Tag Archives: Content Publishing

The connection between content, strategy and social media

These days having targeted content alone doesn’t help you much. You have to approach it from different directions. There was a time when you could attract targeted traffic by simply having good content on your website or blog. Now you need a strategy and while formulating the strategy you have to keep in mind how you want yourself represented on social media and networking websites.

Combine content and strategy and they give you good search engine traffic and add social media and the combination gives you fruitful engagement with your prospective customers and clients. As mentioned in my earlier post the days of one-directional marketing are over. Now you have to engage people in conversations. It is no use having conversations just like any other person because then you become just like any other person. You need to become an authority figure. People should be able to trust you and trust your judgment. You become an authority figure by continuously sharing your knowledge and wisdom with your friends and followers and visitors. You can do this on your blog and through your social media and networking profiles/pages. When you give unconditionally people trust you. This trust is your capital.

So when you are creating your content strategy you also need to simultaneously create your social media strategy because they are interrelated. By the strength of your content you can build your social media presence and through a credible social media presence you can engage your prospective customers and clients and once you are able to engage them positively they do business with you more eagerly and they have no problem recommending your business to their friends, family and colleagues.

Developing a content strategy

In order to develop a content strategy you must realize what you want to achieve through your content. Identify your audience and identify what that audience is actually looking for. You don’t have to provide exactly that but initially you need the traction so be tactful. You have to be attractive enough to your core audience. As a ground work you must

Identify your core audience
Develop a dos and don’ts policy for publishing content
Create a list of your primary, secondary and ancillary keywords
Decide whether you want longer or shorter articles/blog posts/web pages
Decide whether you will be generating content in-house or by outsourcing
Develop metrics to continuously analyze the effectiveness of your content
Develop long-term evaluation policies

A well-defined content strategy helps you focus better and consolidate your content publishing effort. Since you will be investing money and effort into producing content you have to be particular about exactly what sort of content you want on your website or blog. A list of dos and don’ts helps you keep distractions at bay. Keywords will help you increase your search engine rankings, although you should put more stress on the relevancy of your content rather than the keywords but they definitely help you create more targeted content.

The choice of longer and shorter articles may also affect how well your content performs. You will need to decide whether your audience wants longer web pages or shorter. Here is a nice analysis of the benefits of long and short articles by usability expert Jakob Nielsen. It is an old article but it is still relevant.

Routine analysis keeps you on the right path. Before launching your content strategy you must clearly define where you currently are and where you want to go. Analysis helps you gauge whether you are moving towards your destination or not and you can then make changes accordingly.

Content strategy and social media

People are constantly curating content on social media and networking websites and then talking about that. They find an interesting link, post it on their profile and then their friends and followers comment on it. Their friends and followers may also share the posted content with their own friends and followers and this is how your content may go viral. The more relevant and useful your content is the better exposure it gets on social media and networking websites.

But it is more than that. It is not simply about posting your content. Your content gives you an authoritative presence but you have to strike up conversations with people. Seek feedback and provide answers. Express doubts and show disagreement wherever necessary. The underlying idea is keep the conversation going by seeding new thoughts. This is where your content helps. If you just seed thoughts without backing them with authoritative text people soon begin to lose interest. They need something to read and ponder upon.

Your content begins to make an impact when it encourages people to have conversations. When it stimulates it creates impressions. When they also begin to find your content on search engines the bonding strengthens.

Stay tuned, I will write more on this.

10 ways to get regular content for your website or blog

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Continuous writing

To be successful on the Internet you constantly need to communicate with written words. Written words – the content on your website or blog – constantly convey your thoughts to your visitors. They attract new visitors and keep the old visitors hooked to your writing. But this also involves writing regularly. The more regular you are, the greater is the level of interaction and communication. Agreed, networking and interacting on other blogs and online forums do play a vital part, eventually it is your content that wins you the day.

Unless you have ideas of encyclopedic dimensions it is very difficult to come up with new ideas and new matter on a daily basis. You can do this without external help if this is the only thing you do: thinking about and generating content for your blog or website. But if you have only got, say between half-an-hour to one hour, to think about what to write, collect your thoughts and plan them and then write them down, it becomes an uphill task and often gets assigned to the back burner. Here are a few things that can help you get regular content for your website or blog:

Hire a content writer or a team of writers: You can hire writing services according to your budget but this is the best option if you have no time to research and write content for your blog or website. The person that you hire most probably has experience researching online and coming up with fresh and relevant content. This doesn’t mean that you assign the entire responsibility of creating content for your blog a website to your content writer, you will need to constantly keep a vigil and make sure that the content tallies with the fundamental philosophy of your blog or website.
Subscribe to RSS feeds: There can be an information overload when you are subscribed to too many RSS feeds but your RSS feeds subscriptions can prove to be the best resource to get fresh writing ideas. You just need to stick to the most important blogs and content websites while tracking your RSS feeds. Don’t rush while subscribing because this will eventually lead you to around 1000+ subscriptions and the mere number will dissuade you from even opening your RSS reader. Subscribe to RSS feeds judiciously and follow them closely in order to get fresh updates.
Use blog search: Many search engines, including the good old Google let you conduct searches on various blogs. You can use your favorite search term to check what all people are writing on it and then come up with your own content accordingly.
Read about your topic: Reading gives you lots of writing ideas as it fills your mind with your thoughts and wisdom. Whether you agree with what you are reading or not you have something to say, either pro or against. Reading also expands your knowledge-base and the more you know the more comfortable you get writing on your topic. Read books relevant to your field, read blogs and websites that talk about your topic, and interact on online forums. Of course you will need to keep a tab on your time in case you don’t have much time to spare.
Visit content aggregation websites: Content aggregation websites such as popurl.com, alltop.com, digg.com, etc. publish lots of highly relevant and contextual links with great regularity. Make it a point to visit these content and aggregation websites routinely. It is better if you can go to them at least once a day but you can decide your schedule according to your work schedule.
Interact as much as you can: Regular interaction exposes you to newer opinions and varying ideas. Interact with people who are already doing great things in your field. For instance if you want to write about blogging then you should try to regularly interact with people who are successful bloggers. You can use social media networking websites like Twitter and FaceBook to keep track of the ongoing conversations. For these social media networking websites there are many online tools that help you track conversations according to topics and keywords. Actively participate in these forums. But be sure of what you are communicating.
Use your existing content for new ideas: Many of your existing blog posts and articles may carry further topics and subtopics. Sometimes an entire article can be created out of one subheading. For instance, if you wrote a blog post on the benefits of regular blogging you might have written about using blogging as a great blogging tool and you might have written just one paragraph on the topic. Why not write a complete blog post or an article on that?
Invite your visitors to give you ideas: Lots of bloggers ask their visitors what they would like to read on the blog. I think this is a great way of getting new writing ideas because after all the most difficult part of writing regularly is getting writing ideas. Once you have a topic it is much easier to come up with the content. You can ask your visitors to give ideas regarding what they would like to read on your blog or website through the comments section.
Maintain an ideas file: Ideas are like the sparkling fireflies; they happen randomly and unless you have reached Nirvana, you can hardly control them. It is always better to devise a mechanism to preserve them whenever they grace you. You should maintain an ideas file and keep storing ideas whenever they occur so that you can refer to it whenever you need to get some new writing ideas.
Be passionate about your topic: Your mind brims with new and exciting ideas when you are passionate about the theme of your blog or website. Your passion helps you focus and work harder towards collecting your thoughts and expressing them; people can feel the passion in your words and expressions. But can you be passionate about something you are not comfortable with? This dilemma is often faced by professional writers because they have to write on myriad topics with unwavering interest. How do they keep the flame of passion burning all the time? They derive their passion from the fact that they have to write well no matter on what they are writing. In a similar manner you can seek passion in your topic too.

Aside from these activities you can also syndicate content from various organizations that provide regular content to blogs, online magazines, online newspapers and websites.

When you regularly update your website or blog it shows that you are serious about talking to your visitors. It doesn’t always have to be prim and proper and you can be especially yourself on your blog provided you are not discussing your pyjama parties and doggy excursions all the time on your Internet marketing blog; the content should always be relevant to your theme and must always have a target audience.

Content marketing doesn’t stop with n number of webpages or blog posts

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Whenever I tell this to my clients they think I’m trying to get more business from them, which is true, in a sense, because if I’m telling you to get more content from me, and that too on an ongoing basis, I cannot afford to provide it for free. It’s like, getting solar panels installed on your roof is a good step because once you have covered the cost of installation the power you get is practically free (and you save your environment from getting more polluted).

So, it doesn’t make sense to grow cynical if a solar energy company asks you to buy solar panels from it simply because it would mean it is trying to do business. Anyway, the point of this post is not that. I think generating content on an ongoing basis must be a conscious choice and being a savvy business person you should be able to decide for yourself.

Having said that, if you’re getting 20 articles or blog posts written and after that you think that your content marketing campaign is over you need to rethink. Millions web pages are being generated on a daily basis. At least 500-1000 among them are lapped up by search engines, bloggers, website publishers and social media/networking users to promote and spread. These are the top ones that attract the majority of the traffic of that particular day.

For how long can you sit on the laurels of those 20 articles or blog posts? The reality of the current state of the Internet is that you constantly need to publish new content in order to stay in the game.

You want people to keep coming back to your blog or website. You also want social media/networking users to continuously promote your content. You want the search engines to keep on crawling your website/blog so that whenever you are making new offers or updating your content it is indexed and reflected in search results very fast. You want to cover as many keywords as possible in order to increase your targeted search engine traffic. You also want to build a community around your product or service so that people not only buy from you they also promote your business through word-of-mouth marketing.

This requires ongoing content publishing.

Both people and search engines are constantly looking for fresh, topical content to learn from and to promote. They are not going to highlight or promote the same content again and again.

You need to provide them fresh content.

Publishing new content on an ongoing basis doesn’t mean that you do it every day (although this is preferred because you accumulate more content faster). There are many clients who prefer just one blog post every week. Some go for three blog posts. It depends on their budget and the requirement. There are many types of audience and some audience do not appreciate receiving fresh content everyday.

So quantity is not an issue here. The issue is continuity. Publish less content, but keep it going. It is like business marketing. Do you stop after a single campaign? No you don’t. Companies keep coming up with new campaigns in order to draw new customers and clients. Content marketing is also a part of that process.

Are you setting goals for your content marketing campaigns?

Why cheap content mostly harms your business

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Cheap content harms your business

Just stumbled upon this blog post titled “pay peanuts, get monkeys” that basically means if you publish cheap content on your business website your conversion rate falls down drastically.

I would like to state at the outset that I have been offering low-cost content writing services from my website (although, I’m gradually toning down) and I was mostly outsourcing this work to writers who can produce lots of “passable” content at extremely low rates. I would also like to tell you that I started providing low-cost content after having provided content writing services at normal international rates for more than 4 years (I still do) primarily because of 2 reasons:

There is high demand for cheap content
Writers are actually willing to provide such content

So I thought if there is a demand and if there is a supply and if I can earn money out of it then why not? I started offering a “package” and I also got some clients and some steady work for my writers. I mostly provide this content for SEO boost — it helps my clients increase their keyword density. But it stops there.

Cheap content is a vicious loop of failure

Vicious loop of cheap content

The problem comes when some of the clients want very cheap content and then want to use this content as their primary content and when the quality doesn’t meet their expectations they complain.

It’s like, desiring to drive a car while paying for a cheap bicycle.

This is exactly where the expression “pay peanuts, get monkeys” applies.

Cheap content isn’t always bad and surprisingly there are a few writers who really write well without charging much.

How do they do that?

When I asked around for most of them writing is just a side activity carried out either during office hours or after office hours.

They have the skill but they don’t have the expertise and providing professional content writing and online copywriting service is not their primary activity.

This means they neither invest in resources nor in improving their skills.

They are simply comfortable with the language, they can quickly search on the Internet and find the relevant information and then rewrite it very fast.

Nothing is unique and individual voice is always lacking.

This is where the clients pay the casualty.

Whereas cheap content written around your keywords can certainly give you an SEO boost it doesn’t help you when it actually comes to selling.

You may increase your search engine traffic but it will just remain traffic; you’re going to generate very little revenue.

This is because your inferior content is never going to convince them into doing business with you.

Your content needs to inculcate a sense of trust and authority.

If you sound like a teenager it isn’t going to do you much good if your target market mostly consists of grown-ups who are very conscious about making purchase-decisions.

Content writing is like any other service: it takes effort and experience to give you content that gets you business.

There is a reason why bigger businesses eagerly pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars to experienced copywriters and content writers; they perfectly know what harm cheap content can cause.

But I hear some of you saying, “What makes you think that people who charge less cannot provide quality content?”

I have a Chinese Blackberry phone that almost looks like the real thing.

So if you can purchase really cheap versions of a Blackberry or an iPhone, why do you spend so much money on the real devices?

Well, this may seem rhetorical so let us see the practical aspect.

Let us say a content writer agrees to charge you just $5 for a business webpage — a professional content writer may charge you anywhere between $40-$100 for the same webpage, and I’m not talking about a well-known and reputed content writer or copywriter.

How much time do you want your content writer to spend on your particular webpage?

One hour? Two hours?

Keep in mind that your business depends on this page and that is why you are getting it written.

When people read it they will make their purchase decision.

So you would like your content writer to spend ample amount of time while preparing your page.

You would want him or her to properly understand your business and your market and you would also want him or her to visit your competitors’ websites to check out how they express themselves.

To sound convincing you would want your content writer to properly understand your concept and its impact on the target audience.

After all this, you would want him or her to come up with convincing copy.

Do you actually want someone working on your business page who is desperate enough to provide a skill for just $5 per hour or worse $2.5 per hour?

How much time can that person actually devote to your content?

He or she will certainly devise ways to make up for the meager payment.

On the other hand if you pay standard rates (rates that enable your content writer to make contemporary income per hour) then you make sure that your content writer eagerly spends sufficient time on your project without having to worry about how to make up.

He or she doesn’t have to come up with “n” number of words in the given time.

He or she can actually focus on the quality of your content.

So what is the solution if you don’t have a big budget?

Quality always works better than quantity.

Well-written 10 articles are far better than poorly-written 100 articles.

The same goes for your web pages. If you don’t have budget for 20 pages just stick to 10 pages but get some writer who can really write them well.

And what if you also need SEO content?

Then you need to strike up a balance.

You can publish low-quality content in as much quantity as possible but also make provisions for well-written content that actually does business for you.

You need to balance between content that generates you search engine traffic and content that converts that traffic into paying customers and clients.