You may wonder how important a business plan is for your blog and I must confess that as a beginner I wondered the same thing and I learned this the hard way after dabbling around with my first blog. Having a business plan for your blog is not mandatory, but if you regard your blog – or plan to do so – as a way to earn income, to grow your platform, to showcase your creativity and create a brand, then your blog is your business and creating a blog business plan is essential.

Why you need that business plan.

• To help you keep up your focus.
• It will help you develop a short and long-term strategy that will help you gauge your progress.
• Help you to carefully plan ways to make money from your blog in the best way that suits your brand.
• Gives you a clearer picture of how you will promote your blog.
• Helps you budget and guides you through future decisions for your blog as a business.
• It helps to serve as an evidence to interested parties or investors who want to partner with you. Assuming that your blog grows popular over time and investors express interest in partnering with you, the decision to partner or not to partner with you could hinge on their assessment of your business acumen and a possible peep into your blog’s business plan. Such decisions are easier to make with documentation no matter how simple it is.

With this clarity on why you need a blog business plan, let’s go into the details of how to develop a simple, smart plan for your blog.

Thinking it through.

There are certain thoughts that you should have on your mind as you create your plan such as:

The platform (hosted or self-hosted) that you want your blog on – WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Others.

If you are self-hosting, consider how to get your domain name, how to buy hosting service, customizing and designing your blog and consider what the annual fees for maintaining your blog will be.

What are your three main goals for blogging? Identify them and use them as your focal point.

What will your blog subject focus be?

Who is your target audience and what are the possible solutions that you plan to offer to them?

When a reader visits your blog, what are the calls for action that you want them to take – Subscribe, buy, share etc?

How will you encourage them to take such action?

Search and study your competition. What is it that they are doing that you can learn from and possibly improve on.

How often will you update your blog? Think of your first ten blog posts, develop the content and come up with a list of focus keywords for your blog.

What are the strategies that you will use to increase your blogs’ SEO? Do you plan to run periodic promotions for your blog?

How will you measure your success? Think of the methods that you could use – Google Analytics, Email and RSS subscription, comments, and feedbacks. Read More…