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If you’re a solo webmaster running a number of websites or blogs, you will need a content strategy. Here are a few things you will need to figure out:

1. How often to post. Is it a news type blog? If so, you may need to post multiple times per day to keep up with news items as they crop up. Keeping a blog fresh is extremely important if you want to maintain your readership and also for SEO purposes. The search engine spiders tend to love blogs that are regularly updated.

2. What to post. Here’s where private label content can really come in handy. Use the private label content as a starting point. Add to it and make it something that your readers will want to read. Keep it fresh and relevant.

Unless, you have a personal blog, as far as you can, keep your content related to the main theme of your blog. Make sure that you set appropriate categories for your posts. This helps your readers find

3. Automated posting. In WordPress, you can set a publishing schedule by uploading a number of articles and changing the post timestamp so that the article is posted at the time you want. Obviously, this works only for evergreen articles that are not time sensitive. A good idea for how to use this strategy is if you’re going to post a series of articles in parts. Sometimes if you have a lot to say, it is better to break it down into smaller multi-part posts. This also keeps readers coming back for more.

That’s the strategy of multipart TV shows where they have a cliffhanger (to be continued…) and you’ll have to tune in the next time to catch the other part of the show.

4. Store up ideas for future posts. You can do this by composing posts and saving them as drafts. This way, you can go back later and work on the post some more. If you’re a person who likes to write in spurts, this is a good way to do it. Sometimes I want to do more research on a topic before I publish a complete post, so I’ll leave it as a draft that I can polish up later.

5. Collaborating with guest bloggers. This is something that I’ve seen many bloggers do. I plan to invite some guest bloggers to blog here from time to time as well but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Normally, when the blog owner is gone on vacation, they need someone to fill in so that they can keep the blog updated. That’s where the guest blogger comes in. Where to look for guest bloggers? That’s where networking with other bloggers in your niche comes in handy.

Measuring your progress

Once you develop your content strategy, stick to it for a few months and actively measure your success. How do you do that? You can set the yardsticks by which you will measure your progress.

For example, are you increasing your blog readership?

Possible yardstick: RSS subscribers, email subscribers, Google analytics stats.

Are you increasing your blog stickiness?

Possible yardstick: Repeat commenters. Quality of comments.

Is your blog popularity increasing?

Possible yardstick: Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking, number of times bookmarked.

I’m sure you can sit down and write down more goals for your blog and how you are going to measure them. That’s the beauty of the internet, i.e. everything you do is pretty much measureable.

What next?

If you keep up with your strategy for some time, you can then measure if you’re making progress based on the measurement criteria that you set. If you’re not reaching your goals, it’s time to review your strategy and make some changes.

Don’t give up!

Image credit: Renata Baião (through Flickr)

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