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Creating a Content Plan | A Strategic Approach

Writer's picture: MelMel

An effective content strategy begins with a proper content plan. A content plan allows you to carry out your business goals in a practical manner. If you have a business blog that you want to use to drive traffic and sales, it won’t be an overnight success.


You need to first be clear what your business goals. Then you need to determine the short-term objectives that will take you to these goals. A content plan is what bridges the gap between your business goals and their practical achievement. 


In this article, I discuss what a content plan is and how to go about creating one to achieve your business goals.

Graphic of two guys doing a content plan.

1. Clarify your content marketing goals

You need to establish what the purpose of your business blog is. Are you interested in driving traffic, gaining market share, or increasing sales? For most businesses, the aim should be driving sales. 


You need to first determine your goals and then break down these goals into manageable units — or, in other words, objectives. What does that look like? Let’s look at a practical example to illustrate the point. 


Let’s say you own a website that sells packaged specialty coffee. You want to increase sales. You would have to determine the value of the sales that you are interested in gaining. This can be decided through projections based on the price of your product.


The next step is to decide how much traffic is needed to achieve this goal. You can base this on the current level of traffic you have and the value of the sales of this current traffic. Do you want to double, triple, or quadruple that amount?


That’s for you to decide. The numbers don’t have to be super specific or accurate. They just need to be solid enough so that you have a practical target to work with or toward. 


After determining the amount of traffic that would lead to your sales target, you should then choose the number of blog articles that you need to write. This is not a mathematical question. 


There is no such thing as a formula that can determine the number of blogs you need to write to achieve a sales target. This is something that should be decided based on the competition. Ask yourself the following questions:


  1. How large are your competitors’ blogs?

  2. What amount of traffic do they attract? 

  3. What are the estimated sales of this blog? 

  4. How much do you desire to surpass these competitor blogs? 


These questions can help you make an intelligent guestimate as to the number of blog articles that are required to meet your goal. 


2. Determine the topics to write about

After determining what your target is, then you should decide what topics to start writing about. You should always remember that the point of your business blog is to achieve sales. 


However, you should not expect every visitor to immediately be a buyer. You should consider the sales funnel or the customer’s journey. This means that your blog should cater to buyers at every stage of awareness. 


For example, since you sell specialty coffee, customers who are familiar with the term or concept might be interested in learning more before buying. Why should they choose expensive specialty coffee over cheaper instant coffee? 

 

You can cater to these customers with educational blogs such as:


  • What is specialty coffee? 

  • Why specialty coffee is better for your health

  • Why specialty coffee is better for small farmers

  • Why specialty coffee is better for the environment


These topics will help convince visitors to your site that specialty coffee is a premium product that is worth its value. After establishing this level of awareness among customers, they can be pushed further down the sales funnel until they become purchasing customers. 


This is known as the content funnel, which I discuss here. Hopefully, after gaining the general knowledge of specialty coffee as a high-value product that is worth its price, your site visitors will be ready to hear about how your specific brand of specialty coffee is the right choice for them. 


This is a long process. The content funnel has three levels — TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU, that is the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, respectively. The higher the level, the less likely the customer is to convert. 


However, a well-built content funnel means that you nurture customers to become eventual customers by gaining their trust with educational and helpful content. In short, at the end of the process, you should have a list of blog titles that neatly fit into the three stages of the content funnel. 


3. Use SEO tools to refine your blog topics 

There is no point in attracting huge amounts of traffic that doesn’t lead to sales or conversion. That is why you should make careful use of SEO tools to find topics and keywords to write your content around. 


There are several tools to choose from. The most popular include: 


  • SemRUSH

  • Ahrefs

  • SurferSEO 


These tools provide you with key information on topics or keywords. Keywords are the search terms that searchers or potential customers type into the search bar to land on your website. One of the tools I use most frequently is SemRush.

Screenshot from SemRush.
A screengrab from SemRush for the keyword "best specialty coffee."

Here is a screenshot of the keyword “best specialty coffee.” It has terms that you are not familiar with such as: 


  • Keyword difficulty (KD)

  • Keyword volume (KV)

  • Cost per click (CPC)

  • Intent


The table below gives a breakdown of what each of these terms mean: 

Term 

Meaning 

Importance

Keyword difficulty (KD)

This is how difficult it is to rank for a keyword

The higher the value, the more difficult the keyword. Newer websites should focus on keywords with low KD. 

Keyword volume (KV)

This describes the number of times people search for a term in a given month. 

The higher the volume, the higher the potential for the term to attract traffic to your site. 

Cost per click (CPC)

This is an advertising term that indicates how much advertisers are willing to pay for a term in their ads. 

CPC is typically used as a proxy for the commercial value of a keyword. The higher the CPC, the higher is the keyword’s estimated value. 

Intent

This tells you what is the intention of the customer who is searching this term: Informational, commercial, or transactional

Terms with commercial or transactional intent are more likely to lead to sales. 

In the case of our key term “best specialty coffee,” the KV is relatively low. However, the relatively low KD and “commercial” intent means that this is a keyword worth investing in. The CPC might seem low at $2.36. However, it is typically $0.00 for most keywords. So this should also be taken into account. 


Proper SEO research can give you some idea of how much traffic your site can receive and how easily it can achieve this traffic. However, it is not an exact science. 


The main goal in writing a blog is to make sure you cover the topic as completely as possible or at least more completely than the competition. SEO tools can help point you in the right direction in that regard. 


4. Assign writers and editors

Now that you have decided on the list of topics that need to be written for your blog, the next step is to assign writers and editors to write these topics. 

Depending on the type of operation you run, you can rely on writers and editors in-house or you can outsource these services. With the growing popularity of AI-generated content, you may be tempted to use AI to generate massive amounts of content at the touch of a button and avoid hiring writers. 


However, AI-written content comes with several challenges. It is rarely publish-ready. This means you need to rely on the help of human editors. This begs the question. If your editor has to spend too much time refining AI-written content, would it have not been better to hire human writers to begin with? 


So think carefully before hiring writers and editors. Perhaps, when it comes to editors, you should get someone with subject matter expertise. However, for writers, you should focus on individuals who are competent at their craft. 


It is rare to find subject matter experts who are equally competent writers. This means it would be best to work with a small core of writers who are open to learning and doing research on the topic at hand. 


How EminentEdit can help boost your content marketing strategy 

EminentEdit offers content writing to help turn your blog into an engine that drives leads and sales. Our content writing services include: 



Your blog should be part of a holistic strategy to attract, nurture, and convert visitors into loyal customers. Our writers and editors here at EminentEdit focus on creating content that educates and gains the trust of your site visitors. 

 

EminentEdit provides content repurposing services that are:


  • Affordable

  • Professional 

  • Reliable


More importantly, we are adaptable to your specific needs.

Get in touch with us for help in crafting awesome content.



We know what you want to say. We help you say it better.

 

At EminentEdit, our content writers and editors don’t think of content marketing as an afterthought. We ensure that your content works to drive your business goals. Contact us today to create awesome content that works — Let’s Go! 

 

Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2025, January 20). Creating a Content Plan | A Strategic Approach. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/content-plan






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