I’ve got an interesting discussion with a friend the other day about the benefits of planning for the purpose of being organized versus adapting and fixing stuff as they appear. I’ve been a big fan of getting organized after finding out how it could help me feel good in the middle of piles and piles of papers and information waiting to be processed.

Wise man says, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.”

If you are going to implement a blog as part of your business and marketing strategy successfully, it takes more than simple actions to drive in the right direction.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe procrastination is the biggest stumbling block to success. But actions without planning will get us no where, or at least takes much more time than necessary to reach a target.

As a start, you need to identify:

• Core purposes — Know one or at most a handful of very specific purposes why you should start a blog. There are tons of blogging applications in business, namely for branding, create relationship with visitors, build conversation, receive feedbacks, manage content, expand visibility, and more. You can use your blog for those, but don’t overwhelm yourself from the start.
• Intended outcome - What do you want your blog to accomplish for say a year or two later. Do you expect to be an expert in your niche and become an authority blog which people refer to? Other example of outcomes: build your RSS subscribers, provide an environment for soft selling, prepare another medium for lead generation, rank for many popular keywords in your niche, gain many inbound links, aim for better search engine rankings, get more organic search traffic, etc.
• Action strategy - How do you plan to achieve those results? The more details you define the approaches you can take toward your goal the better and more focused you become. Example: write two articles per week, post about news and happenings to blog regularly every other day. Make a detailed weekday plan if possible.
• Resources - What does it take to carry out the plan? Do you have enough resources and energy to carry it out and continually invest your effort into it? Update your action plan to overcome resource problems if needed. If you need to hire blog consultant or any other outsourcing, then jot that down too.

Strategically plan your blogging endeavour will not only increase the chance that you accomplish your goal within a specified timeline, but also prevent you from constant burn out. Sure you will face some problems along the way but with a great plan at hand, you will save yourself from feeling exhausted in what could be otherwise fun journey.