Tag Archives: Content Publishing

Using latest news to create fresh content and improve SEO

A quick link to a nicely written article on how to improve your SEO using latest news. The writer has termed it as Newsjacking.

With search engines like Google attaching more and more importance to the freshness and topical significance the content that you publish, news automatically get higher importance. The only problem is what if your industry has no particular news to offer? Then you create a context. For instance, in my content writing and content marketing business, how can I use the latest news to highlight my content writing services in terms of getting some SEO benefits? That’s where creativity comes in. Let me use a small example.

Recently, Google decided to shut down its RSS feeds management service “Google Reader” and people to whom the RSS subscribers matter were really worried (most of them still are). So I quickly created a blog post explaining to them how they can salvage their RSS subscribers in the event of Google shutting down its RSS reader. As I mentioned above, the trick is, creating a context. RSS subscribers matter to those who regularly publish blogs and those who publish blogs need content for their blogs. This is just one example. In a similar manner, you can create a clever context and use topical news to get some leverage.

Content marketing doesn’t merely mean publishing more and more content

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Before Panda and Penguin updates people were creating massive amounts of content to improve their search engine rankings. The 2012 updates from Google changed the game. Rankings disappeared overnight and businesses based on merely creating content for the purpose of getting higher search engine rankings were basically ruined.

It was also a year when content marketing evolved into a specialized profession. A glimpse of this E-Consultancy survey shows that over 90% companies recognize the overwhelming importance of content marketing. Coca-Cola, the biggest consumer brand in the world, has drawn out a 20-year content marketing strategy that is being considered as one of the most comprehensive paradigm shifts in the way brands are going to promote their products and services.

But no matter how mainstream it becomes, people are still confused about how to implement an effective content marketing strategy. Many still confuse it with creating and publishing lots of content. Of course you need content, but there is more to that.

In order to implement a successful content marketing strategy, you need to understand why people would look for your content. Why they would like to read or consume what you have published, but be it video, text or images? “Why” is very important. If you understand this “why”, 90% of your problem is solved.

If you are in the entertainment industry, then people access your content to get entertained. They may also access your content to know more about the people who entertain them (for instance, celebrities and players). If you are a news agency then people will access different categories of your content according to their interests such as politics, sports, industry, technology or science. If you are selling smart phones people want to know their various features and advantages over other smart phones.

Different people have different content needs and as a content marketer it’s your job to figure out what they’re looking for. Once you have sorted that out, you need to find out what format your target audience prefers, and tools and services your target audience uses in order to find the content it is looking for.

So content marketing doesn’t just involve publishing lots of content to improve your search engine rankings. It’s primary objectives are

Finding out what content your audience is looking for
Creating content that your audience is looking for
Publishing relevant and topical content as the need arises
Making that content available in a format your audience prefers
Making that content scalable so that it is accessible across multiple devices and platforms
Optimizing that content so that it is easier to find it on search engines
Making it easier and attractive to share that content on social media and social networking websites
Streamlining existing content and producing new content according to rapidly changing preferences of your audience

These may seem like lots of points, but whether you are a big business or small enterprise, in one way or another you can implement these points to drastically cut down your costs on conventional advertising.

The difference between content marketing and content strategy

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There was a time when I used to think that content marketing is a subset of content strategy, but now I believe that both content marketing and content strategy can be subsets and supersets of each other.

You cannot have a successful content marketing campaign without a content strategy, and a well-define content marketing campaign is an integral part of your content strategy.

So, if they are intertwined, what are the defining differences between content marketing and content strategy? What are the key differences?

In simple terms, the insights and data that you get through content strategy, you implement in content marketing. Content strategy gives your content marketing the needed direction. Without this direction, your content marketing turns haphazard and ineffective.

If content marketing consists of publishing regular content, content strategy is knowing what content to publish, what audience to target, and which platforms to use for publishing content.

As mentioned above, content strategy is based on the metrics and the insights that you obtain through analytics, observation, experimentation and third-party data.

Content strategy

What is content strategy?

As mentioned above, our actions must be well thought of if we want to achieve something. Here is what content strategy involves:

Knowing what content to publish and distribute.
Knowing who is your target audience and why?
Clearly defining KPIs.
Knowing how to obtain traffic and engagement data.
Streamlining content publishing based on goals and insights.
Zeroing in on the platforms that you will use to publish and distribute your content.
Establishing an audience engagement policy.
Figuring out which content type or format best suits your content marketing KPIs.

First, you need to know what is the purpose of publishing and distributing content and exactly why you need content marketing? How it can serve your business and help you promote your cause?

To be a successful communicator, you must know whom you’re going to communicate to. You should know your audience, you should know what they want, what they’re looking for, what their concerns are.

Data insight is a great power. When you set in motion your content marketing strategy, you will need to constantly analyze your data so that you can make timely changes.

You need a content writing and content publishing roadmap so that you remain focused and you always know what you’re going to published to cater to your core audience.

Merely publishing content doesn’t help you much these days. This is where content marketing comes in. You need to promote and broadcast your content so that it reaches the maximum number of people. For that you need to shortlist channels that you’re going to use to distribute your content, for example search engines, social networking websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

You also need to constantly engage your audience. Unlike conventional marketing, content marketing involves two-way communication between you and your audience (your customers and clients). Without meaningful and regular engagement it’s difficult to establish a rapport and make yourself more relatable and identifiable.

Content can be of multiple formats and if you have limited budget, you cannot target all the existing formats. For example, you can have written content (content writing, etc.), videos, presentation slides on SlideShare, images on your own blog, Facebook and Pinterest, sketches, infographics and basically, everything that you can use to communicate data and ideas. You may like to do something like content writing or images in the beginning and later on start focusing on other formats of content too.

This basically sums up your content strategy.

Content marketing

Content marketing explained

This involves folding your sleeves and actually getting down to the grind.

Whatever steps you have listed in your content strategy document, you implement during content marketing. Interestingly, there is a reason why there is “marketing” in content marketing.

Yes, sure, you publish targeted content. But, merely publishing content doesn’t bring you success. You need to “market” that content – you need to promote your content so that maximum number of people can access it and are then drawn to your website or blog.

Marketing is a proactive activity. You need to take steps so that the visibility of your content increases. You improve your search engine rankings. You broadcast newsletter updates. You engage audiences on different social media platforms. You closely watch and follow trends and publish content to leverage them. You make sure that you stick to your content calendar.

Why is content marketing important? I mean, why not simply advertise and promote your business the way people have been doing for decades?

There is a reason why a greater number of businesses are adopting content marketing rather than sticking to the old ways of business promotion. People these days don’t like being sold to. They want you to gain their trust. This is done through publishing valuable content.

On the Internet (and in real life) it is not physically possible to interact with thousands of prospective customers and clients on daily basis. Your content on the other hand can do the job seamlessly.

Content marketing is also called inbound marketing. Inbound marketing means your prospective customers and clients come to your website on their own after accessing your content or while trying to access useful information. It is their decision. It is they who find your link somewhere, click the link, and come to your website.

Outbound marketing on the other hand is a traditional form of marketing where you interrupt people while they’re doing something else.

You assume that they are going to be thrilled at receiving your marketing message, whereas this is not the case. People are annoyed when you are urging them to buy from you while they want to watch their favorite movie, or read an interesting blog post, or watch an enchanting cat video. You’re interrupting them, and you’re not just interrupting them, you’re also urging them to part with their money on an item or service that they may need, but right now, psychologically, are not prepared to buy.

Through content marketing you are simply there. You solve their problems. You keep them engaged. You seed conversations. They become familiar to you. They become comfortable to your presence in their lives (or on their screens). The more familiar you become, the more they trust you.

Here is a good definition of content marketing from this Forbes article (slightly old)

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly-defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

What should a small business focus on, content marketing or content strategy?

Frankly, there is no use doing content marketing without content strategy. Without strategy, your content marketing is going to be haphazard. It will be like throwing darts in the darkness. You may succeed, or you may not succeed.

Creating a content strategy may seem intimidating in the beginning, but it is not. Even if you spend 3 hours every month strategizing your content marketing, or at least, this is what I think, especially if you’re a small business, it is more than enough.

What is strategy after all? It is being aware of your environment, analyzing your environment, and then controlling your actions accordingly, to reach your goal.

For example, a strategy has a swot analysis – your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You may already have good content you can leverage by reusing and repurposing. There may be many gaps you need to fill. There may be some really good and useful topics you can write and publish content on. How is your competition faring? What can you do to beat your competition?

Using your analytics data is also a part of your content strategy and based on that you can give a direction to your content marketing efforts. If you use Google Analytics, your dashboard tells you the type of traffic your content is attracting. Is this the right kind of traffic or you need different traffic?

If you’re thinking in these terms, you are already using content strategy to make your content marketing effective.

How to keep on creating fresh content for your content marketing strategy

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One of the greatest hurdles faced by content marketing is creating fresh, engaging content regularly. You need more content to cover possibly every topic under your niche and in order to draw attention to that content from people as well as search engines it needs to be highly relevant, useful and well structured.

When you initiate your content marketing strategy as a serious business it is given that you’re going to pursue quality no matter what. It’s regularity you need to worry about. Some businesses publish new content every day, some prefer it twice or thrice a week, some make it a weekly affair and some even do it once or twice a month. The frequency primarily depends on where you are publishing your content. You might be publishing it under your regular business website, on your blog, on other blogs (guest blogging, for instance), news and analysis websites (Washington Post, Huffington Post, Techcrunch, etc.) or social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Listed below are a few ways you can get a ton of quality content on an ongoing basis.

Maintain an editorial calendar

An editorial calendar keeps you focused and it also helps you know which topics you have already covered, which topics you need to improve upon and where you have to publish more.

As already mentioned a well-managed content marketing strategy requires you to publish content on varied platforms. Just focusing on one publishing platform might not be a good approach. For instance, if you are just publishing high-quality content under your own website it may not get the kind of attention it deserves. You need to spread your content so that it also becomes visible at other places. It means you have to generate content for other blogs (it is called guest blogging), niche publications, article directories, wikis and social networking websites.

Without an editorial calendar keeping track of all these platforms can prove to be a gargantuan task and unless you have a team you won’t be able to focus on all of them on a daily basis. On Facebook and Twitter you will need to be pretty regular as visibility matters a lot there. You can allocate certain days to your own blog and others for external publications. Accordingly you can create topics for your own blog as well as other blogs. You can use an Excel sheet to create your editorial calendar. Some also prefer Google calendar.

Use your existing content to create new content

You can get lots of interesting ideas from your existing content. For instance, I can write a completely new blog post (300-500 words or more) on this very topic – How to create new content from your existing content.

Whenever you cover a topic there are many subtopics that you simply touch upon. They may need further elaboration but it might not be within the scope of the current topic. There might be some bullet points that need blog posts and articles exclusively for themselves. This is also an added advantage. Once you have created content around those words, you can hyperlink to this newly created content from existing articles and blog posts and improve your SEO.

Update and improve your existing content

There is always some scope for improving your existing content and once you have updated it, it is as good as new. Suppose you wrote a blog post in the times of MySpace that might not be relevant today. Either you can mention this in the blog post or make necessary changes.

Maintain an ideas file

Ideas are hard to come by especially when you are sitting and thinking about them. They are random dust motes that need to be captured as soon as they manifest. You can maintain an ideas file to do this. As soon as you get an idea for a new blog post or a new update on Twitter and Facebook, quickly jot it down in your ideas file.

My personal favorite for this is Google Docs because you can access them from any device. This way you don’t necessarily have to be in front of your computer or laptop in case a new idea strikes you. You can use your mobile phone or your tablet to save the idea.

If writing seems to be a problem, you can record your ideas using audio, video and photographs.

Make regular content publishing a part of your thinking process

The more you think the more ideas you get. It’s like building a particular muscle in your body. If you keep using your arms, lifting weights with them, they grow stronger and stronger. In the same manner, if you keep on thinking about different writing topics for your content marketing you will keep on getting new ideas.

Track conversations on Facebook and Twitter

Most of the time it is just gibberish on Facebook and Twitter so you might have to use some tools to track relevant conversations. You can use hash tags; for instance if you want to track conversations on content marketing you may try following the hash tag #contentmarketing. Similarly you can join dedicated pages on Facebook. Pay close attention to the sort of questions people ask and out of those questions try to make new articles and blog posts.

Look for questions and issues in various question/answer forums and websites

Have you ever seen the “Answers” tab in LinkedIn? Similarly have you been following questions on Quora? Try to find out what sort of questions people are asking in your particular niche and then create content around those questions.

Engage your audience

You will be able to engage your audience through your blog as well as social networking profiles. Initially it may take some time but if you post relevant content for a sustained period gradually you will build an audience you will be able to engage with. Ask them questions. Request them to let you know what they would like to read on your blog and what sort of issues they would like you to address.

Follow other blogs and websites

This is an oft-repeated advice. You can get lots of content writing and content publishing ideas from other blogs and websites. Just as you can use your own pre-existing content to create new writing ideas, you can also get ideas from others’ writings.

As already mentioned above, quality as well as persistence is required for a successful content marketing strategy and generating new content writing ideas is as important as having a content strategy in place.

How to help your business stand out with unique content

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importance of unique content

First of all let me make it clear that “unique content” doesn’t mean that you have to get your content writing topics from another galaxy. In many cases multiple people have already written about the topic you are about to write. It becomes unique when you write on it from your perspective, from your point of view, the way it affects your business. That’s what makes it unique.

Publishing unique content on a regular basis

Publishing content – whether you’re doing it on your website or your business blog – regularly is an integral part of your short-term and long-term content marketing strategy. There shouldn’t be long delays in publishing new content. The problem is not writing and publishing, the problem is coming up with unique content ideas non-stop. How do they do that? How do successful bloggers and publishers come up with totally unique ideas day after day, week after week, month after month, and amazingly, year after year?

Whether it’s difficult or easy, it depends on your level of involvement. My personal experience has been, when I am eagerly seeking out new content writing ideas, I get them, and when I don’t, it becomes very hard to write something interesting and unique.

How unique content helps your business stand out

The usual stuff isn’t much interesting. People don’t share it, people don’t seek it and people don’t talk about it.

But does it mean I cannot write on a topic like “How to create killer headlines for your blog posts?” because every copywriter, content writer and blogger on the World Wide Web has had something to say on it?

Not necessarily.

Even if the topic has been beaten to pulp you can still make it unique by giving it your touch and applying your business philosophy on it.

In India there is a corporate motivational guru called Shiv Khera and one of his famous taglines is, “Leaders don’t do different things, they do things differently”.

Normally I don’t relate to this tagline much because I believe doing different things is as important as just being different, but in this context, it can help you create unique content if you present it differently, and by differently I don’t mean simply changing the vocabulary of the article or the blog post, but giving it a twist that only you can give.

Remember that when you’re creating content you want to make an impact. If you’re writing it for your customers and clients, they need to see the inherent message and grasp it in the right manner.

Let’s come back to “How to create killer headlines for your blog posts?”

Normally you would have a bulleted list on how to create great headlines. Now consider these headlines:

Increase your conversion rate by 400% with your headlines
Your blog headlines can make or break your online business
The money is in the headlines
No compelling headlines? Forget doing business

In these three headline options we are basically talking about the same thing – the importance of creating compelling headlines but we’re using different contexts to attract different readers. Some readers would want to know how they can improve their conversion rate, some would like to know how critical they are for the survival of their business, and so on.

You can go on and on. You can talk about the importance of headlines for hospitality business, for a web design business, for a business consulting business, basically everything under the sun.

Add context, write in your own unique style, make it relevant to your readers and you have got yourself unique content that can help your business stand out.