A blog business plan isn’t just a step in the right direction to monetize your blog.

It is making your blog a priority enough to want to treat it like it’s a business.

It is motivation to keep making the blog better. It’s a good idea to create a business plan for your blog, especially since working online is more common. That’s one good thing about the pandemic.

Even if you’re not a full-time blogger at the moment, creating a blog business plan is creating a timeline for you to become a full-time blogger.

And now, I’m going to guide you on how to create your plan today!

A Blog Business Plan Needs an Executive Summary

Your executive summary will be the basics of your blog business plan.

This should include a mission statement. What is the mission of your blog? Every blog that aims to be a business or a brand should have a mission. You should also state the goals of your blog, which should reflect the mission of your brand or business.

Your executive summary should also state the history of your blog and its current leadership. This might just be you, and the history might not even be worth putting down. This is geared more towards more prominent blogs with multiple contributors and a long history.

Include a summary of your financial projections. This should align with any goals that you create for the financial side of your blog.

Finally, include a competitive advantage statement which means the types of things that makes your blog better than your competition.

Create a Market Overview for Your Plan

Your business plan should include a market overview.

The market overview shows a detailed and thorough review of the market or niche in which your blog currently resides. This should be heavily researched before it is included in the plan. It is suitable for you to know a market you want to do business in.

Include factors such as the size of the market. You can’t include every blog in your niche significantly if it is slightly oversaturated. But you can at least have the size of the top blogs in the niche.

List any trends or consumer behaviors in the industry in which your blog serves. You should also identify the gaps in the market or industry and how you intend to fill those gaps with your blog.

Conduct a SWOT Analysis of Your Blog

Conduct a SWOT analysis of your blog to determine your position within the competition of your niche market.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

List the strengths of your blog or what you do well at.

Then list the weaknesses on your blog business plan to show what you’re not so good at.

Opportunities are things you could do to have a competitive advantage or get better at something with your blog.

And finally, show what threatens your blog. This might be a trend you’re not quite grasping yet or competition in your niche.

List Your Audience on Your Blog Business Plan

Every blogger trying to create a business or a brand should have a target audience.

You need to know who you intend your content for. There is no such thing as an “everyone audience,”, especially with niche-specific blogs. If you attempt to target “everyone,” it will be too broad, and you will not see the results you likely hope to see.

Define who you want to read your blog. Define who you want to purchase your products or services. Know precisely the group of people you are creating content for.

You should know your audience’s demographic information as well. It also helps understand what triggers your audience to make decisions on your blog, such as commenting, sharing content, and making a purchase.

Create a Marketing Strategy for Your Plan

You should include a marketing strategy in your blog business plan.

It would be best if you had a marketing strategy whether you create a business plan for your blog. Because that strategy is how you get readers onto your content, right?

Your strategy should determine your exact niche and the brand position of your blog.

You should include target goals for marketing and create a milestone prediction of when you want to see the target goals accomplished. It would be best to list what you will be doing to ensure those goals are achieved by the date you have set for them.

Usually, most marketing plans are 3 or 5 years.

It would be best to list the channels and distribution of how you will market your blog.

And lastly, state how you will track the metrics which show you if your marketing efforts are successful or a failure. This could be from goals met or even a third-party source such as Google Analytics.

Financial Strategy is the Next Step of Your Plan

Your business plan should include a financial strategy.

Your financial strategy should cover two sections – profit and expense. You need to state how you will make money with your blog and how you will lose money with your blog.

For making money, you’d list your products and services or methods in which you plan to earn a profit. This might be something like advertisements, consulting, eBooks, etc.

For expense, this would be what you are constantly paying for. Things like domain and hosting costs or advertising costs could be applied to your expenses.

In the end, your financial strategy should state how you will earn a profit to be used to pay for expenses and your paycheck.

Statements usually included in this section of the blog business plan are Profit/Loss Statements, Cash Flow Statements, and Balance Sheets. These will also help ensure you pay required business taxes and not spend more than you earn.

Your Business Plan Could Include a Projection Strategy!

By Projection Strategy, I mean what you want your blog to look like when you update your business plan.

A good blog business plan should be for three to five years. After the years are up, you should update the plan or even create an entirely new plan if it is required. In most cases, you’ll need to update your plan.

But for this strategy, you can at least set the blog’s objectives in alignment with your goals and the mission of your blog as a whole.

And that’s pretty much all to it – do the things above and notice more effort and motivation to focus the blog on becoming a business. If you need further help turning your blog into a business, I offer Coaching Services backed by my 20+ years of blogging, and I am also an MBA graduate. I’d love to help you if you need additional support with your blog business plan efforts.

About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers that follow this blog. Shawn also offers a variety of services for extra help in the area of content creation, blogging, forums, and digital marketing.