Content is king, and without it, you can’t do anything. The adage still rings true. After all, the basis for every successful product, service, site or marketing campaign is actionable, interesting content that gets you noticed.From the description of your product and service to its branding, accompanying documentation, and even video scripts – everything is words. Content marketing drives three times more leads than conventional campaigns, attracting those from your demographic for a long time to come. Let’s take a closer look at why you need a steady stream of ranking content that’s not only well written, informative and engaging, but also an artful exhibit that demands attention while leaving the reader wanting more.
Devote Time To Devising Great Ideas
No matter how good you are at creating content or weaving words, your work will matter little if you don’t start with good content ideas. Reliable ideas are the product of brainstorming and research, with success coming down to how well you can investigate your market and it’s related customer base. Topic ideas need to resonate with readers so stick trending subjects, popular content and evergreen areas of your niche or vertical.
Discover Popular Content With These Tools
Coming up with good content ideas is made easier when you’re armed with good content research tools. Give these leading, effective content discovery platforms a try.
Google Trends – Google Trends is an ever-valuable free trend discovery and topic research tool that no website builder, designer, writer or creator can be without. From finding up-to-the-minute search trends to full archival data concerning global search metrics, consulting Google will give you endless ideas.
Ubersuggest – While paid packages are available, the free keyword idea suggestion feature of Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest will help you reverse engineer the SEO of competing sites to discover tons of ranking keywords sorted according to trends, volume, visits, CPC, buyer intent and ranking probability.
Portent Content Idea Generator – Portent’s title generator won’t guarantee you a well-aligned, winning article,but it’ll get your creativity flowing with an endless supply of interesting content ideas. It’s free and great for when you’re at a complete lack of ingenuity or facing a creative block.
Buzzsumo – As one of the most powerful tools for discovering and aggregating trending/viral content, Buzzsumo is not free. It does, however, offer a free trial letting you evaluate its powerful range of content research & discovery features. This is also one of the best research tools for social media trends and upcoming social shares.
Study Your Own Analytics
There are few resources that can compare to the insights staring you in the face when you use analytics intelligently. While the concept of analyzing analytics may seem daunting to some, the basic practice is pretty simple. Once you’ve set up Google Analytics, Matomo or snapped in your CRM, looking at the metrics will lead you towards which content to create. If you’re using Google, then set up goal tracking so that you can evaluate the conversion rates of each and every page on your site while at the same time tracking its overall online presence as well. Look for what is popular, which content is drawing traffic, which of this traffic is driving leads. Look at things as basic as what type of content is being shared and viewed to more advanced analytics such as time spent in specific areas of your site/content, and the exact flow of actions underlying the average user experience.
Consult Social Bookmarking Sites For Trends
If you want to improve your search engine position for a site, blog post or keyword, then you need to make use of popular, reliable social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites are a constant source of traffic while serving as essential backlinks. Use these sites to not only explore your demographic, related market and general industry for trends but submit articles/blog posts regularly to improve rankings. In actuality, there are hundreds of effect sites, but the essential ones for submission are Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+, Fark, and Reddit.
Develop A Content Strategy
Just as your business, product, service or vision has a marketing strategy, your strategy-aligned content needs a content strategy of its own in order to reach its full value to you. Devise a strategy by deciding the purpose of each content piece, and a greater purpose behind the whole of your contact marketing. Your content will enrichyour brand, answering the questions your customers and potential clientele would ask before they arise. Comeup for a framework for the topics that your business deals with, with related information listed for each and every segment. This will provide you with an overview to start with. Put as much search into this map of your field as possible, determining what will draw users and keep them interested. From this basis, you can begin toset out priorities for what needs to be created and when, as well as what content should be logically created together. Some pieces just need more depth. Certain answers take more substance to establish you as a brand leader. You need to know this first, and then work methodically through your newly formed (and constantly changing) content strategy
Create The Best Content You Can But Don’t Delay
Set a standard and stick to it but don’t be a perfectionist. You should be constantly refining the way that you create content until the workstream is efficient for you and your staff. Split test different types of articles, graphics and infographics. Switch up your video style. Change the overlay used on social media images. Adjust, tweak and refine but never delay putting content out there. The worst thing that you can do is fuss until a degree of “perfect” is found (remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so even this is relative) and delay creating new, relatable, current pieces that remain on the forefront of thought establishing you as a clear leader. Consistency and constant improvement is the key to shaping a user experience that people love to come back to while showing loyalty and inner-resolve as a company or brand that people can clearly see is there for the long run.
Improve Existing Content
Want to keep your search engine ranking position climbing? Refine your content. Now that you’ve got a basis of good content published and in the pipeline keep in mind that small changes to old posts will keep you fresh while also telling Google and other crawlers that they need to keep a more frequent check on your site and its structure. Update, update, update. It goes a long way in both the eyes of a search engine and your online users. If you haven’t already optimized your content for keywords, or perhaps this isn’t part of your marketing approach, one should consider rewording and reworking published content to include at least one or two focus keywords.
Take Time On Your Titles
The best blog post in the world doesn’t make a difference at all if it gets skipped over due to having a generic title. Now, we’re not saying that you need to write clickbait but make sure that your title grabs the attention of the reader. Microsoft studies report that the average human has an attention span of eight seconds (a goldfish’s is nine) and the average user takes between three and five seconds to read a title. That is if they’re actually reading it and not skimming the page. Once you factor in how long it took for the person searching to take interest in your title or subject matter, there’s not much time left for anything. This is what makes it so vitally important to capture the attention of your reader with that title for if you don’t, they’ll most likely get distracted by something else whether its other content or an idea in their head.
Keep Content Conversational
In order to relate to your audience, you need to speak as they do, using not only keen industry insight to showcase your place in the spotlight but a speaking style that communicates clearly. Every industry and, in essence, target demographic thinks differently and therefore talks differently. Keeping your blogs, articles, reviews, and social media posts, conversational keeps things clear and relatable. Sticking to a conversational tone is one of the best writing tricks to combat short attention spans so get yourself into the habit of saying what you are saying without introducing it first while switching to the same style of writing that you use while speaking.
Expand And Diversify Your Reach
Expansion typically means more content creation, but this doesn’t always take an equal investment in authorship and editing. Killer content should be repurposed for all social media channels relevant to your business or industry. A popular article picking up lots of shares can be recreated into an infographic for Pinterest or Instagram. Video trending? Turn it into a blog post. Your content strategy should always include diversification to more than one social network but, as we said before, don’t spread yourself thin. Grow steadily and strategically, while keeping elements of design and content creation that work and using them to set trends for future articles, videos, graphics and other multimedia.
Creating Better And Better Content
No matter how good your content creation and content marketing is, you should never stop working at it. The better you present yourself or your brand, the better your competitive edge. There’s no more powerful tool in this, the age of information, than stunning content. Whether it’s the slogan on your merchandise or the landing page your ads funneling customers towards, content needs to be planned, purposeful and aligned to your brand in every way. Once your presence is established, every piece of content begins to make a difference to the way that you’re seen and the direct metrics of your business so shape your future today by devising a content strategy that no one can ignore.
