If you are into SEO, you know the importance of content already. The purpose of writing content is to reach out to the right audience and make an attempt to sell your product or service to them. However, the fact is that some content are able to see good engagement, while other content pieces suck.
But why do they suck? Well, it can happen due to a number of reasons like:
- The content goes to the wrong audience
- Bad writing, odd structuring, improper formatting etc.
- The content doesn’t answer a question
and so on…
In this post, we will learn how to create a good content strategy that can accomplish the maximum engagement.
Understand the ‘What’ and ‘Why’
The first thing is understand the “what†and “why†of your content. Before you create your content, get the correct answers to (i) What you are going to create, and (ii) Why you are going to create. With a clear understanding of this you can start creating the content.
Keep SEO in mind
You must keep SEO in mind while creating your content. Your content might be incredibly valuable, but it doesn’t make an impact unless you make your content SEO-friendly to get it ranked in search engines.  You should learn the modern SEO best practices to become a good content marketer. Learning might consume some time in the beginning but it’s pretty easy. And one you start using the SEO best practices in your content, it gets easier over time.
While I’m hoping that you would learn the SEO practices yourself, I’m willing to give you a quick tip. Do a good amount of keyword research to find out a list of long-tail keywords that you would use in your content. Use those long-tail keywords as naturally and meaningfully as you could. This means that the natural flow and meaning of the content shouldn’t be interrupted. Use the keywords as they are for maximum chance of search exposure.
For example, if you are creating content to promote a fashion accessories brand, you should not just aim for a rank with “fashion accessories†as there could be a multitude of long-tail keywords you can aim to rank for. Those long-tail keyword choices are
- Affordable bracelets for husbands and boy friends
- Sleek bracelets for girls
- Amazing fashion accessories for my wife
- Best jewelry gift ideas in corona times
A thorough keyword research can find out a long list of these long-tail keywords that you can use in your content for a higher chance of search engine visibility.
Choose the topic wisely
The topic of your content depends on your niche. It’s important to find your niche, and in today’s times content strategists and content marketers are focusing on micro-niche content ideas. Anyway, you need to stay within your niche or micro-niche while choosing your content topics.
Once you’ve selected your topic, you have to stick to it from start to finish of your content. It can sound difficult, but you must always try to stay on topic. Or else, your audience will lose interest in your content and leave it away. It can greatly disturb your engagement rate in turn.
There are different ways you can select the best topics for your content that can boost the engagement quickly.
- Most popular keywords will give you ideas for ever-green long-term content.
- Trending incidents are a great source of getting content ideas, but don’t leave your niche.
- Fresh or breaking news is also a fantastic source for your content topics.
Let’s discuss about trending topics next
Follow the trend
If you want your content to go viral, there are a few things you need to take into consideration.
- Your content shouldn’t be repetitive or boring for your audience.
- It must provide either an entertainment element or some meaningful information.
- The content must connect with a large audience within your industry.
And most importantly, your content should discuss something about the trending topics. People want to know about the current trends that most news portals are covering on their respective platforms. They also like to stay up-to-date. This is why, if you follow the trend while choosing topics for your content, you have a very good chance of connecting to a larger audience quickly.
Following the trends can help your content go viral, which is the dream of every content marketer. Studies reveal that only 1% of all content goes viral, and your content can fall into that 1% category with the simple trick of following the trend. Time your content perfectly and make it fast.
Add images and video elements
“One image is worth a thousand words.†It is not just a saying but a scientifically proven fact.
Every content creator or content marketer knows that including images and visuals makes the content more attractive and more engaging. Nobody wants to read a bulk of text right from the introduction all the way down to the conclusion. The content you produce should be a mix of text, images and some video elements. Nowadays, people are consuming videos more than they are reading text, and the video consumption is increasing, so not to mention Video is the future.
You must focus more on creating video based content. If you are able to create good video content for your audience, it gets so much easier for you to engage them and grow your business.
Provide a solution or an answer
I read all the time “create quality contentâ€. Well, that is correct advice, but what does quality content really mean? Is it adding high-resolution stock photos or recording a 4K video with a super expensive DSLR and using other expensive video equipment?
No!
While adding good images and video elements to the content has its edge (like I discussed in the previous point), nothing really works unless your content provides a solution or an answer.
Your audience needs a solution or some help with their query, which is why they have come to view your content. If your content doesn’t provide that, it’s like trash for your audience and they leave it there and go somewhere else right away. Who would ever want to read something for no benefit?
Create unique authority content
You may have heard about ‘authority content’. Authority content means that you have the sole authority or ownership for your content and the content is the ultimate resource for your audience for the given topic.
You can show your authority by making sure your content covers full details of the topic and all the possible subtopics, which cannot be found anywhere else.
Authority content has one or multiple links to several scientific studies, research papers or any other sources that are highly credible. Your readers can get full knowledge about a specific topic from your piece of authority content and they won’t need to go anywhere else for help or reference.
The power of authority content is huge as all major search engines look to give a lot of priority to authority content pieces while ranking web pages.
Diversify content types
Earlier, we discussed about diversification already that says you need to have a combination of text, images and videos in your content. In this point, we will learn about diversification of different types of content.
You should show your expertise to your audience by creating e-books, opinion pieces, downloadable pdf files, how-to content, special tips and tricks, research pieces, case studies, interviews, whitepapers and experiments etc.
You may not invest in creating all of the above mentioned content types because one can easily get lost in the ocean of those, but you can pick your favorite 3 types of content and put equal amount of effort into creating those forms of content.
In the beginning, it may feel like you are putting a lot more effort with zero return and you may also notice that some content types are not working out at all. But don’t give up there. Creating content in multiple ways actually helps you share your content across various platforms and reach out to a larger audience. So, keep creating multiple content types. There will be a time when it will pay off.
Promote your content
A good content marketer spends 50% of the time in creating content while the other 50% of the time is spent in promoting the content. But a smart content marketer prefers spending more time in content promotion and less time in content creation (almost a 70-30 split).
Well, both are right. The thing is it’s not exactly a number game as different content types would depend on content creation and promotion differently. And also the industry has a role to play, so what you need to understand is that promoting your content is equally or sometimes more important than creating your content.
A research about your audience, the content topic, the content body etc. is vital and once you’ve produced tens of different content units for the same audience, over time you may not need to put a lot of effort into doing that research, and creating content gets a lot easier too. However, that is not the case with content promotion. Once you’ve created a piece, you have to promote in your preferred channels so that it reaches out to your audience.
So, you have to put that time in sharing and promoting your content every time there is a new piece created. That takes time. The number of popular social channels is always getting bigger, so you have to spend even more time in content promotion to get more eyeballs from a larger audience going forward.
So, all I have to say, promote your content as much as you can.
If you are looking to build an audience online for your business in a quick time, why not take advantage of our expert content marketers? They would build a foolproof content marketing strategy for you and work on it to achieve a great success!