You’ve heard it countless times: Content is king.
But what if I told you this isn’t true?
To explain that further, what if I told you royalty-level content simply isn’t enough to make you win online?
No matter how great your content is, it’ll get you nowhere unless you know where to focus when you publish it.
Content might be king, but your audience and your place of publishing is what rules the kingdom.
And wouldn’t you rather own a castle in a kingdom, rather than wear an empty crown?
I call this concept a content house.
(I teach this original concept in my book, Practical Content Strategy and Marketing, and in my 6-week educational Content Strategy & Marketing course.)
In today’s blog, I’ll give you a sneak peek into my original concept and answer questions including:
- Why is a content house important?
- How do I build my own profitable content house?
- Is there anything to avoid when building my content house?
Ready to dive in? Let’s go. ⬇️
@JuliaEMcCoy has a sneak peek on the Write Blog at an original concept from her content strategy course: the content house. Why is a content house important? How do you build your own content house? Learn more Click To Tweet
How to Build an ROI Foundation with a Content House (Plus, How to Get Your Own House Started) – Table of Contents
What to Avoid When Building Your Content House
What Exactly is a Content House?
How to Create a Solid Content House in Three Steps
1. The Foundation of Your Content House: Knowing Your Audience and Creating a List of Long-Tail Keywords
2. The Walls of Your Content House: Quality, Consistent Content and Optimized Web Pages
3. The Roof of Your Content House: Measuring Success (And Failure)
What to Avoid When Building Your Content House
What you shouldn’t do when creating a content house is build it on someone else’s property. Facts here, family.
Think of it like real estate.
You get a lease on a piece of land and lay the foundation for a house. Slowly, you work on the house until it’s strong and beautiful. You furnish the house to make it unique.
But what happens when the landowner decides to end your lease?
You guessed it.
Your house comes crashing down. All those years of persistent effort to build it boil down to nothing.
Today, it’s tempting to focus effort on building a content house on someone else’s property. For instance, there’s social media. Since there are 3.8 billion social media users, why not create a ton of content for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter?
Source: We Are Social
Or why not focus on guest blogging to gain credibility, leads, and higher ROI for your brand?
The answer is the same for all: These platforms don’t belong to you. And since they don’t, you never can be sure they won’t change in the future, leaving you to scramble for another platform to start from scratch.
What you shouldn’t do when creating a content house is build it on someone else’s property. #contentstrategy Click To TweetAs an example, consider what happened with HuffPost. In January of 2018, HuffPost announced it would close its contributors’ platform. This came as a shock to the 100,000 writers who owned accounts on HuffPost.
As a contributor myself, I lost my HuffPost login overnight. Did I panic? Weep because I lost years of hard work building content on the platform?
No. Far from it!
My hard work was safe. In fact, Express Writers lost no traffic with the close of my HuffPost contributor account.
Why?
Because I had a solid content house built on the right platform: my own website.
What Exactly is a Content House?
Your content house is your presence online. It’s filled with consistent, quality content created to fulfill, enrich, and educate your audience.
Of course, your content house needs real estate to rest on. This real estate is your website. You need to have your own domain first, and then to focus on building it up like a house with content your audience can use to improve their lives.
When you start with this and treat social media marketing and guest blogging as secondary, you’re on your way to achieving huge ROI for your brand.
What is a #contenthouse? It's your presence online. It’s filled with consistent, quality content created to fulfill, enrich, and educate your audience. #contentstrategy Click To TweetHow to Create a Solid Content House in 3 Steps
To build a content house, you need to start with your foundation: knowing your audience and researching long-tail keywords. Then, you need build upwards from there, crafting quality content and optimizing your pages with keywords. Finally, attach metrics to your house to track how well it’s doing and find out which elements need to change and what content needs to be updated.
Let’s get into each of these steps one by one.
1. The Foundation of Your Content House: Knowing Your Audience and Creating a List of Long-Tail Keywords
Before you start writing anything, you need to know who you’re addressing and what you’ll write. Without these two key elements, your content will be flat, generic, and useless.
A. Who to Address When Crafting Content
The main goal of your content is to enrich people’s lives. Your readers should see you as an authority in your industry, and trust that you have what it takes to solve their problems and help them reach their dreams.
The problem is, what are these people’s problems and dreams?
If you don’t know your audience on a personal level, it’s impossible to reach out and help them better their lives.
So, the first step you should take when building your content house is to find out exactly who your audience is.
You can start with a tool like Google Analytics. This tool helps you track your site visitors and gain information such as their age, gender, and location.
Next, you want to get to know them on a deeper level. The best way to do this is to interview them. Ask them what they desire and what roadblocks stand in the way of their dreams. Then, come up with a list of ways your brand can help them.
The final step is to create buyer personas. Creating personas means grouping relevant buyer information into avatars you can speak to directly in all your marketing efforts.
Whenever you sit down to write for your content house, pull up a buyer persona and talk directly to him/her. Explain how your solution will lead to unlocking their dreams and goals.
B. What to Write for Your Content House
This is where SEO blends in with making your audience’s lives better.
You already know your audience’s goals and desires, so the next step is picking the right topic for every piece of content you write.
First, put together a list of long-tail keywords for your content.
For example, if you’re a dentist doing content marketing to increase your clinic’s ROI, here are three topics you could write about in your blog:
- Teeth whitening
- Sedation dentistry
- Healthy teeth
The next step is to come up with long-tail keywords to use in each piece of content you produce. You can use tools like SEMrush and KWFinder to help you find low-competition keywords with high search volume.
For instance, long-tail keywords for the above topics would be:
- Safe teeth whitening procedures for teens
- Sedation dentistry for people with high blood pressure
- Organic solutions for healthy teeth
When you create a list of long-tail keywords, you’ll be able to:
- Drive the right traffic to your site
- Compete better for the keywords you use
- Create unique content that speaks directly to a specific prospect
2. The Walls of Your House: Quality, Consistent Content and Optimized Web Pages
The walls of your content house are the most visible aspect of the entire structure. They’re the element that tells Google and users: There’s an awesome house right here!
The walls of your #contenthouse = quality content + optimized web pages. They're the most visible aspect of the entire structure. They tell Google and users: There’s an awesome content house right here! Click To TweetA. How to Build Quality Content for Your House
Building a house isn’t about piling on as much material as possible as fast as you can. It’s about finding the right materials, and then building the walls slowly and surely so the house lasts.
The same is true with a content house. You don’t publish blog after blog, throwing content at a wall and hoping quality and relevance comes out.
But also, you don’t publish one superb blog and then wait months until the muse strikes again with another dazzling idea.
The secret to a solid content house includes three things: consistency, quality, and quantity.
Stick to a publishing schedule for your blogs. It helps to create an editorial calendar so you never panic about what to write and when to publish it.
Creating long-form blogs (over 2,000 words) twice a week is an excellent practice to follow.
Remember, it’s not only about how many blogs you publish. In the end, it’s also about how these blogs are relevant, helpful, and trustworthy in your readers’ eyes.
B. Create Optimized Pages for Your Content House
You’ve already come up with a list of long-tail keywords to use in your content.
The next step is using them throughout the pages of your site. When you use them naturally and consistently, you’ll get Google to notice you.
For deeper learning on the content house concept, the Content Strategy & Marketing Course should be your destination. Enroll and get the knowledge to grow your brand with content.
3. The Roof of Your Content House: Measuring Success (And Failure)
The roof of your content house is there to protect you. Your roof shows you what’s working and what’s not.
To build your roof, learn the important content marketing KPIs to keep track of. For instance, you can attach metrics like bounce rate to your site. Bounce rate is the amount of people leaving your site without clicking through to other pages. If more than 70% of people are bouncing, it’s an indicator that you need to do something to improve your content.
Remember, you need to track all the content on your site. Only then will your roof protect you from having a sloppy site that doesn’t do credit to your brand.
How a Content House Can Increase Your ROI
The goal of your content house is to show people they can trust your brand.
But when you build your house on someone else’s property, it only takes a minute for all your hard work to disappear down the drain.
Instead of taking this huge risk, focus your energy on building your own content on your own platform.
When you build a solid house, people will know where to find you. They’ll gain value from you consistently, and learn to trust you. In a short while, they’ll become your loyal customers, which ultimately increases your brand’s ROI.
