When crafting a high-quality content strategy, it is important to break down all of the possible expenses; determine how much your content is worth; and how you’re going to budget it accordingly.

There are a lot of factors involved in creating and maximising engagement with your content, so making sure that you have a concise, detailed budget means you can optimise your income while maintaining lower expenses.

Where to start

Rather than jumping right to the concrete things like domain cost or hosting price, begin by working out a projected calendar and working out how much time will be involved with your content (What’s New In Publishing). Ask yourself:

●    How much does your time actually cost? 

●    How much would you be willing to pay yourself or someone else hourly for producing, editing and posting content? 

●    What RoI do you expect from your investment?

All of these factors may not seem like very much but the time itself is often neglected in the analysis of content value because there’s no concrete material offline to compare to what the value would be, but keep in mind that your content is valuable. You’re just looking to determine that.

Consider all expenses in your budget

From there, breaking down a budget seems nominal and easy. A few primary things that you should keep in mind are how much you’re willing to pay for search engine optimisation and where you want your content to fall within search results; how you’re going to go about driving individuals to your website; and also how many new people you want consistently engaging with your content. The first is relatively easy, but one thing to remember is that you’re going to be investing not just in optimisation in the manufacturing of the content, but also the analytics required in order to observe just how well your SEO is working. Driving people to your site is a little more complicated because deciding the best way to promote your content is up to you. Ask yourself:

●    How much do you want to set aside to promote posts on social media? 

●    Would you prefer instead to have an engagement program that’s more email-focused and how often do you want your visitor-driving content to go out? 

●    Do you want to buy ad space? 

Most importantly, figure out what’s best for you and your specific needs before investing directly in something that you heard was best. Determining the differences between new visitors and return visitors and how you prioritise them is another important decision to factor into your strategy.

Budgeting your content is difficult in the abstract, but once you know the details of how you want your content to operate and engage with an audience, it’s easy to determine the worth of content and how you want to optimise it. Visit ALHAUS for more strategies in content budgeting.