12 Checklists for Bloggers to Implement Content Marketing Best Practices

12 Checklists for Bloggers to Implement Content Marketing Best Practices process.st/checklists-for-bloggers January 25, 2021

Jane Courtnell January 25, 2021

77% of internet users read blogs – like this one produced by us at Process Street. To pique the interest of this large audience you’ll need to be following optimized, efficient processes so your blog is the best it can be.

And guess what? If you’re looking to better your blog content and stand out from the competition, then you’ve come to the right place. In this article, you’ll learn how to get your blog right with Process Street’s tried and tested checklists for bloggers.

Once more, we’re giving you these checklists for free (our gift to you for being a woautomanderful readership). đ These checklists have been specifically selected and ordered for you to implement best practices from the start to the end of the blog creation process.

Right then, no more dill-dallying, let’s get straight to it.

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Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say so you’re fully prepared to implement our checklists for bloggers.

Let the blogging commence! ֋

Blogging is a key aspect of your content marketing strategy

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Blogging involves posting regular and updated content to a specific site chronologically, so you’ll always find the most recent content first. Blogging is a small piece of your content marketing strategy.

The aim of content marketing isn’t to explicitly promote a given brand, but to stimulate interest in the brand’s products and services. The end goal of content marketing is to build trust with your customers.

A successful content marketing strategy has the following core components, which are as follows: Videos: Did you know that 1/3 of online activity is spent watching video content, making video the best type of content marketing for reaching and engaging your target audience? According to BrightCove, brands that use video marketing can expect an average increase of 157% in organic traffic from search engines. Why not produce short and attention-grabbing informational videos – like this one – along with longer how-to videos and product demos – like this one.

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Infographics: Infographics help content marketers educate their audience and provide useful information that can add value for leads and customers. Readers can better visualize data, explain complicated subjects, and even offer a diagram for your product. eBooks: eBooks are an effective type of long-form content providing value to leads and customers. eBooks are typically gated, meaning visitors must provide some type of information about themselves in exchange for the eBook download. Although creating eBooks takes time, the ROI gained will make any time or money you invest in the project worthwhile.

White papers: A white paper is another type of long-form content that can be effective as a lead magnet. White papers are information-dense, data-driven, and detail-focused. This means they are a great way to build thought leadership and gain more respect in your industry. Once more, 76% of buyers are most willing to exchange their information for white papers.

Social media posts: Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram help businesses reach new audiences and nurture relationships with customers. The content of your social media posts plays an important role in how your company engages new leads and existing customers. Use your social media posts to start conversations with customers and engage your target audience.

Email: 73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email.

Once more, $35 million in sales is generated by email annually. Given this, you can see how emails are a great tool to add to your content marketing toolkit. For more information on how to generate interesting, inspiring, and engaging email content read: 17 Email Marketing Templates For An Effective Email Marketing Strategy.

Influencer marketing: At a fundamental level, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers. Influencers are consumers who are part of your target audience, but also part of your marketing plan. 46% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations, making it a powerful content marketing strategy.

So where does blogging fit among the above, as part of your content marketing strategy?

1/2 of the top 22 Fortune 500 companies had a corporate blog in 2018. That’s because it’s known that companies with a corporate blog produce an average of 67% more leads monthly relative to companies that don’t. It comes as no surprise that the majority of marketers find blogging extremely valuable. Blogging is therefore a key aspect of any content marketing strategy.

The term weblog was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997. Peter Merholz then jokingly broke the word up, producing the term we all know today as blog.

A blog aims to communicate with your audience, to subtly promote your product or service, provide valuable knowledge, or to work and establish your organization as a thought leader.

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The checklists given in this post have been carefully crafted and selected to optimize your content marketing strategy via blogs. You’ll be granted free access to our 12 top checklists for bloggers (and content marketers) so that you can create the best content on the web (like us at Process Street ؉).

But first, why is blogging important?

Why is blogging important?

Blogging gives a competitive advantageφ In our digital era, the importance of digital marketing strategies has increased, with the success and failure in online communication efforts dependent on the quality of the content produced by an organization. Content marketing as a digital marketing strategy is vital if companies wish to remain competitive.

For instance, a Future of Digital Marketing study used online survey results from 262 digital marketing executives at B2C and B2B companies. They found 80% – wow – of those companies planned to increase their digital marketing budgets over the next 12-18 months.

For these professionals, content marketing provided relief from saturated and expensive marketing strategies, with blogging being a key component of this strategy.

Blogging gives you promotional access to a large audienceΙ Did you know that 1/2 of 18-34 year old’s consume their news online? I mean, check you out reading this top online article ы. You see, content marketing is a sub-branch to your marketing strategy, specialized to reach the billions who, like you, source their information online.

Blogging educates, informs, and entertains potential customersӚ Baer (2013) states that content marketing, including blogging, is a tool for educating, informing, and entertaining customers or prospects, by creating attention or causing behaviors that result in leads and sales from advocacy.

Blogging can increase brand healthӈ Brand health is a measure of how well a company delivers on certain attributes for a given product or service as promised to customers. Think of brand health as an important determinant to the organization’s performance regarding sales and demand.

How is content marketing linked to brand health? Well, a 2015 paper by Ahmad et al concluded that content marketing (which encompasses blogging) attracts customers to your brand by improving your brand’s health.

Best practices for optimizing your business blog and content marketing strategy

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Combining blogging with business gives you a business blog, which is defined as a section of a business website, or a standalone website, devoted to writing subject matter concerning the company’s industry and sub-fields.

Whether you’re creating a business blog or a personal blog, the tips and checklists given in this article are transferable.

When blogging is done right, you’ll be telling a story that informs your audience of prospects, to alter their brand perception in favor of you.

Better content can motivate customers to buy your service or product, or subscribe to your blog. But how do you create such top-performing content?

Below are 5 ways you can adapt your content marketing strategy to optimize the effectiveness of your blog – whether that’s to promote your product/service or to gain more readers.

Adapt your blog content to account for the location ̎ Adapt your message depending on your target audience. You’ll want to be thinking about your audience’s age, gender, location, interests, hobbies, living environment…you name it.

Take Process Street as an example. I’m writing to you in American English. Are you American? When it comes to Process Street’s blog, statistically speaking, you most likely are.

Out goes my English dictionary and incomes American grammar. This is an example of localization in action.

Personalize your blog content ы

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A standardized, inflexible brand message sends out one signal – boring. Like stroppy teenagers, your customers will soon switch-off and dis-engage. You’ll need to reignite that spark, to trigger a passionate love affair (too much ǀ?) between your brand and your prospects. Realize your customers are unique with personal demands and adapt your message to reflect this.

Take the above image as an example. These are 2 separate emails I received this morning. On the right-hand side is an email by EcoWatch – generic, with little personalization. On the left-hand side, is an email by the Climate Reality Project, which is personalized addressing me by name. Can you guess which email I took the time to read?

The above represents the benefits of personalizing your content marketing strategy focusing on email outreach, but what about personalizing your blog posts specifically?

At Process Street, for every blog post published, we ask you – yes you – to comment with your thoughts and advice below ̇. We do this because we love to hear from our readership, and respond by making our content personalized where possible. This is another example of content marketing personalization in action, specific to blogging.

Personalization engages, making it easier to influence perception and behavior.

Draw on the individual’s emotions ‫زح؁‬ė A study by Botha and Reyneke (2013) shows that people will share and forward content when they can relate to the message given. This is because relatable content draws on people’s emotions.

Wylie (2014) emphasizes 2 factors that influence the success of content: 1. How positive the message is, with positive messages having a higher probability of going viral.

2. How much emotion the message triggers.

If you read our previous post titled, What Are The Best Christmas Ads EVER Made? (And Why You Should Care), my colleague Amanda explains emotion as a relationship builder, with many advertisements drawing from 4 core feeling tones: Happiness Sadness Surprise Belonging Take the below video content produced by the chewing gum manufacturer Extra. This is an example of content that pulls on your heartstrings, (and inspires you to take up origami).

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Creating content that draws on individual’s emotions is effective no matter what type of content you’re creating, whether that’s a video, eBook, Vlog, or Blog.

Adopt a diverse approach ‫׺‬ Ever heard of the phase, too much of the same thing? Well, this rings true when it comes to content marketing. You’ll need to mix up your marketing regime to keep your prospects engaged and interested. You don’t want to be repetitively spurring out content of a similar style and format.

To overcome this challenge at Process Street, we’ve sculpted our content creation team to contain individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds. For instance, in terms of us business bloggers, our team includes biologists, philosophers, English graduates, historians, marketers, and business graduates. This helps our marketing department consistently create effective content, with new ideas and styles put forward every day. Consider doing the same for your blogging team – if you have one. If not, then try to read around different subject matters to get diverse insights of your own.

Be both ethical and honest ؇ Push marketing will only irritate your readership as it forces information on them. Go for pull marketing tactics to promote your content. As Joe McCambley, co-founder of the Wonder Factory says…

“If your content is good, own it – Joe McCambley, Going Native: Will Content Marketing Work for You? If morals and ethics lie at the heart of a content producer, then disclosure and transparency will shine through the content produced and drive forward business success. Make sure: Brand partners are fully aware of your sponsored content policies.

Public relations professionals get full disclosure.

Content marketers make disclosures clear and visible throughout advertisements.

As stated in the American Accounting Association Meeting, marketing products/services based on lies, false statistics, and covering the truth does not work in today’s society.

Make sure your blog content is relevant, authoritative, and authentic.

12 top checklists for bloggers Great, now we know content marketing best practices, the next question is how do you ensure you’re implementing these practices when creating content for your blog?

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Well, look no further my friend as you’ve come to the right place. In the next section of this article, you’re presented with our top 12 checklists for bloggers. By giving you these checklists – for free I might add – I’m essentially letting you in on Process Street’s nifty content creation secrets. We follow these processes to create quality content daily, and so should you.

With that said let’s jump straight to it.

Each checklist has been carefully selected from our extensive library of pre-made, free-to-use templates. Think of the checklists given below as your bread-and-butter toolkit for all things blogging, one of the main duties of content marketers.

Each checklist has been selected for you to implement best practices for each consecutive step in the blog creation process. Click on the checklist links below, or alternatively scroll down to find out more for each.

Step 1: Do your research with our Blog Idea Processing Checklist!

Step 2: Conduct keyword research using our SEO Checklist: The Keyword Research Process template!

Step 3: Create captivating images for your blog posts with our Blog Pre-Publish Checklist!

Step 4: Before you publish your blog post, run through the final Blog Pre-Publish Checklist!

Step 5: Edit your blog posts with The Ultimate Blog Post Editing Checklist!

Step 6: Perform a peer-editing review for your blog post with our Peer-Editing Checklist for Bloggers!

Step 7: Get your blog posts approved with our Blog Content Approval Checklist Template!

Step 8: Promote your content with our Email Marketing Campaign Template!

Step 9: Promote your content with our Content Promotion Checklist!

Step 10: Promote your content on social media channels with our Social Media Influencer Outreach Checklist!

Step 11: Repurpose your original content with our Ari Meisel’s How to Develop a Content Distribution Machine Guide!

Step 12: Update your old content with our Updating Old Blog Content for SEO (Checklist)!

Step 1: Do your research with our Blog Idea Processing Checklist Run our Blog Idea Processing Checklist to share ideas with your team (or to document ideas for yourself), and find a concept plus relevant keywords before beginning the content creation process.

Starting with a simple idea, this checklist encourages the user to critically analyze each idea and understand what unique insights they can bring to the article.

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Use our long and short text form fields to summarize your content/blog ideas.

All data entered into this checklist is then stored in the cloud using Process Street’s template overview feature, which you (and your team) can access from anywhere at any time.

Click here to access our Blog Idea Processing Checklist!

Step 2: Conduct keyword research using our SEO Checklist: The Keyword Research Process Keyword mastery is an art; the steering force that enables your content to appear on the first page of Google. Keywords will dictate the content you write for your blog, the marketing strategies you deploy and is a crucial component for enabling the success of your business.

Keywords also help you to understand the needs and desires of your target audience, providing back-doors into high-traffic SERP rankings and offering a variety of competitive vantage points.

Our SEO Checklist: The Keyword Research Process guides you through a robust process for keyword research, that you can use, re-use, and modify for your own specific needs.

This checklist uses Process Street‘s Conditional Logic feature to adapt the template, presenting you with two optional processes depending on whether you have access to a keyword database. Although we provide a solution in case you have no such access, we recommend you subscribe to Ahrefs or Moz.com.

Click here to access our SEO Checklist: The Keyword Research Process template!

Step 3: Create captivating images for your blog posts with our Blog Image Design Process This blog image design process provides a structure for the creation of great images – consistently – that’ll capture your audience’s attention.

Use this template to stop relying on memory to make sure you get everything done to a high standard. Not to mention that this checklist makes tracking your image design projects easier. That is, you can upload your blog image drafts in one place using Process Street’s File Widget, for collaboration and future reference.

Click here to access our Blog Image Design Process!

Step 4: Before you publish your blog post, run through the final Blog PrePublish Checklist

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Pre-publish checklists are boring and repetitive especially when you have to run them every single time you’re writing a blog post. But, when writing a blog post either personally or professionally, you can often forget simple things from running a spell check to checking for broken links.

That is why we created this Blog Pre-Publish Checklist, so you never miss anything during blog post creation.

Click here to access our Blog Pre-Publish Checklist!

Step 5: Edit your blog posts with The Ultimate Blog Post Editing Checklist Whether you’re editing your blog posts or someone else’s, this editing checklist will help you catch any errors and present your audience with a polished finished product.

The checklist is divided into 3 sections, as follows: Copy editing On-page SEO Visual content editing All of these elements are equally important for bloggers, as you want to make sure your readers and Google get a good experience from your piece.

Click here to access The Ultimate Blog Post Editing Checklist!

Step 6: Perform a peer-editing review for your post with our Peer-Editing Checklist for Bloggers When creating any content is recommended that you spend 30% of your time composing it, and 70% editing it.

At Process Street, we pass content for peer review between members of our team, to catch errors and guarantee quality. And here you have our secret weapon, our Peer-Editing Checklist for Bloggers, free for you to jump in right away – you can thank me later ؉.

Our Peer-Editing Checklist for Bloggers uses Process Street’s Stop Task feature so no posts are published before all editing steps are undertaken. Think of this feature as your firewall preventing errors from slipping through the cracks.

Click here to access our Peer-Editing Checklist for Bloggers!

Step 7: Get your blog posts approved with our Blog Content Approval Checklist Template

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When it comes to creating blog content, there are many steps from ideation to publishing. It’s often too easy to overlook the smaller details such as running a spell check, checking the HTML formatting, or making sure you’ve done proper SEO. That’s especially the case if you’re juggling multiple posts.

Luckily for you, we’ve created this Blog Content Approval Checklist to make sure you never miss anything when working on your blog posts.

This checklist includes Process Street’s automated Approvals feature, which allows content editors and managers to quickly and easily approve (or deny) edits and revisions to your content, reducing time wasted. This will make meeting deadlines easier than ever before.

Click here to access our Blog Content Approval Checklist Template!

Step 8: Promote your content with our Email Marketing Campaign Template Email generates $38 for every $1 spent. If we consider this statistic concerning Return On Investment, that’s a 3,800% ROI. Such an ROI makes emails one of the most profitable marketing options available, and a great way to promote your blog.

Our Email Marketing Campaign Template has been designed for you to easily build a targeted list, and grab the attention of your blog subscribers.

This checklist has been designed using our Task Assignments feature, to assign and include a range of individuals that’ll help in the creation of your email campaign for it to be the best it can be.

Click here to access our Email Marketing Campaign Template!

Step 9: Promote your content with our Content Promotion Checklist Content marketing is not easy, it takes a lot of elbow grease to create valuable content and even more to promote it!

The promotion part is something that many companies tend to miss when looking at a content marketing strategy. A general rule of thumb is you should spend 30% of your time creating content and 70% promoting it. That’s why we at Process Street have created this checklist, for you to promote content that you work so hard to create.

Click here to access our Content Promotion Checklist!

Step 10: Promote your content on social media with our Social Media Influencer Outreach Checklist

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Social media influencers are gatekeepers who have the power to open a wide bountiful audience of engaged readers. Run this checklist monthly, or at the start of a new campaign to make sure you’re doing everything you can to maximize the impact of your social media influencer outreach.

You want your influencers to promote your content in front of their loyal audience and become affiliates or partners. But with the promise of this great power, the question remains; how do you find and build relationships with the most sought-after influencers in your field?

Fear not, as this checklist holds your answer. Our Social Media Influencer Outreach Checklist has been designed specifically to streamline the outreach process into a useful, reusable template, so it’s easier than ever for you to see a return on your investment.

Click here to access our Social Media Influencer Outreach Checklist!

Step 11: Repurpose your original content with our Ari Meisel’s How to Develop a Content Distribution Machine Guide From podcasts to blog posts, social videos to newsletters, the content you and your company create directly impacts your bottom-line.

However, creating content is time-consuming. It often takes weeks upon weeks to make valuable, interesting content for your audience.

Founder, coach, author, and podcast creator Ari Meisel has solved the issue of sluggish, lengthy content creation and content distribution with what he calls his content machine.

Use our Ari Meisel’s How to Develop a Content Distribution Machine Guide to create your content machine, and repurpose your original content into other blog-related mediums. This particular guide takes Facebook Live videos and transforms them into podcasts, blog posts, and social videos.

Click here to access our Ari Meisel’s How to Develop a Content Distribution Machine Guide!

Step 12: Update your old content with our Updating Old Blog Content for SEO (Checklist) We know creating content can be time-consuming, and while yes 60% of marketers are uploading at least one piece of fresh content every day, there are other ways to boost the output for your blog to stand out from the crowd.

One way is by repurposing your old blog content. Run our Updating Old Blog Content for SEO (Checklist) to stop your old pages from falling off the face of the Earth, by updating old posts with new, high-volume keywords.

Click here to access our Updating Old Blog Content for SEO (Checklist)!

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Additional checklists to help you create competitive content The checklists for bloggers presented above have been designed from best practice by us here at Process Street, to make your blogging duties that little bit easier.

But our helping hand doesn’t stop there.

Process Street is a Business Process Management solution you can use for any marketing process, whether that’s creating content for your blog, or producing videos, eBooks, email newsletters, social media posts, and more!

If you’re new to Process Street, then no sweat, watch our introductory video below which explains how to get started.

If you’re looking to refine and reshape your content marketing processes beyond blogging, then use the checklists below to create competitive content consistently.

All you have to do is sign up to Process Street – it’s free – click on the links, and get started.

On top of these checklists, why not read more of Process Street’s top marketing-related content, listed below: Congratulations!

Having read our post, you’re all set to implement the 5 content marketing best practices given using our top 12 checklists for bloggers. With this article as your resource, you’re well on your way to creating the best content on the web.

Here’s to creating quality content consistently. I’ll look forward to reading your blog posts! ł

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