6 steps to creating content (1)

6 Steps to Creating Valuable Content Topics People Want to Read (and Share)

Why are more than half of professional marketers creating at least one piece of content daily?

Maybe it’s because content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3x the leads.

Another (not so) shocking statistic is that 93% of B2B marketers are using content marketing today.

Yet, only 42% of B2B marketers say they’re effective at content marketing.

If this sounds like you, then it’s time to do what the successful brands are doing – implementing a solid content marketing strategy.

This includes consistently generating high-value content topics that people actually want to read (and, inevitably, share).

We put together this quick guide to help you do just that.

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Let’s get started.

Step 1: Identify And Define Your Target Goals

You can’t begin any marketing strategy without first identifying your goals. If you are the head of marketing for your company, you know that this can be a difficult step; traditional success indicators may not match a realistic marketing goal.

However, it is critical to clarify these goals and make them as simple and concise as possible, so that your whole team can get behind them and participate. For example, maybe you’d like to increase your lead generation by 35% by using a popup form on your website. Or, maybe you’d like to increase your sales by 25% in the next six months by widening your target audience.

Whatever your goals are, you need to clearly define them, so you can gear your content marketing strategy toward meeting them. Then, as time goes on, you can measure the results of your campaign to see if you’re inching closer to reaching the goals you set.

Step 2: Find the Voice of Your Brand

Find the Voice of Your Brand

Every brand has (or should have) its own unique voice. This revolves around how you portray your content to your audience.

Is your brand witty, funny, serious, or friendly? Maybe it’s a mix, to help create a voice that’s authentic and relatable to your audience. For instance, you wouldn’t want to use large words and technical jargon for an audience that doesn’t already have that vocabulary. And, vice versa – don’t use fluff words when speaking to an audience of investment firms. If you do that, you’ll lose your reader at the gate, and they’ll never return.

At WriteForMe, we do a voice and tone exercise with you during our onboarding process. That way, you can tell us about your audience, and we can write for them, enhancing your chances of success.

Step 3: Conduct In-Depth Keyword Research

A part of every strategy to create valuable content is having a solid SEO plan. Optimizing your content makes things easier for not only search engines but also consumers to find your content.

Since the majority of internet users are on Google and other search engines to conduct their research, you need to ensure that your content will show up in the results (SERPs). With careful keyword planning and implementation, you can make this happen. Good news, right?

There are a number of tools you can use to find the best keywords for your audience. The idea is to choose keywords with low competition, so that it’s easier to rank highly. At the same time, the keywords should match the searches your audience conducts. This way, you’re driving relevant traffic to your content. For these reasons, we suggest you have at least 5 different keywords that your website/company wants to be known for.

How you go about integrating those keywords into your content is important. For example, you don’t want to overstuff the content with your keyword so much that it gets penalized by Google. This is what we call keyword “stuffing.” However, you do want to include keywords throughout the written content with the goal of getting ranked for them. As a general rule, you should have your primary keyword in the title, in at least one subheading, and in the beginning and end of your post.

You can also sprinkle keywords throughout the content naturally (emphasis on naturally). It’s also a good idea to include secondary keywords that are similar or related to the topic.

This brings us to our next step.

Step 4: Finding Topics and Categories for Content

Finding Content Topics

There’s no point in optimizing content that your audience won’t want to read.

Knowing what to write about is easier when you know your audience. Researching who they are, what they do, what pain points they have, and what type of content they like to consume will help you better understand them. This way, you can position your content in a way that will be of value to them, so that they read all of it and, of course, share it!

For instance, if you sell baby clothes made from organic cotton and non-toxic dyes, then your target audience would be new parents who care about health and eco-friendliness. Your content topics and categories might revolve around educating them about the dangers of certain dyes, providing them with non-toxic options, or showing them how to care for organic fiber clothing. You’ll need to develop a list of categories to cover, so that you can create a steady flow of content. And, mixed into all of this written education, you can soft-sell your product in a natural way.

Step 5: Writing a Batch of Headlines

Now, it’s time for the organization stage. Once you know the categories you’re creating topics for, it’s time to begin writing some headlines.

This will require literally sitting down and brainstorming a list of headlines for each of your categories. From there, you’ll be able to focus on content creation.

Let’s practice:

  • Decide on your 3 categories.
  • Write out 3 headlines for each category.

Because you do them all at once, this is called “batching”; it is one of the easiest ways to get inspired, and it is much more effective than doing them at random, or one-by-one “when you have time.”

Step 6: Creating a Content Calendar

Visually seeing your content on a calendar is the last piece of your puzzle. After you have found your valuable content topics, you need to plan out when each of those topics will be written. Coming up with publishing dates will ensure your campaign delivers consistent content to its core audience, and it can be as simple as adding those headlines you just wrote down to a content calendar.

There are many tools you can use to aid in content calendar creation, such as Google Calendar, Coschedule, and HubSpot. To make this really effective, it’s best to write a batch of content in advance (say, for the whole month), and then schedule them to be posted.

If you don’t have the skill or time to do this all yourself, there’s another way: hiring a content marketing agency.

Whatever you do, make sure that you are getting your content marketing plan created and implemented as soon as possible. After all, your competitors already are!

Reach out to us at [email protected] if you need help planning your next content marketing strategy customized for success!

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Jamie Macmillan

Jamie Macmillan

https://writeforme.io

Jamie MacMillan is the Chief Executive Officer at WriteForMe. Jamie has been building and helping to scale fast-growing companies in the digital marketing space throughout his career. » More blog posts by Jamie MacMillan

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