How to Create a Business Plan for your Blog + 20 Page Template!
Are you ready to take your blog to the next level? If so, this blog post is for you!
Whether you are a new blogger or a seasoned blogger, there comes a time in your blogging journey when you might decide it’s time to get serious about blogging. Maybe you are hoping to become a full-time blogger or maybe you just want to earn some spending money…either way you want to start treating your blog as a business. Congrats. I’m proud of you!
Need a business plan for your blog? Here's a 20 pg template to get you started! http://www.livingfornaptime.com/freebies/blog-business-plan-template/ Click To Tweet
In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through setting up a business plan for your blog. I’ve even enclosed a 20 page Blogging Business Plan for you to use. This business plan is broken up into four parts: Goals & Strengths, Niche, Competitive Research & a Plan for Growth.
Buy the Ultimate Blogging Business Plan
Blogging Goals & Personal Strengths
The first thing you are going to do is write down your goals and motivations for your blog. Write down your “WHY” (the reasons you started blogging), along with the goals you would like to achieve with your blog. Those goals can be anything you’d like. You can use that space to write down monetization, traffic or philanthropic goals. Writing down your goals is helpful, but it allows you to visualize what you are working towards.
Secondly, you’ll want to document where you currently are with your traffic & monetization efforts. Even if you are brand new it’s a good idea to fill this part out as it provides you with some baseline statistics that you can look back on in weeks, months and years to come.
Next, you should perform a personal strengths audit and write down the talents and skills that you possess that will be an asset to your blogging journey. You’ll also want to make note of the areas in which you may need some help. Having a list of strengths and weaknesses will allow you to know where to put your focus on in terms of learning new skills.
What Makes you So Different?
The second part of the business plan will help you to narrow down your niche. If you intend to build a profitable blog, it’s essential to choose a niche and find ways to create a name for yourself and find ways to monetize that niche. In this business plan template, we’ll take a look at your interests and passions, by asking some basic questions. Once you have a general niche chosen, you’ll create an ideal reader persona for your blog. This is a fun exercise in which you get to assign your ideal reader with a name and bio.
Lastly, in this section, we’ll explore ways to monetize your exact niche. You’ll determine which services, products and different revenue streams fit with your niche and then use those to monetize your blog.
A Little Competitive Research Never Hurt Nobody!
Next up, you’ll want to do a little competitive research. Now I’m going to warn you…spying on your competitors can either motivate or depress you. Which is why I want you to be especially perceptive with your feelings when you go through this exercise. Does seeing your competitors successes excite & motivate you OR does it make you feel sad about your own journey? If you are motivated by their success..then GREAT! However, if you feel pangs of jealousy, then I want you to complete the competitor research and NEVER look back. After this exercise, it will be better that you never go back and check to see what your competitors are doing because jealousy is a bitch! Put your head down and focus on your OWN blogging journey.
Ok, now that we got some touchy, feel stuff out of the way, the things that you are going to want to look for in terms of your competitors are: what they are doing to monetize their site, what social networks they are on, as well as what does their content & content schedule look like? I then want you to write down what you will do to be better than those competitors and what you offer to your readers that will make you stand out.
Plan for Growth
In the last section, you’ll have an opportunity to strategize your blog’s growth. You’ll write out a plan for how you are going to use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest & Instagram to grow your profitable blog. Because your strategy will need to be different for each social network, I’ve included a separate worksheet for each network for you to fill out.
You’ll also devise a plan to increase email subscribers for your blog. You will determine what it is you want to be sending your subscribers as well as how often you will email them.
Lastly, I’ve included a monthly revenue & traffic tracker that you can fill out at the end of the month to keep track of how much revenue and page views your blog is getting. It’s a great way to monitor the growth of your blog and it should also provide you with motivation to keep going.
Buy the Ultimate Blogging Business Plan
Getting organized and establishing your blog business plan is the first step in creating a profitable blog. I’m so happy that you have downloaded the template and can’t wait to see how successful you become. If you found this business plan helpful, please don’t keep it a secret! Share it with a friend!
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What a great resource, thanks so much for sharing!
Of course! Love to share freebies with my readers 🙂
I’m so excited to implement this! Thanks for sharing.
Great info! Thanks for sharing!
Sharing is caring 😉
Awesome, you always give the best advice so I am going to give this a try!
That is very sweet of you…thank you! And YES, you’ve got to get that business plan girl 😉
This is just what I needed! Thank you so much for sharing!
Xo, Ashley
Of course! Happy to help 🙂
I cannot wait to complete this! Thank you so much chrystie! You’re the bomb.com!
No problem Tessa! Good luck 🙂
Totally printing this out and adding it to the back of my Pageviews to Paycheck binder! Thanks so much for your wealth of knowledge!
Haha! Awesome. I love that you have a binder for it 🙂
I’m loving your blog and blogger group! It is really helping me grow as a blogger. Thank you for sharing your business plan template. I am going to sign up for the template. I finally narrowed down my niche for my blog, so I am ready to take the next step in the plan!!
Awesome! Happy to hear that you found your niche! 🙂
You are nothing short of amazing. I could read your posts all day long.
Awww! Thank you that means a lot 🙂
Thank you so much for this! I printed it off and plan to use it. I really appreciate all you do and your Facebook group!!! You are awesome:)
And I appreciate you being a part of that group 🙂
I love this Chrystie. Thanks for such a fab resource again!
This is EXACTLY what I needed - perfect timing! Thanks so much for sharing!
Thank you for creating this!! As a new blogger this will help me immensely. BTW - love that we are both BB Fanatics. Your FB group rocks!
This is great I signed up. I can’t wait to get the download! Thanks Chrystie 🙂
xo, Nicole
I definitely need this - thanks for the great resource!
Thank you!
Especially the example is helpful to get a better idea. However, I am wondering why you would need a business plan at all? If you are not seeking for investment, what could be the use in your eyes.
Cheers! Marc
For creating a business plan for your blog the very important thing you will be doing is to know your goals and passion for your blog and most important is to narrow down your position.
I totally agree with the point regarding blogging goals and we have to work on business plan so we can get subscribers. Secondly we need to invest little bit to get started. Well written article thanks.