Every businessman in the world wants to be celebrated for what he does. That’s a fact. It doesn’t matter if you sell web hosting services or gardening supplies, you want people to know about who you are, what you do, and how well you do it. Your mission in business is always to reach out to new people who might be interested in your expertise.
Creating interesting and unique content that has even the slightest chance of being amplified by your desired crowd is the same as digging a tunnel with a teeny tiny plastic spoon – you’ll need to put in some proper man hours to accomplish your goals.
To write, for example, a really good blog post, one must spend hours and hours researching the Web for information, talking to other experts from the industry and thinking about how to transform that new found valuable data into something fun and readable that hasn’t already been seen thousands of times online.
Most businessmen know that. They also have a pretty clear understanding that getting people to read and acknowledge your work is even a bigger nightmare. That’s why many of them still avoid content marketing, even though they know that it could do wonders for their brand.
Whether you’re writing short stories, long and informative blog posts, hacks, tips, tricks or specific case studies that showcase examples of impressive practice, you’re contributing to this ever-growing online library we refer to as the Internet.
If you manage to keep producing quality stuff, people will notice your efforts and perceive you as an expert within your field, niche or industry. This will automatically sky-rocket your web presence and present your services as trustworthy and relevant to anyone who’s in need of something similar that you already offer.
As someone who has been practicing this type of marketing for years now, I have learned that you can easily cheat your way to great content. I have learned that you don’t need to waste days and weeks every time you want to produce a particular piece of content. No. All you gotta do is think outside of the box. So, without further to do, here are a few tips that will help you quickly and easily create great and compelling content for your brand:
Strategy
I know that to some of you this might not look like a “cheat”, but trust me, nothing will speed up your content production process like a rock-solid strategy.
Think about it, if you just sit in front of your computer every time you have to produce a blog post without any idea what to write about, the chances are you’re gonna be there for a while. You’re gonna lose hours and hours of valuable time cluelessly staring at your screen.
Coming up with fresh ideas for your content is extremely difficult, that’s why it’s of crucial importance that you develop a system. In my experience, the best thing to do here is to design a content table that will serve to tell you what and when to write about, at least a month or two in advance. Outlining your content ideas ahead of time gives you enough space to review and edit them over and over again, until they’re good and ready to go.
Now, when we got this in the clear, the second part of your content strategy should focus on your targeted audience.
If you’re not sure for whom you’re writing for and what you want to achieve with a certain piece of content, you’re probably gonna see your efforts go down the toilet. You’re gonna keep wasting valuable time creating stuff that does nothing for you or your targeted audience.
That why it’s of crucial importance that you, before you even write a single letter in your CMS, always answer these following questions:
*What do I want to get from a particular piece of content and how do I plan to do that?
*What type of content resonates well with this audience?
*When’s the right time to publish it?
*How to deliver it to the right people?
If you cannot answer these questions, than you’re probably creating useless content.
Repurpose Old Content
As I already wrote on this blog, to make content repurposing work for you, you actually have to find a way on how to recycle your best work so that it applies to all sorts of different new formats.
Let’s say, for the sake of the story, that you have an 1800 words long blog post that you spent ages creating. You invested a lot of time searching the web, gathering great and unique information that you can use in your story. Before you even wrote it, you knew it was going to be good.
Days, weeks and months pass and here you are now – You’ve already published your post, shared it and republished it on all your channels. You milked it dry, right? This piece of content is done, you got from it all that you possibly could? – Wrong.
If you repurpose that post as a presentation, animation, video, podcast, and infographic you suddenly end up with a much broader possible audience and the investment you made earlier will continue to give you more and more users.
Repurposing content is a great way to get high mileage from your older efforts. Apart from that, this sort of tactic helps you to:
*Build up SEO and generate ROI by investing very little time into its design.
*Reach new audience members from all sorts of different media channels.
*Create “new content”, fast and cheap.
Reach Out to Experts Within Your Industry
One quick and painless way to create quality content is to come up with a series of questions on a hot topic and reach out to all sorts of different experts from your field. Once they send you their answers, you just copy and paste them in your post and voila – you’ve got a piece of content that will surely stimulate a large number of people to click on it.
How come? – Well, because you’ve linked your topic to a lot of credible sources with, presumably, a huge following. This sort of content tactic is usually called ego bait because it, more often than not, gets cited individuals to share your post with their own audience.
The only problem here is to actually come into contact with most experts from your industry. If you don’t personally know them, you might find it a bit difficult, especially if you stand behind a small or new brand, to get people to reply to your emails. You have to write about something truly interesting, if you want your targeted crowd to sit down and answer your questions.
User-Generated Content
Before you start to bash your head against the wall, hoping that you’ll come up with something interesting to write about, you should always first look at what’s already in front of you.
Most brands don’t know their clients and customers. They’re not familiar with the people who are liking them on social media and why.
This is a huge mistake, especially if you’re practicing content marketing. As Neil Patel wrote in one of his posts: “Guessing rather than knowing often produces serious marketing mistakes.
Why is this true? Because our guesses are often wildly inaccurate and strategically dangerous. A guess-based approach to marketing could plunge your business into disaster.”
If you just invest a little patience into getting to know your “crowd”, you will see that you’re sitting on a gold mine.
For example, if you sell hosting services as we do, you will see that you host a lot of different and interesting businesses which have interesting stories to tell. You can use your blog or social media channels to promote them and thus, on their behalf, establish trust with people who are already looking at your firm as a possible hosting solution for their own website and get high-quality backlinks.
Apart from that, you can use your user-generated content to present your public with inspiring business stories and just how big a part, for instance, your great hosting solution played in their success.
Thank you for reading this blog post. If you have anything to add on this subject, feel free to write down your ideas in the comments section below.
That’s it for now,
See you soon again,
Goran @ AltusHost B.V.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
