The Blog Business Plan Template 📈

Brought to you by: Ryan Robinson

Real quick before filling out this template for your blog business…

If you haven’t read my full posts on both starting a blog and crafting an actionable blog business
plan, I highly recommend diving in and giving those a read before implementing this template.

This template is a guide (and framework) you can use to set strategic goals that’ll grow your
blog over the course of time, but without a full understanding of the nuances that go into
positioning your blog for success in the first place, you’re only doing part of the job.

The blog business plan template starts on page 2…

To make a copy of this document so you can save it to your own Google Drive and edit, go to:

File → Make a copy… and save a version of this document to your own Google Drive.

From there, you’ll be able to make private revisions, save and start implementing your plan 😊

You’ll also be able to download this template as a Microsoft Word document, PDF or otherwise.

Starting on the next page, is our fillable blog business plan template.

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plan/
 [Your Blog Name] Business Plan
Created on: _____________

1. Uncovering Your “Why”

Why do you want to start a blog in the first place? What’s your greatest purpose for blogging?
Who are you hoping to help with your blog content? How? Why?

These are the kinds of questions you’ll need to critically ask yourself in order to determine your
deepest purpose—which is the underlying fuel to drive your motivation and passion for blogging
over the weeks, months and years to come. Start by answering these questions for yourself:

● What’s your #1 reason for wanting to blog (as a business)?

● What’s the impact you envision creating for yourself as a result of this blog business?

● What impact do you hope to have on other people as a result of your blog? Bonus
points: Who are those people?

● What are 2-3 specific, measurable goals you have for your blog business? (Short-term
or long-term are fine, but stretch yourself to think about what you’d like to achieve within
the next year with your blog). Examples could include… earning $1,000 within your first
6 months, landing one consulting or freelance client within 3 months, selling 100 seats in
a new online course within 12 months, securing a book deal with a major publisher...

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💰💰💰 A quick pit-stop to talk about budgeting for your blog business… 💰💰💰

Because running a blog that’s designed to operate as a business (and eventually earn money)
does cost some money to get started and keep running, no matter how you slice it. Here’s my
detailed breakdown on how much it costs to blog.

You can expect that it’ll cost somewhere around $65.00/year (on the very low end) to operate
your blog from just a web hosting perspective. You can quickly add onto the expenses with
hardware (a computer upgrade), software tools or themes & plugins (to add more functionality to
your blog), advertising, outsourcing and so on…

My advice, if you can afford it, is to be extra safe and budget for spending at least a couple
hundred dollars on your blog per year. Again, it’s definitely possible to get by spending less—
but you may be doing so at the expense of slower growth, less features on your blog and a
more difficult experience monetizing your content. Nothing that can’t be overcome, but the
ability to spend a little more on your blog can greatly accelerate your results.

● 💰 How much can you afford to spend on your blog each month for the next year?

2. Positioning and Branding Your Blog

The next foundational step in creating your blog business plan, is to define exactly what your
blog (and business) will be—clarifying how your “what” connects to your “why” from step 1
above. The first task therefore, is to pick a clear niche for your blog.

● Are there any specific topic areas (aka a niche) that you’re compelled to blog about? If
so, why? If you’re having trouble here, think about some of your personal interests,
hobbies, skills or strengths, ways you enjoy spending your free time and even topics
people have often turned to you for advice on throughout your life. Read here for more.

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 ● What makes you uniquely qualified, or well-positioned to make a positive impact in the
niche you’re considering blogging about?

● What’s the market opportunity? What are a few tangible ways you can envision your
blog helping people within your chosen niche? Examples could include… better long-
form guides and tutorials, a video-first training approach, expert-led guidance...

● If you still need to name your blog, follow along with this guide of mine right here. If
helpful, you can use this space to jot down potential blog names (and available domains)
that’ll be a good fit for your niche.

Now, let’s talk about your audience…

In order to actually help a group of people (within your niche) through your blog content, you’ll
need to develop a deep understanding of who they are—both from a demographic and
psychographic standpoint. From there, your content can provide actionable solutions.

Demographics: The quantitative traits of your readers. Like age, gender, location, job title.
Psychographics: More unmeasurable traits like values, interests, attitude and belief systems.

● Which kinds of demographics and psychographics do your ideal readers identify with?
Describe who your blog audience will be and bonus points for thinking about the ways in
which you’re similar, somehow connected to that audience or a member of the
community yourself…

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3. Doing a Competitive Analysis of Other Blogs
One of the best ways to clarify how you can stand out from the crowd within your niche, is to
look at the biggest players who are already creating content in your space. This activity will not
only give you ideas for ways to rise above the competition, but will also show you clear content
formats & topics that do resonate with the audience you’ll want to soon reach.

● What do you feel are 5 to 10 of the most relevant, essential, important keyword phrases
within your blog’s niche? These are core topics you’ll likely want (need) to blog about in
order to attract your ideal audience & provide some value to them… Check out my
primer on keyword research if you need a refresher. Examples could be… how to
become a freelancer, copywriting tips, best hiking trails in California, lasagna recipes…

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

● When you Google search for a few of these crucial keyword phrases, are there any clear
competitor websites (or blogs) that rise to the surface in your searches? If a particular
site appears in multiple searches here, that’s a competitor you can definitely learn from.
Paste in the URLs of your top 5 perceived competitors here:

1.
2.
3.
4.

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 5.

● What can you learn from these pages that currently rank for the keyword phrases you’d
like to soon dominate? What do they appear to be doing well? Where is there room for
improvement? Things to look for could include… Are their articles long or short?
Recently updated or old and out of touch? How are they positioning their headlines and
structuring their content? Are there any keyword phrases you hadn’t thought about that
now appear to need coverage on your blog?

Bonus Questions to Ask Yourself When Evaluating Competitors:

● How do they appear to be monetizing their blog?

● Can you tell what they do in order to promote their content?
● How are they driving traffic to their blog?
● Which keywords are they going after (and which ones appear to be best monetized)?
● Is there a clear opportunity for creating better (more helpful) content than theirs? How?

4. Map Out Your Traffic Generation Strategy

At the end of the day, the absolute most important question to ask yourself when considering
how to best drive traffic to your blog… is where does my ideal audience already spend their
time online? That could be in many different places, including:

● Asking questions on major search engines like Google

● On Facebook (in groups, on pages, interacting with the content in news feeds)

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 ● On LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok or other social media
● Reading major business publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur and Inc Magazine
● Consuming smaller industry-level publications within your niche
● Listening to podcasts in your space
● On the blogs of influencers, brands and companies in your niche
● The list goes on and on…

Regardless of where your audience spends their time, you’ll also want to consider your own
limitations—time, financial constraints, skills, strengths and weaknesses.

My advice is to do your research (by asking real people within your niche) how they go about
finding and consuming content in your space… and then focus on just a couple of different
traffic generation efforts in order to maximize the return you’ll be able to get. Doing one or two
things very well, will pay off much more than doing a mediocre job at several different tactics.

● After speaking with a few people within your ideal audience, how do they find and
consume content within your niche?

● Looking back at your competitor sites, how do they appear to be getting the majority of
their traffic? It’s highly likely that organic search is a major traffic driver for them. More
on how to optimize your blog content for SEO-friendliness right here.

The #1 traffic driving strategy I find myself recommending to 99% of bloggers, is guest posting.

There are two main reasons why guest blogging is so effective—(1) it can drive an incremental
spike in traffic to your blog when the guest post goes live and most importantly (2) you’re getting
a high quality link or two back to your blog from a site that’s more established & authoritative.

Guest blogging is writing a blog post that you publish on another website (which is not your
own)—presumably one that has the right kind of audience you’re trying to tap into. It’s a win-win
for the blog or publication that accepts your (high quality) guest post, because they’re getting
free content that they want for their readers, and you’re getting the opportunity to tastefully link

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back to your own blog within the guest article… thus building your SEO profile and also creating
the opportunity to drive readers to your blog when they want more.

● Excluding your direct competitors from above, can you identify a few relevant and
somewhat related blogs, brands or industry publications you could pitch on a guest blog
post? Ideally, these are sites that already have a readership you’d like to tap into, but
aren’t direct enough competitors that they’d be hesitant to accept your article and link to
your blog…

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Aside from the long-term SEO play (eventually ranking high in key organic search rankings) and
guest blogging that you should highly consider, here are a few of my other most impactful traffic
generating strategies to keep top of mind:

● Optimizing for medium and long-tail keywords

● Publish quote roundups from industry experts
● Pitch yourself as a podcast guest (or start your own podcast)
● Content partnerships with other bloggers or brands in your space
● Landing a publication column (either in your niche or a large site)
● Create vertical-optimized images to share on Pinterest and build a following
● Starting to build your own email list (to promote your content immediately after publish)
● Publishing videos on YouTube and bringing viewers to your blog for more content
● Becoming active on other niche community sites within your space (if applicable)
● Co-hosting webinars or virtual summits with more established players in your niche
● Considering a thoughtful engagement strategy on social media channels like:
○ Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Quora, Reddit
● More can be found here and here

So, what’ll it be for your blog business over the coming months?

● Taking this full menu of traffic driving strategies into account, which 2-3 methods do you
want to focus your efforts on for the next few months? How are you going to get started
with implementing these? Take some time to thoughtfully plan this process out.

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5. Developing a Winning Work Process (and Habits)
By this stage in the planning process, you’ll have clarified why you’re blogging, what you’ll be
blogging about (at least as a starting point) and how you’re going to start reaching your target
audience—in order to bring them to your blog. Expect some of these things to go according to
plan, and for others to change, grow and evolve over the coming months as you learn, adapt
and continue experimenting with your blog.

Now is a great time to think more critically about what your work process should look like with
this business… because if you’re not putting in regular time & giving your blog business the
attention it deserves, you can’t expect it to grow into something meaningful. You should
consider key questions like how frequently you’ll be able to sit down and write for your blog, how
long it’ll take to publish an article, where you might be able to outsource for some help along the
way…

P.S. You can grab a copy of my editorial planning calendar template right here.

● Will you be doing all of the writing yourself for your blog? If not, can you afford to hire
writing help or will you be leaning on a friend/partner for assistance?

● Looking at your current commitments and schedule, can you identify a regular block of
time(s) throughout your week that you’ll be able to commit to writing for your blog? How
many hours per week will you be able to write for your blog? Keep in mind this may
require moving things around, sacrificing in some areas of your life, utilizing your early
mornings before work—or nights and weekends…

● Monday:
● Tuesday:
● Wednesday:
● Thursday:

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 ● Friday:
● Saturday:
● Sunday:

Example: Monday, Wednesday, Friday: 6:00am - 9:00am. Total = 9hrs/wk

● Taking this writing time into account, what’s a realistic goal for how often you can expect
to publish a new article on your blog?

● Is there anything you plan to outsource with your blog right now? If so, explain exactly
what that should be, what your monthly budget is and the benefit you’ll get…

6. Monetizing Your Content

Monetizing your blog content naturally comes last in the planning process, because without
putting in all of the work it takes to create impactful content and attract readers… you’ll never
even get a chance to profit from your blog.

In order to eventually make money from your blog, there needs to be a clear value trade.

This comes back to how effective you can be in helping the readers that discover your content.
Are you providing them with enough valuable help, information, instruction, advice, guidance to
justify asking them to take an action (like purchasing your book, training course, consulting
services, etc.) on your behalf? This is the pillar by which you need to measure the strength of
your content—and relationship with your readers.

● Considering the niche your blog is in, and the strengths you personally have… is there a
monetization channel you envision for your blog right off the bat? If so, explain…

It’s ok if you’re not yet sure about how to monetize your blog… this process is best done in
partnership with your readers. Once you have real people consuming your blog content, it’s your

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privilege to connect with them, learn from them, partner up on solving their biggest challenges
(with your content) and come up with win-win paid ways to further those relationships. Some of
the most tried and true monetization channels include things like:

● Sponsored Blog Content

● Affiliate Programs
● Blog Advertisements
● Selling Online Courses
● Physical Products
● Release a Software Tool
● Selling Your Own Services
● Writing (and Selling) eBooks
● Launching a Virtual Summit
● More Creative Business Partnerships
● Podcast Sponsorships
● Freelancing (Consulting)

I’ve done all of these things to monetize my blog content (in different ways). Much more on that
here. You’ll want to start experimenting with just one or two of these channels at first—likely
freelancing as it’s one of the fastest ways to start profiting from your blog, or promoting the right
affiliate programs of products/services your audience will find value in as one of the most
scalable channels that profits more as you bring in more traffic.

● If you’re not immediately sure of how to best (eventually) monetize your blog, what can
you learn from how your top competitors are already making money with their sites? Do
they sell online courses? Are they affiliates of particular products, tools or services? Can
they be hired as a consultant? Take note of any monetization ideas you can identify…

As you continue attracting readers to your blog, never lose sight of the greater purpose for why
your website exists… sure, part of you is in this business to earn a living and provide for
yourself & your family. But beyond just yourself, you’re creating content that’s designed to help
people overcome a particular set of challenges.

If you keep an open mind and cultivate a willingness to experiment with your audience, then
finding win-win ways to monetize your blog will come very naturally as time moves forward.

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Now, it’s time to get to work 🙂

Thanks again for downloading this template!

I’m always happy to help with free tips and advice. Just shoot me an email: ryan@ryrob.com

And remember, in my full breakdown about blog business planning, I dive deep into my
personal process for strategically bringing readers to my blog, how I work to build relationships
with you—and eventually uncover smart ways to monetize that everyone benefits from (like my
flagship course, Built to Blog).

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