Perhaps the most important part of your content strategy is your content creation strategy. How will you create content on an ongoing basis? How will you differentiate from your competitors? Can we create topics for articles in a systematic fashion? Here are some important considerations when developing a content creation strategy.
Content Creation
One of the most important parts of your marketing is your content creation strategy. You will need to determine what types of content you will write, how to create content ideas consistently and how to measure your content’s effectiveness.
Content Goals
Before deciding on what content to create, you should decide on your content goals. Some common content goals are as follows:
– To drive more traffic to your site
– To get more inbound links
– To get more email optins or direct conversions and sales
– To create engagement and stimulate discussion amongst your readers
– Simply to share a resource or your thoughts on a topic
For my blog, I generally focus on two types of content goals, content to generate traffic and content to create engagement and influence. For example, list posts seem to be good traffic drivers for my blog and they also tend to attract inbound links.
However, since I already have an audience and a web presence, I also create content to create engagement. This keeps readers interested in my blog articles and keeps people coming back to read more. I know that content that isn’t targeted for search engines might lose visibility after a while if I don’t continue to promote it, but creating content that isn’t tied to keywords allows me to give value to my readers when I want to simply share ideas and concepts that haven’t be written about yet.
Some businesses do very well by focusing primarily on SEO targeted content. They do keyword research for every article and each article they write is designed to drive more search engine traffic to their site.
However, the type of content you will create will depend on what your goals are. Decide on those goals first and then figure out what type of content you will need to create to achieve those goals.
Selecting the Right Niche (Broad vs narrow niches)
Another important consideration is selecting the right niche. One of the biggest mistakes I see businesses making when getting into content marketing is picking a niche that is too narrow.
For example, I once discovered a company that was selling carpet cleaner and they had a carpet cleaning blog. I read their latest article and it was an interesting article about how to use vinegar to remove stains from carpet.
But how many people would subscribe to a blog about carpet cleaning? And how would you come up with enough article ideas to keep the blog going over a long period of time?
Here are a couple of examples of businesses that did well by selecting a broader content focus:
1 – WP Curve offers WordPress maintenance services for a low monthly fee. Most businesses offering WordPress related products and services would probably write about WordPress to establish themselves as WordPress experts.
But WP Curve took a different approach and wrote about online marketing and business. They shared their growth story as they were growing the company and focused more on providing interesting and useful content targeted towards business owners. As a result, WP Curve grew into a 7-figure business and ranked well for WordPress maintenance.
2 – Moz sells SEO software as a service and their blog initially focused on SEO. Although they did well in the SEO niche, they decided to expand their focus to include social media and other marketing tactics. In their 10 year anniversary video, Rand Fishkin mentions that their reach expanded significantly when they decided to expand their content focus.
3 – Buffer started off by creating content for its target audience. But one day, co-founder Leo Widrich saw Rand Fishkin’s presentation called the Content Marketing Manifesto. Rand stated that instead of writing content for prospective customers, marketers should instead focus on creating content for influencers that are already reaching them.
Source: How Buffer’s Blog Posts Get Shared 1000’s of Times
This led Leo to target a broader audience and as a result, their social reach jumped from 250 shares per article to over 1,000 per article. Their content included interesting articles about human psychology, like these:
- 6 Powerful Psychological Effects that Explain How Our Brains Tick
- 10 Simple Things You Can Do Today that Will Make You Happier, Backed by Science
- Sleep Your Way to Creativity And 9 More Surefire Methods For More Ideas
The article above about how to be happy was one of their most shared articles ever with thousands of social shares. Buffer quickly grew into a 7-figure business with multiple remote employees.
4 – Groove HQ founded by Alex Turnbull offers customer support software that makes it easy to manage customer service emails without requiring a ticketing system. Most businesses in this space might think that creating a customer service blog would be a great way to attract targeted leads.
While Groove does have a customer service blog, they really became well known for their entrepreneurial growth blog, where Alex shared some of the marketing tactics that they used to grow as well as their actual revenue numbers. Groove took a broad approach and as a result, grew to 7-figures with a new goal to hit the 10 million dollar mark.
While selecting a broader niche can help, don’t pick a niche that is so broad that it doesn’t convert at all. I once had the opportunity to message Sean Work when he was working with Kissmetrics and he mentioned that they use to write content about blogging on the Kissmetrics blog. But Kissmetrics is an expensive analytics software solution targeted towards businesses. Solo bloggers usually don’t have a lot of money and aren’t good prospects, so they shifted their approach towards focusing their content on online marketing and analytics for businesses.
Content length
Another important consideration is content length. How long will your blog articles be?
Some data studies show that long form content performs better than short content, but keep in mind that such studies only provide averages. These studies also don’t take into account the time and resources required to produce content, i.e., sometimes you will get more traction by publishing a few short articles versus one long article.
One of my most shared articles on my site has over 5,000 social shares and is only around 1,000 words long. Sometimes it’s more important to focus on quality over word count.
Generally, I recommend a mix of long and short form content although it really depends on your niche. Shorter content will drive engagement and longer content can drive traffic or go into more detail when you are writing about more complex topics.
Publishing Frequency
How often will you publish on your blog? How often will you guest post on other blogs?
A study by Hubspot shows that blogs that publish 16 or more articles a month get over 3x more traffic than blogs that only publish 0-4 times per month. However, this number is just an average and I know of a couple of bloggers who do really well by publishing just once a month.
My general recommendation regarding publishing frequency is to publish less often on your own blog when you are starting out and don’t have an audience yet. Instead focus on either promoting your content or growing your audience.
As your audience grows, you’ll discover that articles you write will automatically start to get search engine traffic and social shares, even if you don’t promote it. People will link to your articles without you asking them to and share on social media. Increase your publishing frequency once your content starts to “promote itself”.
Cornerstone Content vs Evergreen Content
Another important part of your content strategy is deciding what to write about. Ideally, you also want to create a system for generating content topics so that you will never run out of things to write about.
Cornerstone content is content that positions you as a thought leader or drives a significant amount of traffic to your site. It’s the best content on your site.
People blogging about digital marketing often say that everything your write needs to be “quality content”. In reality, however, even most content created by influencers seems ordinary. It’s their best articles that allowed them to rise to influence.
Cornerstone content can also be link magnets. In other words, they are designed to attract links from other websites. These links can help the article rank in the search engines or the link juice can be funneled through your site via internal links to help other articles rank.
Ideas for thought leadership or cornerstone content might come up once in a blue moon. In fact, you may only get a few amazing ideas each year, but bloggers who really succeeded at creating and promoting their best content became influencers.
There are a couple of things I do to create content that stands out. #1 is to read about business and marketing often so that I can keep up with the trends and keep learning. I visit communities like Inbound.org often, subscribe to newsletters from other marketers and join Facebook groups.
The other thing I do is to experiment with different marketing tactics. You’ll learn a lot more by doing your own experiments and develop insights that other people don’t have. These two activities allow me to know my niche really well and occasionally come up with amazing ideas.
Another type of content that many business blogs like to focus on is evergreen content, especially keyword targeted content that ranks in the search engines. The problem with evergreen content is that everyone else is writing about those topics and it’s hard to stand out when writing evergreen content.
Evergreen content can perform well if you are good at content promotion and also after you have built up your own audience and authority. As you build your audience, you’ll also find that people ask questions that you can answer with evergreen content.
This guide is an example of evergreen content. I came up with idea for writing this guide because several people that I talked to were struggling with content strategy. I can refer people to this article in the future if they are unsure of how to get started with blogging for business.
My recommendation is to always be thinking of ideas for cornerstone content. Write evergreen content as well to drive traffic and help out your audience.
Multiple Contributors and Hosting Guest Bloggers
Will your blog have multiple contributors or just one blogger? Will you allow people to guest post on your blog?
Most blogs start off with just one blogger, but as the business grows, having multiple bloggers can allow you to create more content which can result in more traffic to your site.
Having only one blogger can have some advantages over running a multi-author blog. People enjoy being able to connect with other solo bloggers and the content experience is more predictable when everything is being written by one person. Readers often want to follow individuals of interest instead of reading blogs with multiple authors.
As a business grows, however, being able to create more content by having multiple authors might make sense. More content often leads to more search engine and social media traffic once you already have an audience.
Guest bloggers can also create content for your site, but managing guest bloggers can be time consuming. You’ll get a lot of pitches from bloggers that aren’t suited for your blog and each new guest blogger will have to learn your editorial guidelines.
However, guest bloggers can create more content for your blog which can result in more traffic. Guest bloggers can also have unique content ideas or experiences that you won’t be able to get from your in house writing team.
You can allow people to pitch your blog for guest posting, decline all guest posting requests or make guest blogging available by invitation only. You’ll have to decide if you want to allow guest bloggers or not for your blog.
Check out the rest of this content strategy guide or click here to return to the first page of the guide:
Objectives and Metrics – We need to set goals and define metrics to track our success so that we can measure our content marketing effectiveness.
Content Creation Strategies – Creating content on an ongoing basis is one of the biggest content marketing challenges. In this chapter, we’ll discuss ways we can create content that stands out and drives traffic.
Content Promotion Strategies – We need to promote our blogs to gain visibility and grow our following. This section discusses some popular promotion strategies and when to use them.
Types of Content that Create Engagement and Build Influence – Certain types of content are effective in creating engagement and building influence. This section will examine the types of content that other influencers have used to outperform other content marketers.
About Brian Liang