The biggest hurdle in the way of publishing high-quality content on a regular basis is what to write about? Sooner or later you run out of topics. Remember that quality and relevancy is of utmost importance. Never write and publish content just for the sake of it because it does more harm than good. So how do you go on producing quality content without compromising on quality?

Publish content to help your customers.

This involves knowing what your customers want (in terms of content consumption) and then producing content accordingly. The biggest purpose of investing in content marketing is creating a presence people can relate to. Familiarity breeds more business (provided it is positive and not negative) and it is the regular appearance of fresh and relevant content from your side that familiarizes your target customers with your presence. And what can generate more positive familiarity than constantly helping your customers?

But let’s be realistic, you cannot provide help for everything under the sun. By the end of the day what matters is how much your business grows – how much money it makes. So while creating helpful content you also have to create an appropriate context to relate that help to your core business. That’s why, in order to execute a high-performance content marketing strategy you need a dedicated person who can continuously find a context and then create matching content.

Whenever there is a problem, there is a solution. People invest in your product or service because it fulfills a certain requirement. Let’s suppose you sell a word processor. Already in the market there are plenty of word processors, and many of them are totally free (Google Docs, for instance). Still, people buy the MS Office Suite (or just MS Word). They spend lots of money fully knowing they are not going to use more than 80% of its features. Not just MS Word, there are other niche word processors. Then there are people who are not looking for a conventional word processor. I, for instance, use a full-screen simple text editor called Q10 because it plays the typing sound when I’m typing (helps me concentrate) and it also covers the entire screen to give you a distraction-free writing environment. Then there are writing applications for novelists, research writers, thesis writers and journalists. For bloggers there are inbuilt writing tools.

So you can see, just in the field of writing there are multiple working preferences. Why do people choose one application over another? Despite being a professional content writer why do I use just a text editor rather than a full-fledged word processor? I have strong preferences. Similarly, people looking for your product may have strong preferences but somehow are finding it difficult to make the switch. They either haven’t found you yet or haven’t fully realized or understood the benefit of using your product or service. You can help them decide by being there exactly when they need you.

How to create helpful content?

Helpful content can be of multiple dispositions. You can help people understand your product or service better. You can help people realize in how many ways they can benefit from your product or service. You can solve people’s problems that they might be facing while using your product or service. You can also help them by publishing case studies of how you have helped businesses and individuals do their jobs better with your product or service.

Then there can also be topical help that may not promote your product or service directly but it will certainly make people feel good about your presence. Recently Google decided to shut down its RSS feeds management service and people all over the web were clueless regarding what will happen to thousands of subscribers they have acquired over the years. I wrote a quick blog post on how you can move to another RSS feeds management service and retain most of the subscribers in the process.

Then some people wanted to know what is all the fuss about the Author Rank and what is the benefit of creating your own Authorship. I featured the topic in my weekly content writing newsletter and the response was great. These are just two examples of how I was able to help people through my content writing.

You will need to use your own discretion while writing helpful content.