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From the Wikipedia entry on Strategy

A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, as differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand.

I’m writing this post not because I’m an expert at blogging strategy, but because that’s what I’m exploring, myself, these days. My focus has always been more on the technical aspects of blogging. That’s the fun part, for me.

However, it’s about time I did some thinking about my blogging strategy. And you can’t have a strategy without a goal.

We’re all blogging for a reason. For most business blogs, the purpose is marketing for our business or ourselves. This is a good reason for having a blog; there’s nothing wrong with marketing. But I think you need to go further than that — you need to ask yourself: “What is it I want people to do as a result of reading or visiting my blog?”

That’s the real goal of the blog, and the goal is what drives the strategy.

I’ve been re-reading Seth Godin’s free ebook “Knock Knock,” which he published a while back. Sometimes these things have to be read, allowed to percolate in the brain for a while, and then re-read. Knock Knock is actually not about blogs, but about web site strategy. But since blogs are a type of web site, it’s a good read for anyone using blogs to market their products, services, or ideas.

“Knock, knock” is what people are doing when they come to your blog — knocking on your door. What you need to know is, how will you answer that door? On page 35, Godin says:

Here are the three questions you must answer about every single page you build:

1. Who’s here?
2. What do you want them to do?
3. How can you instantly tell a persuasive story to get them to do #2?

I think that determining a strategy starts with deciding on what your answers are to those three questions.