You might assume that planning and strategy are the same. While they are certainly similar, there are important differences; it’s just as important to strategize as it is to plan.

By creating a strategy, we mean going deeper than simply who will write about what and when will it be written. We mean specific details about the content, including targeted keywords, subject matter, and promotion of the content. Will your content be informative or entertaining? Will you include videos? These are all important questions that need to be addressed when you strategize your content.

To put it harshly yet clearly, people don’t care about you. That’s not to say people are cold-hearted individuals who only have their self-interests in mind. Far from it. However, when they are reading content on your blog or website, they likely don’t care about your random thoughts or weekend vacation. Sorry, it’s just the truth.

Instead, people want to be informed. You are the expert in a unique industry, so no matter what your specific business or niche, you should be sharing that expertise. Your knowledge is something that you can contribute, something that no one else has (or at least very few people have), and it’s an important resource that will increase your general reputation (online and off) as an expert.

Let’s suppose, as a random choice, that you own a local tire shop. Here are some good and bad title ideas.

Not-so-great titles:

• “Why I Love Spending the Weekend with My Dog”
• “My Favorite Feel-Good Movies”
• “The Best Smoothie Recipes for Monday Morning”

These all sound fairly interesting, but have nothing to do with the tire shop.

Here are some better titles:

• “4 Reasons Why Your Tires May be Seeping Air”
• “How Often Should You Rotate Your Tires?”
• “Staff Survey: What Tires are on Our Personal Vehicles?”

All of these reflect your business and provide useful information from an established expert.

Links are crucial. The content you write should be linked together through a series of links that help improve your search engine optimization. Every article you write should have at least an inbound link (linking to one of your site’s pages, possibly another blog article), as well as an outbound link, which links to a site outside of your own.

While you don’t have to create a detailed and complex web of links, you should make sure that the majority of your content has proper links, and that the links go to quality sites. While we are on the topic, we should mention that you should avoid artificial or paid-for links to your site, as these are easily identified and flagged by search engines.

Your brand should have a message. (If it doesn’t, you likely need to rebrand.) All of your content should stay within the pillars of that message and, at least in a small way, enhance, explain, or honor that message.

What message are your sending to potential customers and clients? What do you want them to think of when they hear about your business? This messaging should be threaded into the fabric of each article, video, social media post, and marketing material.