover the basics, which means defining your blogging business. This important first step entails choosing your niche and defining your unique value proposition as a blogger.
Choose your niche
The very first step in crafting your blogging business plan is choosing your niche. That’s because your niche will dictate everything from the kind of blog content you’ll write, to the type of audiences you’ll be targeting.
From personal finance to productivity, there’s a seemingly infinite number of niches out there to tap into. So, how does one “niche down”? Not to get all philosophical on you, but you’ll find the answer to that question within yourself.
To put it differently, the niche you ultimately go with will depend on your interests and your area of expertise (and the demands of the blogging market, but more on that later). When choosing your niche, think about the content topics you’re passionate and knowledgeable about. What do you love talking about and looking into online? What kinds of things do your family and friends ask you for advice on? Do you know the ins and outs of the stock market, front to back? There’s a potential niche. Are your friends always asking you for relationship advice? There’s another.
Identifying your passion and expertise, however, is only half of finding your niche. Once you’ve figured those out, you’ll need to do some market research in order to determine whether those prospective niches are financially viable. This means you’ll need to conduct some keyword research, using tools like Google Keyword Planner, to figure out just how large and how competitive your potential niche’s market is.
Following the basic principles of economics (and just common sense), a lucrative niche will be one with high demand (i.e. high search volumes) and low competitiveness (i.e. low search results). This all indicates that there are likely gaps within your niche that are ready to be filled (by your blogging content, of course).
Determine your unique value proposition
Next, you’ll want to define your blog’s unique value proposition.
What’s what? Technically speaking, your unique value proposition is a statement that conveys why your blog is better than your competitors’. Your UVP should include your blog’s unique benefits and how it provides solutions to your audience’s pain points. As a rule of thumb, it should be compelling, comprehensive, and concisely written.
So, why write a unique value proposition? Because it’s a unique identifier for your blogging business. Without it, audiences won’t have a reason to read your blog and subscribers won’t have a reason to, well, subscribe. They may even go so far as to choose another competition simply because that blogger is able to communicate its value proposition clearly in its marketing campaigns.
Step 2: Identify your target audience
Now that you’ve found your niche and written your unique value proposition, it’s time to find your blog’s target audience.
Basically, your target audience is the specific group of people who will be most interested in and most benefit from your blog content (and any products you might offer in the future). Gaining a strong understanding of your target audience, from their demographic info to their pain points, is crucial to building your blogging business plan. Why? Because, ultimately, it’s this group of people who will determine the kind of blog content you produce and the marketing campaigns you create. In other words, as a blogger, you’ll be tailoring all of your business strategies towards their needs, preferences, and pain points.
Conduct a competitor analysis
To determine your target audience, you’ll need to conduct some competitor research.
The first step in conducting a competitor analysis is to chart out your niche and compile a list of competing bloggers. From there, do a deep dive into each of your competitors’ blogs as well as any social media profiles they might keep in order to gain an understanding of their content and marketing strategies. With all of this data, you’ll also be able to piece together your competitors’ unique value propositions as well as their target audiences. Finally, complete an analysis of your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies in all of these categories, and describe how you and your blog are different — or better!
A comprehensive competitor analysis allows you to understand which audiences your competitors are targeting and how, exactly, they’re doing it. The data you pull and the conclusions you draw during this phase are useful to your blogging business for a number of reasons. First, they’ll alert you to any opportunities you have to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Secondly, they’ll open your eyes to any potential gaps within your niche’s market, which you can fill with your blogging content. Thirdly, they can help you identify and target audiences that you hadn’t previously considered, so that you can expand your blog’s reach — and grow your income.
Create user personas
It’s important to remember that your target audience is only a subset of your niche’s larger target market. That’s to say your target audience is a small and specific group of people, so you’ll want to be precise and intentional when defining it. For this reason, a user persona is a helpful tool you can use to get a handle on your target audience.
So, what, exactly, does this tool look like? Well, a user persona is a detailed profile of your ideal audience or customer (or subscriber). When visualizing your user persona, it might be helpful to think of your target customers (or subscribers) as semi-fictional characters, and of your user persona profile as a “portrait” that includes information about their goals, behaviors, and needs.
Creating a user persona means writing a detailed narrative description of your user using the qualitative data you gathered during your competitor analysis. These descriptions will include extrapolations on your users’ personality traits, lifestyles, pain points, habits, attitudes, decision-making processes, and more.
This amount of specificity is key when it comes to writing your user personas and defining your target audience. That’s because a high level of granularity will help you adequately zone in on your audience’s needs and pain points, so you can create the blogging content they’ll want to subscribe to — and even the digital products they’ll want to pay for.
So, is one user persona sufficient to create a great blogging business plan? Typically not. Because a single user persona only represents a subset of your blog’s target audience, it’s recommended that bloggers create multiple user personas, with each representing a different segment of your ideal customer base.
Step 3: Develop a content strategy
At this point, you’ve found your niche, defined your unique value, and identified your target audience. All of those steps required a lot of introspection and a ton of research.
So, now’s where the real fun begins! That means developing your blog’s content strategy. This process will see you getting creative and digging into the nitty-gritty of your dream blogging business:
Brainstorm content topics
Creating a great content strategy starts with a great brainstorm.
Need some help getting those creative juices flowing? Your content ideation brainstorm always starts with your target audience. Revisit the data points you collected during your competitor analysis and reflect, specifically, on their needs, preferences, and pain points. What kinds of topics do they find interesting, entertaining, or valuable? What problems do they need solutions for or pain points do they want to alleviate?
Example: Let’s say you’re a blogger in the career and professional development niche targeting single, university-educated women between the ages of 25 and 35. In this case, you’ll likely be looking at content topics like resume-building, job interviews, promotions, career growth, and work-life balance.
Develop your content pillars
A solid content strategy is always propped up by a set content pillars. Essentially, content pillars are the main themes that your blog will focus on, and most successful blog content strategies rely on a combination of them. Not only does a set of well-defined content pillars help you manage and maintain your content strategy, it also enables you to build a strong and recognizable personal brand within your specific blogging niche.
To develop your blog’s pillars, revisit the content topics from your brainstorm, jot down any similarities between them, and then group them into broader content categories (aka your pillars).
Example: Let’s return to our previous example of the work and career blogger. For a creator within this niche, a set of solid content pillars might include getting hired (i.e. resume-writing and job interview tutorials), navigating the workplace (i.e. tips on office etiquette, workplace communication, and asking for promotions), and career development (i.e. interviews with professionals about their career journeys).
Set a publishing schedule
Once you’ve established your content pillars, it’s time to puzzle out your blog’s posting schedule. This means deciding on how frequently you’ll publish new blog posts.
When determining your posting frequency, you’ll need to keep both your audience’s preferences and your work schedule top of mind. While it might be tempting (and aspirational, even) to upload a blog post every day of the week, the fact is that if you’re not able to maintain that posting cadence, your content strategy will easily become derailed and your audience engagement will decline, fast.
Keep in mind that consistency is absolutely key when it comes to running a successful blog. Setting a reasonable, realistic posting cadence helps you create a consistent content calendar. And a consistent publishing schedule makes implementing your content strategy much easier and smoother, both now and in the long run. On top of that, posting consistently also keeps your readers interested and engaged in your content, and even generates hype for upcoming blog posts.
Step 4: Build a marketing plan
By now, you’ve decided on your content strategy and plotted out your content calendar. Now, it’s time to figure out how to promote your blogging business. And that means crafting a marketing strategy.
From sponsored posts to email newsletters, there are tons of ways to promote your blog online. Here are a few of the most popular tactics available to bloggers like you:
- Create a social media marketing strategy
- Build your email list
- Try paid advertising
- Develop a collaboration and partnership strategy
Create a social media marketing strategy
As a content creator, the most intuitive way to promote your blog (and any potential products you have in the pipeline) is with, well, content! And you know what that means: developing a stellar social media marketing strategy.
If you already have a social media following, then congratulations: you already have a built-in audience and pool of prospective blog subscribers. If you don’t have a following just yet, then you’ll want to get on it by choosing a social media platform (or two!) so you can start growing one.
Choose your platform
So, which social media platform is right for you? That depends entirely on your target audience’s preferences and digital habits. In other words, you’ll want to choose the social platform (or platforms) where your audience hangs out and consumes content.
Speaking of platforms: the best social media strategies typically involve a combination of social platforms, with a focus being placed on one “main” platform and additional content being disseminated through secondary platforms. This strategy allows you to reach a larger portion of your given target audience, and provides you with more opportunities to engage them in different ways.
Keep it authentic
No matter the platform you choose, there are a number of things that every blogger should keep in mind while promoting their blog through content.
First, authenticity is of the utmost importance! Remember that your audience follows you for you — and that includes all the knowledge, expertise, and personal idiosyncrasies that make you unique as a creator. On top of that, online audiences can sniff out inauthenticity from a mile away — and once they smell it, it can be hard to win back their trust. That’s why it’s crucial that your promotional content doesn’t feel like an ad. Rather, quite the opposite: it should feel as compelling, entertaining, and educational as the rest of your content.
So, what’s the trick to producing authentic-feeling marketing content? We suggest creating content that’s similar in topic to the blog posts (or digital products) you’re trying to promote. Have an “Investing 101” blog post behind a paywall? Consider creating a short-form video with an investing tip or two. From there, you can covertly insert a CTA informing your audience that they can access more of your expertise on the topic by subscribing to your blog. This method is effective because it gives prospective subscribers a taste of your blog’s value, which provides them with a ton of incentive to smash that “subscribe” button.
Build your email list
Sure, social media marketing works perfectly well, but did you know that ye olde e-newsletter remains one of the most effective digital marketing strategies out there? You heard us right: on average, email marketing generates a ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. With that in mind, you’ll want to leverage the power of email marketing in your blog business plan.
Email marketing is a powerful way to convert your audience into paying subscribers (and customers). On top of that, email marketing also gives you more control over your blogging business. While your social media following remains at the mercy of third-party platforms and their fickle algorithms, your email list is an audience (and a marketing tool) that you own, 100%. And that means nobody can take it away from you.
Before you can start sending out email blasts, you’ll need to build your email list, i.e. the list of subscribers who will receive your marketing emails.
To build out your list, you’ll need to capture your followers’ email addresses. That might seem like a tall order, however, in this day and age, there are tons of tools at a blogger’s disposal to do just that. These include opt-in forms, which can be added to your blog homepage or link-in-bio landing page, and lead magnets, which you can give away in exchange for your followers’ contact info.
Try paid advertising
Are you willing to invest a bit of money into your blogging business? Then you might want to try paid advertising to promote your blog (and any potential digital products you might create and sell). As a blogger, there are a couple of ways to approach your paid advertising strategy.
First, you can advertise your products on social media through sponsored ads. From Instagram to YouTube, every content platform has some way for you to promote your blog or digital products. And a single sponsored post can go a long way in terms of ROI. We suggest approaching your paid advertising strategy as an experiment. Start with a small budget, look into commissioning an ad or two, and see where it takes you!
Another option would be to try out Google Ads. These ads get displayed on Google search results pages, on websites and blogs, and in a ton of other places around the web. This means that Google Ads have the potential to give your blog (and your products) a ton of reach and visibility. Google also has some of the best targeted advertising tech on the market, which means that your ads have a better chance of landing in front of the right people (i.e. the people who will want to read and subscribe to your blog).
Develop a collaboration and partnership strategy
Partnering with other bloggers within your niche is a great way to grow your audience and boost your credibility. For these reasons, you’ll want to develop a partnership strategy for your blog.
To do this, reach out to other bloggers within your category and try securing guest posts on their blog. Rather than going the paid sponsorship route, you might be able to work out an exchange where you cross-promote each other’s content.
So, how do you find the right blogging partner? Be on the lookout for bloggers who share your audience and values, and who have a similar style or approach to creating content. This will make it a whole lot easier to create content that resonates with both of your audiences and helps you achieve your blogging goals.
Before starting a collaboration, plan out all the details of the partnership, including goals, content format, and timeline. You’ll want to make sure you’re both on the same page before and throughout the process. Remember: clear communication is the key to a successful collaboration!
In the end, collaborations are a great opportunity to create unique content that stands out from your regular blog posts and build your blog’s community. Treating your fellow bloggers as collaborators rather than competitors can open the doors to brand new audiences — and brand new subscribers.
Need help managing your partnership strategies and the rest of your marketing efforts? Our Blogger Business Plan Template helps you build and implement your blog’s marketing strategy quickly and easily.
Step 5: Develop your SEO strategy
Finally, it’s time to build your blog’s SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. This process involves a number of steps, including performing keyword research, optimizing your blog posts, and honing your thumbnail design, among others.
The first step in crafting your SEO plan is to conduct keyword research. To do this, you’ll be using tools like Google Keyword Planner to find keywords that are relevant to your niche. From there, you’ll optimize your blog posts with descriptive titles and informative descriptions containing your target keywords, along with using tools like Surfer to figure out your posts’ ideal word counts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Want to learn more about creating a comprehensive SEO strategy for your blog? Our Blogger Business Plan Template helps you create, manage, and implement an effective SEO strategy for your blog.
Step 6: Create a monetization strategy
You’re not done with those strategic thinking skills just yet! Next, it’s time to build out your blog’s monetization strategy.
From subscriptions to digital products, there are lots of ways to generate revenue as a blogger. But, ultimately, the monetization tactics you choose depend entirely on your audience’s preferences and blog’s business needs.
Looking to max out your blogging income? (Trick question!) Then you’ll want to harness a combination of revenue streams. This might mean tapping into subscriptions in addition to selling digital products and partnering with brands. Here are a few of the most popular ways for bloggers to monetize:
Subscriptions
Creating subscribers-only content is bloggers’ bread and butter when it comes to earning an income.
A blog subscription works just like any other subscription service (take Netflix or Amazon Prime, for example). In a nutshell, your subscribers pay a monthly fee for access to exclusive, paywalled blog content and any other perks you might want to provide.
So, what does a blog subscription strategy look like? Well, there are actually quite a few approaches you can take.
One of the most popular strategies is placing entire blog posts behind a paywall. This tactic typically entails offering select blog posts for free, while offering the rest (aka “the good stuff”) only to paid subscribers. This strategy is effective because it provides potential subscribers with a taste of your blog’s value, which gives them incentive to subscribe (i.e. pay up) to gain access to more.
Additional subscription strategies might include placing the second half of each blog post (aka the juiciest or most informative parts of each post) behind a paywall or providing subscribers with early access to your blogging content.
Digital products
Selling digital products — like mini-courses, tutorials, and guides — is one of the most lucrative and low-effort ways to earn money as a blogger. This is because digital products are an excellent source of passive income. Why? Well, because you only need to create a digital product once before copies of it can be purchased endlessly. That means you can allocate that time and energy saved towards other, more enjoyable business operations, like creating the content.
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Brand partnerships
Brand partnerships are some of the most popular ways for content creators to earn money online — and this counts for bloggers too.
When it comes to blogs, partnering brands will usually pay bloggers to promote their products and services via a sponsored blog post. These promotional posts could take any number of forms, depending on the terms of your partnership.
Example: If you’re a travel blogger, a sponsored post might take the form of a written review for one of the brand’s products or services, or it might be an account of a trip paid for by your partnering brand.
Before you jump into a brand partnership, you’ll need to do a little bit of research and outreach in order to find the right one. The trick to forging a great brand partnership is to partner only with brands that you yourself would use and support, and affiliating yourself with products that you truly believe in. Partnering with a brand just to earn a buck can rub your audience the wrong way and erode the trust you worked so hard to build.
Launch your blogging business today
So, there you have it: everything you need to launch a successful blogging business, all in one place. Now, it’s up to you to put our Blogger Business Plan Template to good use and begin plotting out your route to becoming a superstar blogger.
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