Blogging is like a full-time profession for many of us, and because of that we have a dedicated interest in our audiences. We are the place that they come for content and we have a responsibility to provide current, accurate reporting as far as content is concerned. Our opinions usually shape the final decisions of a number of our readers and because of that a lot of power rests in our hands. Creating captivating blog entries is always a challenging task, especially when you have a lot on your plate and little time to get it all done.
In order to be a successful blogger, you have to understand what success means to a blogger. For some it equates to a lot of clicks, but to others it means providing a source of information to our readers. We are tasked with presenting an unbiased view that is free from fear or favor when it comes to a particular topic and we should take our responsibilities as bloggers very seriously.
Success Tips To Help You Make Your Blogging ROI Increase
If you truly want to succeed and produce a blog that you can be proud of, here are a few things that are almost guaranteed to net you success.
Success Tip #1: Put Your Audience First
How many bloggers out there truly know their audience? How many of them are simply assuming what their audience wants and instead miss the attractive points that would draw the crowds? Understanding your audience is one of the most important things any blogger can do. By understanding what drives your audience, you locate the motivation behind their need for content and this allows you to better home in what they love to read. Putting your audience first means taking their likes and dislikes into account. Usually in niche blogs this is a simple matter because only an individual that follows the particular area of interest would be a reader on such a blog. When it comes to more open, wide-ranging blogs there is a lot more scope for you to be good (or bad) at presenting your ideas. Knowing your audience helps you to streamline your ideas to present it in a more palatable fashion to your readers, according to Copyblogger. Know what they read and what interests them and you’re well on your way to creating riveting content that will ensure that people take notice of what you say.
Success Tip #2: Be Unbiased In Your Representation Of Facts
Anonymity has made it easy for anyone to be a blogger and hide their real identity. It doesn’t do much to promote trustworthiness, however. When you produce a blog, what you write on it is a direct reflection of your own opinions and ideas. However, if you’re blogging about a factual piece of information then you should be careful to separate your ideas from what makes up the body of truth. Representing fact is important and the more accurate you are in presenting the fact uncolored by bias, the more your audience tends to trust you. Creating trust in an audience means that it is more likely that they will come back to you for news since in their opinion, you are a reliable location to get the truth. Opinion pieces are welcome since the aim of most blogging is to represent a blogger’s opinions on a particular issue. You must be careful to draw the line between opinion and fact since blurring those lines will lose you credibility in the eyes of your audience. Showing your audience two sides of the story before chiming in with your own take on the issue is a very good way to present an issue in a simple, unbiased way.
Success Tip #3: Don’t Get Complicated
One of the things that turns a lot of readers off from a blog is content that is simply padding. Overcomplicating an issue is a very common way to pad a word count, but it does your audience no favors. The more complex a piece of content is, the less likely that you’re going to get readers willing to sit through your filler text. Get right down the point and do it effectively and efficiently. It might be a lot easier to simple research a point in depth rather than trying to create meaningless phrases and words to make up a word count. Keeping it simple helps connect with your audience without alienating them. In some industry blogs, using jargon that is common within the industry does not count as being complicated. This exception is because such blogs are usually aimed at industry professionals that are already familiar with these terms. General Blogs should try to maintain a conversational tone without inserting obscure words and phrases. Doing so usually interrupts the flow of your conversation with the reader and could lead to them dismissing your entry as not worthy of their time.
Success Tip #4: A Picture Paints a Thousand Words
We’re no longer in the dark ages of the Internet where a single jpeg file could take as much as ten minutes to load on a dial up connection. Thanks to the wonders of easily available high speed internet, using eye-catching images is not only an option, it is recommended. Quite a lot of human beings have the ability to process graphic information far more readily than textual information. It’s the reason why memes are such a popular thing in internet culture today. Utilizing images capitalizes on this ability by giving your readers content in a breathtaking flurry of color and shape. Selecting the right image for your post is as important as writing the post itself and due care should be taken to choose an image that best represents what you want the reader to take away from this entry. Images are probably the best way to communicate simple ideas and you should utilize them in blog posts as often as you can in order to give your content a more attractive look.
Success Tip #5: Post Regularly and Consistently
Last but maybe most importantly, blogging isn’t a fly-by-night enterprise. It requires a lot of dedication and hard work before it even has a chance of being successful. Looking at how blogs have been developed over the last decade, it is obvious that in order to maintain your momentum and to keep readers coming back for more, your posts should be done on a regular schedule. Ideally, posting one blog a day is a good idea, although some people do cover more than one post, sometimes incorporating multiple posts of different types of content into one single day. Other bloggers only post once a week, but their content is rich and it leaves the readers on the edge, awaiting the next instalment. Creating regular blog posts not only gives you visibility, it shows that you are consistent. Nothing is more unnerving to a reader to find that a blog they have followed for a long time has simply ceased to exist. The longer you post for, the more confidence that readers have in following your posts over the long term. Blog readers tend to increase over time the longer you blog so it’s in your best interests to keep your posts coming regularly to grow your readership over time.
Success Tip #6: Networking is Essential
The advent of social media has made it much easier to share your blogs as well as to engage in conversation on them. Conversation on an entry is one of the most important driving factors in a blog. With social media intertwined with most blog hosting outlets, it is not a surprise that most bloggers have a social media outlet dedicated to sharing and promoting their blog entries. Many bloggers also ask questions within their entries so that their readers can comment and start up their own private discussions in the comment threads. The true masters of blog networking follow other blogs that have similar interests and attempt to engage their writers in civil conversation. This usually leads to an exchanging of ideas and sometimes even readers. There is a downside to this blogging practice, however. Comments are left to the discretion of the user and unmoderated comments can lead to spam. There are ways to avoid this such as requiring a login to post a comment but it can interrupt the flow of readers who simply want to leave a comment and be on their way. The benefits to reaching out socially to your audience far outweigh the negatives.
A Noble Profession Not Learned Overnight: Blogging
Blogging isn’t something you learn to do overnight. Starting a blog is a simple process, but keeping one running for any length of time will test your dedication. Creating new content can have you feeling burned out at times and even trying to follow multiple threads of discussion can leave you tired at the end of a long session. With dedication comes reward. Blogging is rewarding on many levels, both financially and intellectually. Sharing information about a topic with others who may not know as much as you offers the benefit of helping you grasp concepts easier while at the same time providing a useful resource for others.
Creating compelling content and interacting with users from other blogs helps to bring you closer to your readers and discover new points of view and new ideas. Blogging is a noble profession, and if done right it can be one of the most rewarding things any writer can find themselves undertaking.
From the outside, content marketing might appear simple. Great writers sneeze and create compelling blog posts, right? It’s not that hard.
The reality is, however, that even the best writers in this industry have to build their skills. It’s like becoming a world-class weightlifter: you don’t just go out and do it. You work at it, for years, and you eventually get good.
One of the largest challenges for writers in the content marketing industry is learning to create engaging content readers want to interact with. It’s easy enough to write meaningless fluff, but compelling material? That’s another story.
Luckily, this is a learned skill and, like all learned skills, it just requires practice.
12 Tips for Crafting Audience-Friendly Content
So, you want to create useful content that converts clicks into customers? You’ll need to start planning for it. Here are the steps to take:
1. Start With Curation
One of the very first steps to writing useful content is learning to curate it. The more you understand what your audience likes and dislikes, the better you’ll be able to create it for them.
What’s more, discovering what is hot and trending in your industry plays a crucial role in helping you understand the needs of your audience, which will make you a better writer down the road.
To get started curating content, invest in a streamlined curation tool like Scoop.it. Scoop.it eliminates the manual labor from the curation process and can save you hours of searching for the right content.
Remember: curating content is all about finding the best content in your industry, but you can’t stop there. Give your writing muscles a flex by adding your unique commentary or perspective on the article before posting it for your readers.
2. Poll Your Readers
The next step in discovering what your audience is looking for is going directly to the source. Writing engaging content starts with answering customer questions. Before you can answer those questions, though, you have to know what they are. This is where polling your readers or searching through question-and-answer sites can be invaluable.
If you’ve never polled anyone before, start with social Q&A websites such as Quora. Quora is a popular social platform chock-full of user-generated questions on nearly every topic under the sun. Once you’ve found some questions you think would resonate with your readers, turn them into blog posts.
If you want to poll your readers, turn to your social profiles. If you’ve been considering writing about a particular topic or idea, ask your readers what they think of it. Is there something they’d prefer to read about? Do they have any questions for you? Figuring these things out in advance is a great way to create truly custom content for your readers.
3. Use Industry Tools For More Topic Ideas
Struggling to come up with catchy blog topics? Hubspot offers a free blog topic generator that is great for idea mining and can help you get out of a creative rut.
All you need to do to use the tool is insert three nouns that relate to your industry, and the blog topic generator spits out a list of ideas. As with anything, a little common sense goes a long way with selecting your topics. Not every option will apply to your industry, but the topic generator does a great job of inspiring useful content ideas and can give you a lot to work with.
4. Read Competitor Content
Believe it or not, your competitors are an excellent source for content ideas. If you’re having trouble coming up with topics that will be useful for your audience, comb through the comments of a competitor blog. When you do this, you’re looking for unanswered questions that your competitor’s customers are asking. Once you’ve found them, take these unanswered questions and run with them on your blog.
Want to take your competitor research a bit further? Browse through a competitor website and take note of what you see. What do they have that you don’t? Do you notice anything missing? This is your opportunity to fill in content gaps on your website and, thus, provide more useful and relevant content for your audience.
5. Pay Attention to the News
Another source for locating in-demand topic ideas is news sources. Depending on your industry, news topics can come from a variety of sources. A great starting point for general news is Google News, where nearly every industry has some form of news to report.
Beyond Google News, look into popular industry online magazines and other relevant publications. Reddit also contains a fair amount of news-like material, but use your best judgment with this source, since not all content is fact-checked and verified before publication.
6. Use Your Headlines as a Hook
When it comes to writing engaging content, it all starts with your headline. Even if your piece is well-written, it might never reach its full potential if the headline isn’t on point. So, how exactly do you write compelling headlines that encourage your customers to read your content?
Think in numbers. According to Moz, 36% of customers prefer “number” headlines over other types of headlines. Take this blog post for example, with X Tips for Useful, Engaging Content. Use numbers to create helpful advice pieces, or to showcase lists in ‘Top X’ format.
Solve a problem. Offering a solution to a problem in your headline will get customers clicking to find more information.
Ask a question. A surefire way to write engaging and useful content is to answer questions. In fact, 11% of readers prefer these headlines to other types.
Remember: 80% of readers will never get past your headline, so it pays to make it as useful as possible. To check your headline’s strength, use a tool like AMI’s headline analyzer, which judges your headline based on its intellectual, empathetic, and spiritual word saturation.
7. Go Long
When it comes to writing engaging blog posts, longer is better. Studies have shown that long posts that have at least 1500 words earn a higher ROI than shorter posts.
Long blog posts also keep your audience on your website for an extended period, thus increasing the chance of conversion. Be aware that writing long blog posts takes more time, and you won’t do yourself or your readers any good by rushing it. Instead, leave yourself ample time to edit, adjust, and fine-tune your post before publishing.
8. Format the Post for Maximum Readability
While most people think the writing of a piece is all that matters, it’s also vitally important to format your posts correctly. Today, people scan blog posts more often than they read them line by line, and it’s essential to anticipate this and format your posts accordingly. If you’re not sure how to format your posts, don’t despair. Here are some fast tips:
Use Short Paragraphs. Readers skip over large blocks of text. In some cases, an impenetrable wall of text can be so alienating to readers that it drives them away.
Use Bolded Headers And Subheaders. These break up your content and give readers a “road map” by which to scan it.
Keep Sections Short. As a general rule, you want a subheader every 300-350 words of copy.
Use Bulleted Or Numbered Lists. These make information easy to digest and improve the skimmability of your content.
Break Up Content With Images. Images like screenshots and custom graphics make your content more interesting and useful for readers.
The better you get at formatting your content, the easier it is for readers to engage with it.
9. Do Your Research
No matter what you’re writing about, always do your research. Research makes you look much more credible and gives your audience more information to use. Remember always to cite your sources and to link to original studies and findings.
10. Don’t Skip The Visuals
Visuals are some of the most compelling elements of content. At the bare minimum, your posts need “Featured images,” although it’s more ideal that they have screenshots, stock photos, and custom visuals throughout.
Are there topics nobody is talking about in your industry? If so, address them head-on. When you dare to write about what your competitors won’t, you become a thought leader in your industry. These hush-hush topics don’t have to be anything crazy: it can be as simple as discussing the variations of price points in your industry or even calling out gimmicky tactics.
12. Write For Your Audience, First and Foremost
Whenever you write a post, keep your audience in mind. In fact, take it as far as imagining that your reader is standing right there in front of your computer, and you’re talking to them directly.
Compelling Content Made Simple
Writing engaging content can be challenging, but it’s a great challenge to undertake. With these twelve tips, you can start crafting high-quality, compelling content your readers will love, rather than fluff they just slog through. And when you do this, your entire brand gets a boost!
Most times in life, it pays to have a plan. Content marketing is a technique that works best when you look before you leap, and having a strategy can help make your content dollars stretch further. However, the act of developing a smart strategy is another game on its own.
There is no doubt that content marketing will be big in 2015. To get started on implementing your own routine, here are several content marketing strategies that will help take your content marketing to new levels.
Start Your Content Marketing Strategies With an Audit
So, no one really likes an audit — completely understandable. Although audits aren’t the most pleasant way to launch a content marketing strategy, they serve as the perfect kick-starter for several reasons:
Content audits help you find missing information within your website
They help you discover thin content
You can analyze keyword density
They highlight what’s working for you
Overall, you must consider the value that your content brings to the table. As you analyze your current content, ask yourself if your content is educational, relevant, entertaining, or engaging in some way. If your content does not meet at least one standard in those criteria, it might be time for an overhaul.
Bring in Content Curation
Now that your content audit is out of the way, it’s time to start having a little bit of fun. Curating content is bound to go big in 2015, and it’s easy to see why. To relieve the expectations of churning out high quality content week after week, curating content is a breath of fresh air.
The advantages of curating content are many, and if you have yet to include this strategy, you don’t know what you missing. Curating content helps you accomplish:
Brand establishment
Authority in your niche
Relationship building
Increased engagement
Steady stream of fresh content
There are several ways to curate content — by hand or by curating tools like Scoop.it. Even though content appears right before your eyes when you take the route of automation, a human eye is still required to get your curation just right.
Discovering What They Want
To continue the curating theme, the next step is to determine what your audience wants. You can blog about anything under the sun, but what matters most is to understand the needs of your audience. If you aren’t meeting their needs in one way or another, your content will fall flat every time.
So, how exactly do you know what your readers want? To take the mystery out of the equation, you can resort to several sources.
Quora is a community-based Q&A website that brings real-life customer questions to light. There are topics on nearly every industry and niche you can think of. Simply searching for your keywords in the search bar can reveal dozens of topic ideas right before your eyes.
It might seem like an unlikely source, but Reddit contains a variety of topics in an assortment of industries. One of the advantages of Reddit is that, like Quora, you can browse real conversations from people who are considering your services or products.
Not to sound super obvious, but a third option is to ask your audience what they want from you. This is where you can use the power of social media to engage your audience and ask direct questions. You can even start a live Q&A session on Facebook or Twitter to get those ideas flowing.
Top-Notch Topics That Get Them Talking
Generating new topic ideas can be one of the most challenging aspects of content marketing strategies. The goods news is that ideas aren’t as hard to come by as you think, and there are plenty of sources for inspiration if you know where to look.
The first step to finding engaging content ideas is discovering what’s hot and trending in your industry. Check into Google news, industry news websites and magazines, and even network with likeminded people in your niche.
Another unique topic technique is to create a topic web; think back to those days in high school when you drew story webs for English class. The trick to this is taking content that already exists on your website, and using the web to branch out into other relevant areas. A little bit of brainstorming can go a long way for getting that light bulb moment.
Finally, Hubspot’s blog topic generator is perfect for creating fun blogging ideas. By simply entering three nouns into the generator, Hubspot’s helpful tool can give you several ideas for your blog right on the spot.
The 2015 Outlook: Your Content Calendar
So, you know what your audience wants. You also know how to generate awesome topic ideas time and time again. The final part to nailing your content strategy for 2015 is by bringing in the almighty content calendar.
Content calendars are like your little black book of topic ideas, along with your days to schedule your posts. You can also include precise days and times to post to social media. Sure, you can wing your strategy without a content calendar, but there are so many reasons why having one helps immensely:
Content calendars help keep you focused. If you are easily sidetracked or even forgetful, your content calendar can save the day
Content calendars can be as detailed or thorough as you want.
Using a content calendar can align your core business goals with your content
Content calendars can keep you focused on your audience, which helps them stay engaged
Content calendars take the guesswork out of your content marketing strategy
Believe it or not, 2015 is already in full swing. Getting your content marketing strategies in order can make things for your routine smooth sailing for the rest of the year.
Whether you take pieces of these strategies or you dive in head first with all 5, you will be further ahead with your content marketing this year. From content auditing to curating, these simple yet effective strategies will prove their value time and time again.
In the last year, 2014, we saw a growth in the overall amount of media content that was shared by users in all forms of social media. The amount of users that utilize social media grew enormously, leading to a larger number of users sharing content across multiple social media networks.
In order to calculate the return on investment on content, we must examine the different factors that affect the interaction of the audience with the content and how much time the content resulted in a positive response. By using the metrics for these data we can build a picture of how well or how poorly the particular content performed in respect to the investment made on promoting the content. Due to the sheer number of different things that make up the calculation for return on investment, pinpointing a particular factor to change or to improve in order to raise the ROI would be nearly impossible.
10 Ways To Boost Your Content ROI This Year
There are wide spectrums of small changes that can be made to your content in order to make it more marketable. Let’s take a look.
Use The Human Element. In order to reach out to people in this day and age it is necessary to interact with them on a more direct level. Human beings tend to utilize social media as a personal space; meaning that they tend to like and share items that resonate with them most personally. In order to bring a level of humanity to social media, adding a human element is often necessary. In order to get users to appreciate your brand, you have to act less like a brand online and more like a person. The personal touch goes a long way towards having people like and share your content because it stops coming from a nameless, faceless entity. The world today has invested a lot in being impersonal and anti-social. Key among offenders is businesses, since they tend to isolate themselves from their clientele. By breaking down this barrier you establish a rapport with your audience which goes a long way towards getting your content out there and raising the ROI on your content investment.
Keep Focused. In social media as with anything that requires you to cover multiple angles in order to be successful, you have to keep your focus throughout the time of your social media campaign. Your target is audience is what you should be focusing on. Knowing your audience is probably the most important thing in conducting a successful social media campaign. By knowing your audience you can direct your efforts towards this particular niche, using the jargon to make them feel at ease. Once again, establishing rapport is crucial to getting your content around. Knowing your audience allows you to build targeted content that your audience would find both interesting and useful. The other point that you need to keep focus on is the quality of your content. Creating good content is as important as having a grasp of what your audience wants. You should give your audience what they want but not compromise truth in order to do so. Balancing these two aims will allow you to create content that your audience will love and pass around, directly affecting your ROI on content investment.
Target Your Efforts. There are a number of different social media outlets available to a company. Any company investing in social media should be aware that the figure for a single arm of social media doesn’t necessarily carry over to other arms. Thus the outreach of a post on Facebook will not be the same as the outreach on a social media such as twitter. In order to maximize your ROI, you have to treat each one of these social media outlets separately instead of lumping them all together into a “social media” grouping. Many times, when a company seeks to lump all of its social media activity under a single umbrella department, the result is erroneous results where one arm of social media that has a poor results skews the statistics negatively. By selectively focusing how you market to each arm of social media and taking into account each arm separately you can find out which arm is the most in need of assistance in order to maximize the ROI for that particular social media network.
Be Engaging. Social media is all about interacting with the customer on their level and creating and sustaining a rapport with the customer. In order to get the most out of your marketing efforts you need to engage the user and convince them that your content is worth reading and worth sharing. Once your content is good enough, you break it down to convincing them that they should read it. Simply posting links and descriptions isn’t what being engaging is about. You need to have more of a presence on social media in order to increase your engagement level with your users. Proper engagement requires commenting on relevant posts by users, including your own input in debates, asking for feedback about your products or services and personally dealing with users as they speak to you. Creating unique content is also important in the quest to be engaging and the more unique and high-quality the content is, the less you’re going to have to convince the user to share and like it on social media. These, in turn, translate to a higher ROI on your investment in the content department.
Keep in Mind Your User’s Device. Social media and all content marketing over the last five years have seen a shift away from computer-friendly methods to methods that are intimately geared towards mobile users. Tablets and smartphones have taken over as the most popular ways of accessing the internet and content marketing has shifted focus along with it. Creating content today is mainly about developing engaging content, but at the same making this content accessible by all your users on all sorts of platforms. Optimizing your content for users on multiple platforms has the advantage of allowing more people to read your content and thereby creating more options for social media sharing and interaction. Outreach is the name of the content game in the twenty-first century and having more people aware of your content means that your ROI on content investment raises as each one of them shares the content and raises your visibility.
Build and Maintain Trust. Transparency has been a major issue among content producers for quite a long time. In order for some companies to share their work, they have created or paid for “dummy accounts” that increase the amount of shares they have artificially, flooding the social media stream with the post. Although this has worked in the past to create visibility, it is by no means an honest method of getting your content out there. Users tend to think twice about clicking on a link that is posted by a fake profile or shared by a nameless entity. Social media filtering protocols are slowly weeding out these fake accounts and removing their influence in sharing, meaning that this method of increasing visibility is fast coming to an end. The best way to encourage users to trust you is to be genuine in your interactions with them. Social media interactions allow for personal exchanges and create a deeper sense of understanding than sharing a link from a fake profile. By building and maintaining trust with your audience, you are more likely to get them interested in reading what you have to say and getting it out to their friends and acquaintances via shares.
Long Term Beats Short Term. Keeping the long term vision in mind is a surefire way to see your ROI grow exponentially. This can mean longer content, more research and more work put in your content. However, it may require taking a hit with your ROI early on in order to set up the late-game influx of interaction with your audience. By having content that makes it onto other media outlets, whether they are magazines or blogs (as guest posts), the initial spike in users to your content will eventually die down. The content serves as a selling point that can lead to increased user confidence later in time. The long term vision allows you to take into account the appeal of your future content by leveraging the hosted content as a means of increasing your credibility to potential users later down. Your content will only benefit from the exposure and as time goes by it will increase your presence across the internet and allow you the option of creating backlinks in order to boost your future content.
Track, Measure and Optimize. Understanding the analytical portion of your ROI calculation allows you to track the respective data variables that affect your ROI and create methods to optimize them in order to get more visibility. Using tools such as Google analytics to keep track of your site data tracks the amount of visits over time and all the requisite data for those visits. Using the built-in tools you can analyze the data in order to determine what sort of strategy works in getting visits and what doesn’t. Google analytics allows you to pattern your actions over the strategies that work and build around these strategies to create and overall marketing strategy. Combined with your social media analytics as provided by Facebook and other social media sites, you can create a strategy that will no doubt lead to an uptick in your ROI for content.
Think About the Rewards. The end result of your content marketing is improving the lives of others. In order for others to be able to benefit from your content, they need to know it’s there. Your marketing strategy to raise your ROI should focus on creating value for your content readers, and not just clicks for your website. Although it may sound altruistic, by doing the first you almost guarantee the second. You also don’t compromise your integrity by using underhanded methods to generate leads. Users tend to appreciate being thought of because of hoe easy they are to dismiss as clicks and not as people. Considering them as people pays of in the amount of people that support the brand and the amount of them that benefit from the content you provide. As a content provider, you need to be faithful to your audience. By giving them great content that affects their lives, you give them value and they are likely to remember that the next time they have the option of increasing your outreach.
Don’t Mislead your Audience. Very possibly, the worst thing that any content producer can do is use clickbait in order to get people to read their content. Clickbait is a term used for headlines that use hyperbole in order to inflate feelings about a story, encouraging the user to click on it. The result is that the story is usually much less than it’s hyped to be and the user feels cheated. Although the content might have been good with a regular storyline, the inflated storyline sets the reader up for a story that the body doesn’t deliver. This might be a way to get clicks cheaply but the long-term effect of something like this is horrible. By using clickbait, you effectively betray the trust of your readers by leading them on about content. They are much less likely to trust you in the future and although the initial uptick in visits looks good, the long term slide of visitors is a testament to why using clickbait is a very bad marketing strategy. It compromises your integrity and your truthfulness and instead makes you seem fake.
Real People Interest = Real Results
In order to increase the return on investment you get from your content, the thing you need to do above all else is get users interested in your content. Social media is the most obvious way to do this, but there are a lot of other ways such as SEO optimization and targeting ads. In order to utilize all of these disparate methods properly, you need to set goals for your marketing figures and you need to understand the niche to which you are marketing. Knowing these factors makes it easy to create a seamless and interlinked marketing strategy that incorporates statistical analysis of data from analytical sources in order to craft the ideal strategy for your content. Generating return from content can seem like a complicated task, but the rewards are well worth the effort.
The New Year has been rung in: 2015. Can you believe it? I can’t either. I’m sure I will be saying the same thing when 2016 is on the horizon, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. If anything was learned in 2014, it is that high quality content is not going away. It seems like content is continuing to dominate both the search engines and digital marketing strategies, with its value only continuing to increase. It’s safe to say that content is not a trend or ploy to pull traffic in your direction; it is an online marketing staple with nearly limitless potential.
When it comes to preparing your content for 2015, you might be asking yourself exactly which direction you should take. Content marketing has several layers, and they nearly all need to be tapped into in order to yield the best results.
To help you prepare your content for the New Year, we are breaking down the essential steps to getting your content on track in 2015. Furthermore, we will provide you with a guide to finding the best content to share with your readers, and we’ll throw in a few helpful how-to’s on getting inspiration and producing the very best content in your industry.
It’s another big year for content in 2015, and here are the best 3 prep techniques for reaching your audience and converting that content into cash.
Foolproof Technique #1: Starting 2015 With a Bang . . . And an Audit
So, audits are not exactly fun, but they are a very logical starting point for preparing your content for 2015. There are several strategies for performing content audits, and the best approach really depends on how what tools you have access to and the platform that you use.
The Manual Audit: Overview of Keywords and Word Count
If your website contains a high volume of content, start with an Excel spreadsheet that lists the URL of every individual page. Take note of the keywords used within the content, the date it was published, and the word count. This is an opportunity to discover what content on your website needs improvement, whether it is from a word count standpoint, or your content is simply outdated and no longer relevant.
Broken Links Bring Down Page Value
Another essential step in your content audit is to identify broken links within your text. Google considers websites with broken links and bad information as low quality, which can ultimately hurt your website search rankings. Whether the link is internal within your own website or outbound, clicking on all existing anchor text can save you a lot of hassle in the long run.
Identify Content Gaps: What’s Missing?
Although you are analyzing all of the existing content on your website, there is another audit approach that’s just as important: content gaps. Identifying content gaps will help you understand where your website falls short in terms of content. For example, you built out your website several months ago, but forgot all about adding an About Us page. Believe it or not, Google looks for signs of a legit business through your content. If you are missing pages such as About Us or Mission Statement, it could potentially hurt your rankings.
Identifying content gaps is also important from a competition standpoint. In fact, this is yet another way to help determine what’s missing from your own website. When you are visiting your competitor’s website, take note of the content that they have available. What do they have that you don’t? Whether it is a blog or a staple subpage, competitors can leave clues to what you are missing. In order to stay in the content game, you need to know where your content gaps lie.
Extensive Guide For Manual Content Audits
Manual content audits can be grueling, but luckily there are extensive and helpful guides that can help you through the process. In particular, Moz has a pretty in-depth guide that explains the process and purpose of a content audit. Following this guide can give you a clear understanding of the content audit.
If you are looking for reading that is a little bit lighter, here is a shorter version of a content audit breakdown with some informative instructions.
Performing Content Audits: Wordpress Edition
Wordpress is a large-scale content management system that is used by amateurs and professionals alike. It’s the perfect solution for publishing content, as well as implementing SEO techniques with built-in plugins like Yoast for Wordpress. Yoast is a highly effective plugin that helps content marketers properly optimize their websites using the best SEO practices. If you happen to be using Wordpress as your content management system, you can easily perform your very own content audit with the help of this tool.
Using Yoast as a Guide to Audit Content for 2015
Yoast is perfect for filling in the missing pieces of those little meta tags. Meta tags might be small in terms of content, but they are essential pieces to solving the content auditing puzzle. Your meta tags in Yoast can give clues as to how your audience views your website in the search engine pages, and they even impact your click-through rate that influences your web traffic.
Image credit: yoast.com
When you’re looking at the Yoast plugin, take note of your keyword and meta description. The first step to finding the best keywords for your website comes down to thorough research; this can be achieved with industry-leading keyword research tools such as SEMRush. Once you have your targeted keyword in place, be sure that it is used sparingly within the body of your content. The Yoast plugin also tracks keyword density, which is another vital factor to successfully ranking your content on Google. A high keyword density in your content can lead to trouble when Google’s Panda update rolls around.
Your focus keyword should be primarily present in your meta description. Since the meta description is so short, you only need to use your keyword once in this instance. Always fill out your meta tags; they may be tiny, but they can make or break your click-through-rate.
Questions to Ask Yourself During Your Audit
Asking key questions during your content audit can drastically change your results. The right questions will help you discover content gaps and find out how you can increase the overall value of your content. While you are combing through your content page-by-page, ask yourself the following questions:
Does my content serve the needs of my audience?
Does it educate, engage, and entertain?
Is it too long or too short?
Does it carry a consistent voice?
Do I contribute valuable information to my industry?
Am I using effective visuals?
Is it still relevant today?
Would I personally read this content or share it with friends?
Unfortunately, these questions cannot be answered with a simple auditing tool. In order to get relevant questions to these answers, a content marketing expert should review your content for best results.
Foolproof Technique #2: Curating Your Way to a Better New Year
Curating content in itself isn’t exactly new, but the importance of curating content has received a big push as of late. In case that you’re still in the dark on the wonders of curating content, it is the act of collecting and organizing high quality content to distribute to your audience.
The key to successful content curation involves discovering content that has that engagement factor while adding your own valuable comments. Copying and pasting a link is kind of curating, but thought-leader curating requires your own expert insight.
Now that you understand the goal of curating content, here is how you can start your curation strategy off with a bang:
Invest in content curating tools to escalate efficiency. While manually curating your content is an option, the downside to this is the amount of time that it takes. Browsing the Internet for hours on end is out of the questions for most marketers. You already have enough on your plate, and there are just not enough hours in a day to curate.Fortunately, there are highly efficient tools that help make your life much easier. One of those tools is called Scoop.it; it gathers all of the top content in your industry at the click of the button. From there, you can cherry pick the best results to share with your audience.
Add curating to your content calendar. Curating content is an efficient way to supplement your existing content. Sometimes it can be difficult to come up with original content week after week. The goods news is that content curating can give you a break from brainstorming; all you need to do is add a bit of expert input.
Build new relationships with content curation. One of the advantages to curating content in the first place is establishing new connections. Tagging or tweeting your sources from your curated content is the perfect starting point. The goal is to get your primary sources to recognize your brand, and hopefully your sources can return the curation favor in the future.
Establish Credibility With Content Curation. If you are looking for a fast track to establishing credibility, content curation can help move you to that level. Sharing helpful and relevant content can get your audience accustomed to perceiving you as an information source. Furthermore, ensuring that your curated content is from credible sources also adds to your credibility while helping your rankings in the search engine.
Best Tips For Curating Content for 2015
The beauty of curating content is that it consistently serves as a fresh content stream. In order to keep churning out relevant curated content, there are several techniques to tap into the best content available in your industry. Other than using curation tools such as Scoop.it, here are some manual options to help you curate.
Explore social Q&A websites. An often-overlooked content curation source exists within social question and answer websites. One popular example is known as Quora. Quora is a community-based Q&A website that hosts thousands of questions and answers. These can easily be churned out into curated content.
Dive into Google News. Depending on your niche, topics regarding your industry might be discovered in the news section of Google. If your industry happens to be news-heavy, this is the perfect opportunity to curate content on a daily basis.
Dig on social media. Find the popular pieces of content that others are sharing. Content that is heavily shared and re-tweeted can give insight as to what is hot and trending in your industry. Use this to your advantage and share with your audience, along with added an original thought or two.
Explore different content types. Curated content does not always have to be in the form of a blog post. Consider curating content like infographics, slideshows, and videos. This will stretch your curated content base while offering more data to your audience.
Tap into the unknown. There is an incomprehensible amount of content on the Internet with millions of sources at your fingertips. Instead of always reaching for the same old sources, expand your horizons and dig into the unknown. There are plenty of content sources with untapped potential, such as Digg’s newsletter The Daily Digg, and even your own e-mail inbox. Here’s a great list that highlights 17 unique places to discover new content.
The future of curating content is looking bright in 2015. It is helpful for filling up your editorial calendar, establishing credibility, posting content on a regular basis, and becoming a thought leader in your industry. If you have yet to implement content curating into your content marketing strategy, 2015 is a great time to start.
Foolproof Technique #3: Creative Strategies For Original Content
Brainstorming unique content ideas is a tough gig. It’s difficult enough to compose an engaging blog post, but coming up with a new idea for every blog can turn into a huge hassle. Although your content does not need to come from your own brain 100 percent of the time, at least 65 percent of your content should be original to your brand. That’s a lot of pressure, even for a professional content marketer.
As tough as it seems, I’m going to let you in on some content secrets of the pros. Fresh topic ideas are everywhere if you know where to look; and I’ll tell you exactly where to find them.
Overview your competitors’ content. Your competitor’s content can give all kinds of inspiration for new ideas if you know what you are looking for. Similar to a content audit, dig deep and find what content they have that you don’t. You can also review their existing content and see what options you have for building off of their content. Just remember: if you choose to build off of your competitor’s content, it needs to come from an entirely new angle and offer new insight.
Explore the comments area of your competitors’ websites. The comments section can be a gold mine of new content opportunities. Analyze the feedback and take note of any unanswered questions. Those questions can turn into a brand new blog post for your own company.
Take advantage of Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator. I personally love this tool and recommend it whenever I get the chance. To use the tool, enter 3 nouns that pertain to your industry. The generator tool then gives you a list of ideas blog topic ideas. Keep in mind that not all topics will apply to your niche, but it can help you branch off in other directions.
Repurpose old content. There’s a chance that you may already be sitting on top of new content opportunities without even knowing it. If you have spent the last year perfecting your blogging skills, now is the time to try something new. Take those old blog posts and present the information in a new light, such as a slideshow or infographic.
Google’s auto fill search helps fill in the gaps. Type in a search phrase or keyword for your industry into Google. Google’s auto fill search provides an additional list of opportunities that you can turn into new content. The auto search feature showcases key phrases that are commonly searched, so there’s no question that there is an audience for your new topic.
Don’t forget YouTube. YouTube is video based, but it is the second largest search engine with over 6 billion hours of content. That means you could watch content on YouTube for 684,477 years without stopping. Still think there’s no opportunity on YouTube?
2015 is here. Quality content marketing opportunities are nearly limitless for the upcoming New Year, and having a strategy in place will help maximize your efforts. With these foolproof techniques in place, you will be well on your way to dominating your content for 2015.
