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Are you looking to start a blog business and make your first $100k in 2024? If so, then developing a blog business plan is essential.
A blog business plan can help you create realistic goals and provide the structure needed to reach them. It will also allow you to identify potential challenges and develop strategies for overcoming them.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to create an effective blog business plan that will put you on track toward achieving the financial success of your dreams.
We’ll cover topics such as setting goals and objectives, creating content plans, monetizing strategies, budgeting techniques, marketing tactics, and more!
So if you’re ready to get started on your blog business journey – read on! Before we get started, let’s go over the definition of a blog business plan.
What is a Blog Business Plan?
A blog business plan is a document that outlines your blog’s objectives and overall strategy for launch, growth, and success.
It should include a comprehensive analysis of your blog’s current standing, a detailed marketing plan, and a budget outlining the costs associated with running the blog.
The business plan should outline your overall vision for the blog in terms of its potential direction and growth over time. You won’t always know this upfront, but it can help a lot to consider the potential for multiple directions or paths to growth.
You should create realistic goals for yourself that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive. You can read more about creating SMART goals here.
When creating your blog business plan, you should consider several factors such as what services or products will you be offering, who your audience is, and what type of content you need to create.
We will dive into these factors in more detail throughout this article.
When it comes to monetization, scaling, and growth, it’s important to explore strategies that fit best with your blog’s purpose.
Some factors to consider here include pricing strategies, potential revenue streams, and ways in which to maximize profits.
Blog Business Plan Executive Summary
An executive summary is a key component of any blog business plan.
Your executive summary is an overview of the blog and its goals, objectives, strategies, and financial projections.
It should be concise yet comprehensive enough to give a clear picture of what your blog business plan entails.
Write Your Executive Summary
Use the headings and descriptions below to create your own executive summary for your blog business plan.
I recommend revisiting this summary after you’ve made it through the rest of this article and have a better idea of your blog overview.
We will cover each of these topics in more depth later on in the article when you are creating your detailed business plan for your blog.
Goals and Objectives
When it comes to deciding on the goals and objectives for your blog, it is important to create realistic and achievable targets.
What do you hope to achieve with this blog?
Create a few simple goals to start with and then make sure to revisit this step to turn them into SMART goals after you have outlined more of your blog business plan and have a better idea of what direction you plan to go in.
You can also create a mission statement for your blog if you’d like.
Blog Topic and Niche
Decide on a blog topic, or blog niche, for your blog. Ideally, you should have some experience in this area or a desire to learn a great deal more.
Your blog niche should also be specific and narrow enough that you can identify a target market and create content specifically for those people.
Competition
Identify some of your biggest competitors and the most successful blogs in your niche so that you can do a competitive analysis on these blogs.
Research the competition in your blog niche by looking at how other successful bloggers are targeting their audience.
Try to identify trends so that you can use them in your own blog business plan and ensure that your blog appeals to potential readers as well as stands out from the crowd.
Target Market
Who would you like to reach with your audience? Who do you want your ideal audience to be?
Make sure to be specific when you outline exactly who you are trying to reach, including their age, gender, lifestyle, preferred method to consume information, other typical habits, and more.
This will also go hand-in-hand with the type of content that you want to create.
Content Plan
What kind of content will you create? This should be a marriage of the kind of content you desire to create with the kind of content that your ideal audience likes to consume.
If you don’t want to create videos, you don’t have to. But if your audience prefers video content and it would help you sell products, you may have to make some concessions.
Decide on 1-2 different types of content that you want to create and which platforms you want to share them on.
Products and Services
What monetization methods will you use? Outline the different types of products or services that you plan to sell on your blog.
Consider starting out with ads or affiliate marketing if you need some time to gather data and feedback from your audience before creating your own products.
Create a solid monetization strategy and plan for how you will achieve it.
Marketing and Sales
Great products need a great marketing strategy or they are dead in the water, no matter how great they are.
Decide what kind of sales-centered content you can create to help you sell your products or services.
Consider what strategies you can implement to continue to grow and scale your monetization efforts.
Finances
This may or may not be a consideration for you, but it’s important to have an idea of how much starting an online business will cost you.
As I explain in more depth in the section on building your foundation and starting your blog, you can start a blog business very affordably if you take the right steps.
Create an effective budget that outlines all expenses associated with running the blog including hosting fees, content creation costs, marketing costs, and more.
Create a start-up budget and a monthly budget for your blog business to set the right expectations for at least the first year of operations.
Create Your Blog Business Plan
Throughout the rest of this article, we will take a deeper dive into the high-level topics we mentioned in the executive summary.
Ideally, you should create this summary after reading the entirety of this article.
Keep it open and use it as a business plan template to create your own!
1. Set Business Goals and Objectives
Let’s set some overall goals and objectives for your blog business plan. What do you hope to achieve with this blog?
Start by asking yourself what you hope to achieve with your blog — whether it’s increasing traffic, building a following, or generating profits.
Once you have identified your blog’s key goals, create SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely) objectives that will help you reach those goals.
Breaking down blog objectives into smaller steps will make them more manageable and easier to track progress.
For example, if your blog’s key goal is increasing traffic, an objective could be creating two blog posts per week for the next six months.
Or if the goal is generating profits from your blog, an objective could be launching an e-commerce store in six months with 20 products.
When writing a blogging business plan, make sure that the objectives are attainable in a reasonable timeframe and that they accurately reflect the blog’s purpose.
It is also important to consider ROI – or return on investment – when setting blog business objectives so that you are able to measure success.
Also, consider how you will achieve these goals.
Breaking down blog objectives into milestone tasks can help ensure that you stay on track and reach them in a timely manner. Milestones should include activities such as market research for driving traffic and developing content plans for blog posts.
2. Ideas and Niche Exploration
Let’s get to the fun part! It’s time to come up with potential blog topics and content ideas for your blog.
Brainstorm Blog Topics
What do you want your blog to be about? What topics of content do you want to share?
When it comes to blog ideas, it is important to think outside the box a bit and get a little creative, if you can.
Start by thinking of topics that are related to your blog’s purpose or niche and then brainstorm ways to make the topic more interesting and relevant.
Asking yourself questions such as:
- What do I know?
- What do I have personal or professional experience in?
- What problems could I solve?
- What information would be useful for my readers?
- What is trending right now?
These questions can help guide your blog ideas in the right direction.
Narrow Down Your Niche
Choosing a blog niche is an important part of creating a blog business plan because it could help determine your overall happiness and satisfaction with your blog as well as how successful your blog will become.
It’s important to choose a niche that you are passionate about and knowledgeable in so that you can provide helpful content for your audience
It should also be specific enough that there are not a lot of other blogs out there talking about the exact same thing.
Narrowing down your niche and blog topic can help make sure that your blog stands out from the competition and attracts the right audience.
Now, there will likely already be hundreds or thousands of blogs blogging on the same topics and this shouldn’t necessarily deter you.
But consider how you can narrow in on your target audience.
For example, “Weight Loss” and even “Weight Loss for Women” is too broad of a blog topic.
Here are a few better blog topics:
- Weight Loss for Men with a Keto Diet
- Vegan and Sustainable Dieting for Weight Loss and the Environment
- Fast Weight Loss for Women Over 200 Lbs
These are all more specific and speak to a more targeted audience.
Potential for Monetization
You should also consider how much potential there is for monetizing the blog within a certain niche.
Some blog niches are also known to make more money than others, so you may want to take that into consideration as well.
You won’t always know this information when you’re just starting out, but that’s okay.
You can do research on keywords related to your blog topic so you can gain insight into what people are searching for online and what drives website traffic.
Also, consider exploring multiple niches if you want to diversify your blog’s content offering.
You can also look into potential collaborations with other bloggers or influencers in order to reach new audiences.
Consider how you might make money from this topic, and then you can explore the potential in your competitive analysis.
3. Build Your Blog Foundation
One of the most important parts of your business plan is to outline how you will start your blog.
Make sure to build your blog on a solid foundation, and that always starts with your domain name and hosting company.
Domain Name and Hosting Company
Truthfully, your blog name doesn’t matter quite as much as you think it does and shouldn’t be something you dwell on for too long.
A lot of popular domain names are already taken, so you might have to get a little creative here.
My best advice is to come up with a name that is:
- easy to spell,
- easy to remember,
- and easy to pronounce.
It also helps to consider keeping it flexible in case you decide to change your blog’s direction at some point in the future.
Once you come up with a domain name, it’s time to choose a blogging platform and hosting company.
WordPress is the most widely used platform by successful bloggers and the only one that we recommend. It’s what this blog uses.
For blog hosting, we use and recommend Bluehost because it’s one of the most affordable hosting companies for beginners and has great customer service.
You can use our link to get a discount and get a hosting plan for as little as $2.75/month.
Blog Setup and Design
If you want some help setting up your blog quickly, easily, and as affordably as possible, check out our full guide on how to start a successful blog.
In that guide, we outline all of the steps on how to set up your domain name, hosting, website theme, and more.
When it comes to what theme you want to use, I recommend starting out with an affordable, beginner-friendly theme rather than getting caught up too much in what your competitors are using.
Good web design takes time, patience, and some skills and is something you’ll want to work on over time as you define your blog more and start creating content.
That being said, the competitive analysis is a great place to start with getting inspiration on the overall theme and design of your blog.
4. Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis is an essential part of blog business planning that is often overlooked or even skipped entirely.
Competitive analysis involves researching and analyzing what your competitors are doing in order to gain insight into how you can be successful and stand out from the competition.
Analyzing what’s working for other blogs in your niche can also give you inspiration and ideas on potential blog topics and other strategies.
If you notice that certain blog posts receive more engagement than others on competitor’s blogs, this could be something worth exploring on your blog too.
It could also be helpful to analyze which keywords they use so that you can incorporate them into your own content strategy.
Identifying Your Competitors
When conducting a competitive analysis for your blog business plan, it’s important to take a close look at both direct and indirect competitors.
Direct competitors are those that blog about the exact same topics as you, while indirect competitors are those who blog about related topics.
Both types of competition can offer valuable insights when it comes to developing a strategy for success.
Metrics to Measure
Some things to analyze include blog content, audience engagement, website design, keywords used, and other factors that can help you determine the best direction for your blog.
More specifically, you should analyze metrics such as blog post frequency, length, engagement, and the span of topics that they cover.
Look and see how they drive their traffic, whether that’s through social media, Google, or other platforms.
Here are a few questions to consider in your analysis:
- What are their traffic sources?
- How much do they engage with their audience?
- How are they driving their sales?
- What are they selling?
- Are there other ways that they are monetizing their content?
- Do they have an email list and a lead magnet?
This will give you an overall picture of how other successful blogs are structured, attracting customers, and driving sales.
Once you have conducted a competitive analysis for your blog business plan, you should have some better insight into what strategies might work best in your niche or for your blog.
From there, consider how you can implement some of these strategies but in your own way that might set you apart from the competition. How can you do it better?
5. Target Audience and Community
When deciding on your blog’s target audience, it’s important to take into account several factors.
Blog Content
First, consider the type of blog you’re creating and what topics you’ll be covering.
Knowing who you are creating content for will help you determine the type of content that will appeal to them.
Honestly, your content strategy and target audience should both be considered together to make sure these two align.
You can decide what kind of content you want to create and then decide on which target audience this content would appeal to most OR you can decide what audience you most want to reach and then decide on what type of content would appeal most to them.
Just remember that different demographics of people like and respond differently to different types of content.
Audience Demographic
Now, let’s think about your blog’s demographic.
Demographic factors like age range, gender, location, interests, occupation, and lifestyle are all crucial components in helping you identify your blog’s target audience.
Think not just about who you could reach but about who you truly want to reach.
Understanding who your ideal reader or customer is will enable you to create content that resonates with them and is tailored specifically to their needs and interests.
For example, if you’re sharing weight loss advice with someone, the advice will have to look very different for an older woman compared to a younger man, because their interests and lifestyle will vary greatly.
These two types of people also spend time on very different platforms. An older woman likely spends more time on Facebook and Google and a younger man might spend more time on TikTok or YouTube.
This brings us full circle back to blog content again, which we’ll dive deeper into in the next section.
Community
Before we move on to blog content, let’s first talk about community.
It’s important in the blogging world to be able to build a community around your blog or website.
When you build relationships with your audience, they begin to trust you and are more likely to purchase from you and continue to support your success.
You can build a community around your blog in a variety of ways, including through Facebook Groups or other community platforms.
You can also build community simply by being engaged with your audience on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or through an email list.
When you engage with your audience through your content, comments, or other communications, you make them feel valued and more connected.
All of these things lead to additional trust built and the potential for more sales down the road.
6. Content Plan
When deciding on the different types of content you can create for a blog, it’s important to think about a couple of things.
The most important thing is to identify what type of content will be most engaging and beneficial for your blog’s target audience.
Content should be tailored to match your blog’s purpose, whether it be providing informative blog posts or inspiring stories.
But the second most important thing to identify is what type of content YOU want to create.
This is important because if you don’t enjoy the content you are creating (or worse, if you hate it), you likely won’t give it the time and dedication that it needs to be successful.
You don’t have to love every part of the process, but if you absolutely hate being on camera, starting a YouTube channel may not be for you.
Type of Content
As I’m sure you are aware, there are a lot of different types of content on the internet these days.
Traditionally, blog posts have been associated with blogs as the main source of traffic.
While that is still true and Google SEO (search engine optimization) remains one of the best sources of traffic for bloggers, there are also a lot of other types of content that you can create for or alongside your blog.
I like to think of the blog as the “home” for your business and your blog posts, but you can repurpose your blog posts and content for other platforms to reach wider audiences.
TikTok has become a great source of revenue for many bloggers and influencers, as well as Instagram, and YouTube.
If creating videos isn’t your thing, you can always consider Pinterest or focus on Google SEO.
Now, keep in mind that different types of content are popular or successful on different platforms.
What works on TikTok will likely have different results on Pinterest or may have to be changed considerably.
Each platform typically has its own way of sharing content and engaging with followers, although there is some overlap on some platforms.
Structure of Content
What platform you decide to use will also somewhat dictate the structure of your content.
Informative blog posts are great for helping readers learn more about a certain topic and should include plenty of facts and data, backed up by reliable sources, to ensure accuracy and authority.
This type of content is ideal for Pinterest marketing or a Google SEO strategy.
You can also share this type of educational content on a platform like YouTube, but it’s significantly harder to convey longer messages on platforms like Instagram and YouTube.
Inspirational stories are another type of content that can also be very powerful to help you build trust and connection with your audience.
This type of content should focus on real experiences or stories that illustrate how you or someone was able to accomplish something or overcome challenges.
This type of content is relatable and is a great way for you to get personal with your audience. It’s also great for story-centric platforms like Instagram.
Videos are another popular form of content for blogs because they give you the chance to show off your personality and engage viewers on a deeper level than text-based content.
They make a great supplemental source of traffic alongside blog posts and there are a variety of ways to do this, including platforms like Twitch or YouTube Live, which you may have not used or considered before.
Lastly, podcasts can also be an easy way to repurpose content with an added level of personalization beyond text.
They’re easier to create than videos and your listeners can tune in without looking at their computers.
7. Product or Service Offering
Creating a product or service offering and outlining your monetization strategies is a key part of your blog business plan.
There are a lot of monetization methods for blogs, and it’s important to take the time to research potential ideas that align with your blog’s purpose, values, and target market.
Start by brainstorming ideas for products and services that would fit with the blog topics you cover.
Types of Products, Services, and Revenue Streams
The most successful blog businesses generally sell their own products and services, whether that be digital products like online courses or e-commerce stores that are targeted to their blog’s audience and niche.
Other examples of popular products and services include selling eBooks and other downloadables, online coaching, or even other people’s products and services.
This is called affiliate marketing, and it’s a very popular way that many blogs start earning their first bit of income, before selling their own products.
Another way that many bloggers start out monetizing their content is by partnering with ad networks to place ads in their content.
Mediavine is probably the most popular amongst bloggers but requires a lot of traffic to get started. If you have less than 50,000 website views per month, Ezoic is a better option to start with.
You can also create paid communities and memberships for a variety of different platforms.
Product or Service Viability
Look for gaps in the market related to your blog topic.
Ask yourself these questions to get ideas and then validate those ideas:
- Is there a need for this type of product or service?
- Who is my target customer?
- Are there any existing solutions similar to what I am offering?
By thoroughly researching these questions before launching a product or service offering, you can ensure that your business plan is well thought out and able to generate more sales.
Pricing Strategy
Finally, come up with a pricing strategy for your products and services that reflects their value and quality while still being attractive to customers.
Consider adding multiple tiers of pricing options so customers can choose the level of value they need from your offerings.
One of the best ways to get ideas of market prices for your products or services is to do research and see what other people are selling for similar products.
Stay competitive with your pricing or consider even going a little lower than you’d like to start off with if you need some time to gain momentum, customers, and positive reviews and testimonials.
But even the best products won’t sell with a poor marketing strategy.
8. Marketing and Sales (Traffic)
An effective marketing and sales strategy is absolutely crucial to your blog business plan to make sure that you give your monetization strategy its best chance at success.
Marketing your content and products isn’t always easy and it’s important to experiment with different strategies when targeting your audience and learning how to best serve their needs.
Content Marketing Strategy
One of the best ways to market your products and services is to create sales-centered content around the topics that your products or services cover.
For example, if you sell a course on dieting relating to being vegan and environmentally conscious, you should create a lot of content on these topics and related topics.
This content helps to bring in a very targeted audience of people who will have a higher interest in what you’re selling.
Consider writing content, creating videos, or creating content for whatever platforms you are marketing your content on.
Share more about your product and how it can help the end user, as well as clear call-to-actions in your content with links on where to find out more or purchase.
Sales Marketing Strategy
Consider what platform you’re selling products on — here is a list of platforms for online courses.
Make sure to design your sales pages in a way that converts customers and utilize promotion strategies like discounts, sales, and coupon codes when you can.
One of the best ways that bloggers sell their own products is through email marketing: creating an email funnel to sell their products.
You can send a few emails with the sales-centered content that we just discussed and follow it up with a limited-time sale on your product.
Limited-time offerings create scarcity and a reason for people to buy now and buy from you.
You can also consider using paid ads to increase traffic to your products or email opt-ins (that sell your products), but this is definitely a more lucrative and advanced step because ads are very competitive and usually pretty expensive.
Lastly, consider using surveys to get feedback from your audience about what they would like to see from your blog and then use those insights in order to shape future content plans, marketing strategies, and product ideas.
Next Steps: Grow and Scale
What’s great about creating a business plan for your blog is that you can outline the path and plan to success.
Sometimes it doesn’t always work out according to plan, but it will keep you from getting stuck in the water and unsure of what the next steps are.
This is why it’s important to continue to review and revise your blog business plan as your blog grows.
There will undoubtedly be times when you have to pivot (sometimes hard). We’ve been there multiple times over the years.
We’ve had waves of Pinterest traffic, waves of paid ads, waves of YouTube traffic, and each time, we’ve ridden the wave until it crashes.
Then, we get up, and we find the next wave.
Being flexible and aware enough to pivot when necessary and create new strategies is the most important factor to maintaining your success and creating a sustainable business.
Some of our favorite strategies for growing and scaling include the following:
Build a Team and Outsource Work
You may reach a point in which you can no longer do everything on your own. That’s totally understandable and completely expected.
Most bloggers start out by hiring a virtual assistant, freelance writer, or social media manager to help with the workload.
This will help you free up your time from the menial-but-still-important tasks and allow you to focus on the higher-level stuff like marketing and growth.
Paid Ads
I already briefly mentioned it before but ads can be a really great way to scale what you’re doing.
If you already have a system in place that drives traffic to your blog and successfully sells a product, turning on paid ads can simply scale up a system that already works.
It can be time-consuming and expensive, but it can also be totally worth it.
Your ads can also be a lot more effective when paired with a good email marketing strategy.
Consider this if you have a budget for it and you think it will work in your niche and with your target audience.
Building Partnerships
Lastly, one of our other favorite ways to scale our business and income is to form partnerships with other successful bloggers and brands in our niche.
We have built great relationships and partnerships with important players in the blogging industry, including Bluehost, Teachable, and ConvertKit.
These are all tools that we already love and use in our business and we’ve partnered with them to offer joint webinars and discounts to our audience.
We’ve been featured on podcasts by tons of other bloggers and have also built out our own affiliate marketing program for our blogging courses.
The possibilities are endless, so consider how you might want to grow and scale your blogging business and include this in your business plan.
Blog Business Plan Summary
Creating a blog business plan can be an overwhelming process but it is necessary for achieving success.
Remember that you can also do this in your own way. We recommend using this guide as a business plan template that ou can customize, but also don’t feel that much can really be omitted.
But if you don’t think that identifying your company’s mission statement is super important right now, then you do you.
We didn’t personally outline that before beginning and it’s very subject to change in the first few months anyway.
But having a blog business plan does help you keep focused on reaching your goals while providing clarity on how to reach them.
It also helps motivate you by giving you something concrete to work towards each day.
Having a clear understanding of your blog’s content direction can also help you make informed decisions related to resource allocation, marketing, and more.
We hope that you found this blog business plan helpful. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments!