Have you heard of content marketing?

If you’re a business owner who’s been researching ways to grow your business online, you’ve heard the term before.

The questions you probably have are:

• What is content marketing exactly? – Many publications online throw the term around a bit, but it’s important to understand the true definition of content marketing and how it works
• How does content marketing work? – This post will dive deep into the deep ‘how-to’ and step by step methods for building an effective content marketing strategy.
• Will it work for my business? – The short answer? Content marketing works for all businesses when it’s done right. Don’t worry, we’ll show you the light.

This post contains the most comprehensive list of content marketing tips on the entire internet. We provided this giant list to give you every option possible to make smart decisions for your business.

Before we dive into the tips, let’s answer the questions above.

What is content marketing?

Here’s the definition of content marketing from the content marketing institute:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Put simply, content marketing is a tool to grow your business. 

If your efforts aren’t leading to your desired outcome — engagement, leads, or sales — your strategy isn’t working.

Unsuccessful marketers focus on vanity metrics — analytics that do nothing more than boost your ego.

Successful markets focus on leading their customers through the sales process from start to finish and improve their efforts until the entire process works.

How Does Content Marketing Work?

You begin a successful campaign by answering the following questions:

• Who is my target audience?
• What does my target audience want?
• How does my target audience interact with content online?
• What types of content drive the desired behavior and results of the customer?
• How can we create engaging content for readers that also meets digital marketing standards?
• What is the best way to lead customers through the sales process?

And taking the following actions:

• Perform target audience and keyword research
• Create an initial content strategy
• Produce content regularly
• Iterate

When you create you create an implement your strategy, you want to track and refine it over time to optimize your results.

Stick with us…

We’ll walk you through tips to answer all these questions and act on the information as soon as possible.

Will Content Marketing Work for My Business?

This question bugs you the most, doesn’t it?

You’re a forward-thinking business owner or marketer. We know this because you’re here searching for useful information.

But, deep down, you might wonder if content marketing will produce results for your business? 

Maybe you think you’re in a ‘boring industry.’

Maybe you’re worried about return on investment — is dumping money, time, and resources into your content going to pay off? How can you truly know if it’s paying off? The ROI of content strategies is notoriously hard to track, but there are ways you can do it.

Content marketing works.

It can work for your business.

It’s nothing more than a tool. It’s up to you or the digital marketing agency you work with to use it the right way.

Side note: If you’re working with a digital marketing agency, ask them how their strategies are going to help your business improve its bottom line. Really, drill down on that question because great agencies can answer that question and bad ones can’t.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s go over the tips. Feel free to jump around and find ones you think will work for you.

Create a Customer Avatar

Question for you — do you know who your ideal customer is? Do you know his or her hopes, fears, desires, and frustrations? Can you paint a vivid picture of them in your mind?

You need to know your target audience with pinpoint accuracy and a customer avatar can help you define your audience. With a defined audience, you can create targeted strategies.

Some questions you can use to build your customer avatar are:

• What keeps them up at night? Finding your target audience’s deep pain points and frustrations can help you highlight them with copywriting and provide solutions
• What are their hopes and dreams? You need to know what your client aspires to, not just in terms of your product, but their life in general. This way, you can tie in your product or service with their lifestyle, which builds trust and shows empathy
• What end result will your product fulfill for them? There’s a classic marketing quote that goes, “When people buy a drill, they don’t want a drill. They want a hole.” Make your marketing fit that mantra
• What other solutions may they have tried?

With this information in hand, you can create a targeted avatar. Then, you use the avatar to write content for your ideal customer. This makes the reader feel like you’re speaking to them personally.

Use This Word Often

This subtle change can skyrocket the results of your content strategy.

The change? Use the word ‘you’ more often.

When you use the word ‘you’ instead of phrases like ‘our customers’ ‘our client’ and [xxxx], you show an investment in the person on the other side of the screen.

Most companies talk about themselves way too much.

Your customers want to know what you can do for them. Keep your content focused on their needs at all times.

Paint the Picture

Imagine you’re at your computer right now.

You receive a notification with a new lead or sale.

Your phone is ringing off the hook with customers calling after finding your company on Google.

Minutes later, you get another notification from your company blog. A reader just commented, “Wow. This is the best content I’ve ever seen. I’m bookmarking it to re-read.”

You think to yourself, “I wished I’d started sooner,” and you’re feeling the same rush of emotions you felt when you hit previous milestones in your business.

And most importantly, when tracking your revenue, you’re seeing numbers that make you wide-eyed.

These are the results you can expect from a successful content marketing campaign.

Now, read the next few sentences:

Our company provides digital marketing solutions, SEO, and web design. We can help your company reach a broader audience online, engage with them, and produce positive results.

One sentence says what the company does. The other paints a picture of how the customer will feel after you’ve transformed part of their life.

Check out the way Ramit Sethi uses the paint the picture technique on his sales page for a personal improvement course:

Read Your Customer’s Mind

Want an easy way to figure out exactly what your customers are thinking and make them feel like you’re reading their mind?

Here’s how you do it:

• Research – Read product reviews on sites like Amazon, Quora, Yelp, Google reviews, and Facebook reviews.
• Highlight – Find the phrases customers use over and over
• Become a psychic – Use their exact words in your copy

Use These Tricks to Measure Content ROI

If you want to get an idea of how much revenue your campaigns drive, use these techniques:

• Goal tracking – Most ad and analytics solutions provide goal tracking, which measures how many times users perform a desired action, e.g., buy your product, call, or enter a contact form
• Set $ values – Create a dollar value amount per the desired action. A sale is overt, but you can also measure (on average) how much your leads are worth.
• Compare – Using methods like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV) you can measure how profitable your leads are.

Don’t be a One Trick Pony

Use different forms of media as part of your content strategy.

When it comes to content marketing, content means much more than the written word.

Other great mediums are:

• Video
• Infographics
• Images
• Audio
• Slideshare presentations
• Paid PPC ads

Elements of Style

Copywriting and blogging aren’t the same as academic writing.

When you write for web, use these elements of style to keep your reader moving down the page:

• Short sentences
• Headings (H1, H2, H3)
• Bullet points
• Add media in between sections to break up the copy

The Yoast SEO plugin provides a ‘readability score’ to make your content easy to read online:

Use the Skyscraper Technique

The skyscraper technique is simple.

Here’s what you do:

• Find the best piece of content about a subject
• Write a piece of content that’s 10X better
• Reach out to people who linked to and shared the other article and show them yours

The creator of this tactic, Brian Dean, uses it to rank for tough to beat keywords like “Google Ranking Factors.”

Optimize for Click Through Rates

When you perform on-site SEO for your website, you will create a unique meta description that will appear on search engines.

You want to add relevant key phrases to your meta description to rank highly in Google and you also want to make sure your description is compelling. 

Why? Because Google’s new Rank Brain algorithm prioritizes click-through rates, meaning they will rank a site with lower authority, but a higher click-through rate than its competitors.

In this post, Neil Patel describes techniques you can use to research your current site pages and optimize them for CTR.

Map Your Content to Lead Customers to the Sales Process

Each customer is at a different awareness stage when they discover your business. They may be unaware of their problem, aware of their problem and wondering if you can solve it, aware of your problem and believe you can solve it, or ready to do business with you because they’re convinced you can solve it.

Leading your customers from lead to customer involves guiding them through the process step-by-step with different pieces of content:

• Whitepapers
• Blog posts
• Videos
• Infographics
• Landing pages
• Service pages

To create an effective content funnel, anticipate which stage of awareness your customer will be at when you create a piece of content and use that content to guide them through to the next step.

Write For Humans, Not Search Engines

While you do want to create content search engines love, you must create content people love too. Google is trending toward prioritizing the user’s experience over the standard SEO techniques.

Writing content people want to read also provides these SEO and digital marketing benefits:

• Longer ‘time spent’ on page (a positive ranking factor)
• Lower bounce rates (a negative ranking factor)
• Social sharing
• Higher engagement
• Better conversions
• Brand awareness through word of mouth

Find Your Citations

If your business has been around for a while, chances are people have mentioned it online. When someone mentions your business online, it counts as a citation for your business. Consider a citation a vote of confidence.

You can search for your citations online and reach out to those who have mentioned you and ask them for a link.

Moz created a detailed guide for finding your citations and getting links from people who already love your business.

Create a Welcome Series for Your Company

Email marketing is still one of the top tools you can use to grow your business with content marketing.

To bond with your customer and lead them through the funnel of education to sale, you can create a welcome series. 

A welcome series provides automated emails that send out in sequence based on when a new lead signs up for your email list.

Sending them an introductory welcome email creates an instant connection, helps customers remember your brand, and creates familiarity when you send them new messages:

This infographic from Spark Page shares excellent details and step for creating the perfect welcome series:

Beef Up Your Content

Numbers don’t lie. And the numbers say long-form content ranks best on Google.

Industry standards used to say the key length per page was 300-500 words, but new data shows the top-ranked content online usually has 1800-2000 words:

When you create long form content, aim to make it the best content about the chosen topic period. You also want to choose an evergreen topic, meaning the topic will be relevant for years to come.

Epic content takes time and effort, which is why it works so well. Few people are willing to put that much effort into their content and the ones who do run laps around the competition.

Use Search Display and Facebook Ads to Gain New Leads

Most companies think about ads the wrong way. Ads aren’t just a tool to get users to buy right away. You can also use ads to draw in casual readers and move them through the stages of awareness we mentioned earlier.

If a customer doesn’t know or trust you, they won’t click on an ad to buy your product or service right away. If, however, you use ads to provide them with something useful, interesting, and free to get their attention, you can build the trust you’ll need to market to them later. Check out these awesome examples of companies using ads to connect with users:

Emma

Hubspot

Think Long Term

Content marketing requires patience to see the fruits of your efforts.

It may take several months to a year for your post or page to rank on page #1 for Google.

An SEO campaign isn’t considered mature until the one year mark. When you work on a content strategy, think about your long term engagement, sales, and traffic goals then work backward to create a strategy that fits.

When creating a content marketing strategy, think of how you can not only gain a customer but keep them for life. An effective content marketing strategy not only lands new customers but continues to remind them why they purchased in the first place.

Ways to increase engagement for the long with customers and prospects are:

• Blogging consistently
• Email marketing (both sales and engagement-oriented)
• Remarketing ads
• Special offers
• Active social media

Use This Powerful Ranking Signal

Collecting as many reviews and testimonials from customers and clients has multiple benefits:

• Google uses reviews as a ranking signal
• Reviews provide ‘social proof’ which show potential customers why they should trust you.

According to research from Bright Local, 91 percent of people surveyed said they read reviews (at least occasionally) and 84 percent say they trust reviews as much as their own friends.

Republish Your Content

You may have heard that duplicate content is a definite no-no. As it turns out, that’s not exactly true.

You can republish your content on other websites as long as you identify the original piece of content with a rel: canonical tag.

Some platforms, like Medium, have this import function built right into the platform:

Even top Google engineer, Matt Cutts, explains how many forms of duplicate content don’t harm your SEO:

Harness the Power of Guest Blogging

Guest blogging on authoritative websites helps you gain quality backlinks, send traffic back to your website, build your email list, and increase your brand awareness.

That is if you do it right.

The aforementioned Google engineer once declared that guest blogging was dead, but he meant that spammy guest blogging was dead.

Given you find a reputable website and create legitimate and useful content, guest blogging is still a top white hat technique businesses can use.

Some great articles on guest blogging are:

Guest Blogging – The Definitive Guide

The Essentials of Guest Blogging Strategy for SEO 

Don’t Build on Rented Land

There are many great third party tools and websites you can use to aid your content marketing efforts.

You don’t, however, want to build your business on someone else’s property. This is called digital sharecropping.

Let’s say you decided to add all of your content only to Facebook instead of your own website. If Facebook decides to change its terms of service or delete your page, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Companies like Facebook change their rules all the time. Relying on third parties alone is a dangerous strategy.

Having your own dedicated online real estate and using long term strategies like SEO and email marketing will ensure your content efforts don’t go to waste.

Use Influencer Marketing to Build Your Brand

Influencer marketing is the process of leveraging the fame of celebrities to promote your product. This extends further beyond typical “A-List” celebrities like actors, rock stars, and comedians. There is a large number of social media influencers out there — people who are only famous through their social media platforms — that you can work with to promote your product. Neil Patel has a great guide on launching an influencer marketing campaign.

Spy on Your Competition

There’s a simple recipe you can use to beat out your competition on search engines:

• Find out what your competitors are doing well
• Do it much better than them

You can use tools like Ahrefs and Buzz Sumo to figure out how your competitors use content marketing. Once you have data on the type of content they create, where their links and engagement come from, and the level of depth they put into their content, you can create better content on the same topics and reach out to everyone who engaged with their content.

It’s that simple.

Create a Maze to Keep Your Readers on Your Website

You can use what’s known as the Wiki Strategy to improve our SEO and keep readers on your website longer.

Here’s a condensed version of the strategy (follow the link to see full):

• Create the best content online
• Link to reputable sources in your content – Wikipedia is a heavily cited and linked website. Meaning that you never have to leave Wikipedia to find more information. You want to create the same effect with your linking strategy
• Find experts to contribute to your site to build the catalog
• Promote your content
• Track your progress
• Repeat

Conclusion

These are just a few of the many content marketing tips you can use to grow your business.

What are some of your favorites?

What have you tried?

Tell us what has worked (or what hasn’t)/

Content creation is the life-blood of any content marketing campaign.

The problem? Content creation can be difficult.

If you don’t use the right strategies, you can waste time and money.

There’s no shortage of companies who’ve tried to do content marketing themselves or hired someone to do it that didn’t get great results.

The question is – how can you make content marketing and SEO work for your business?

How do you know what content to create?

How can you invest in content creation and ensure you get a return on investment (ROI) — even though this is harder to track than metrics like cost per click?

If you’re opting to work with an agency, how can you be sure they’ll deliver?

This guide is meant to be the end-all-be-all when it comes to creating content for your business.

Before we go deep into strategy, you have to get this next part right. In fact, the next section alone will make or break your success.

The Mindset You Need to Become a Content Creation Expert

People don’t talk about this often.

It’s easy enough to read blogs about content marketing.

Doing it and doing it well is a different story.

The funny thing? Content marketing isn’t hard, per se. It’s time-consuming, requires consistency, and only works after you spend a lot of time, effort, and money creating content.

Even if you don’t write the content yourself and hire an agency do to it, realize that not all agencies are created equal.

In fact, the sad truth is that many of them will write “me too” content that doesn’t move the needle. Agencies can be just as guilty at failing to live by the rules of successful content creators.

Rule # 1 – Write 10x, World-Dominating, Head And Shoulders Above the Competition Content

Here’s a guaranteed hack that’ll help you rank better on search engines:

Write content that’s 10x better than your competition.

How can you do this?

Make your content longer and more in-depth:

Add media to your blog posts to make them stand out:

Add novel insights and contradict the advice of your competitors:

Use this Simple Framework to Beat Your Competition:

• Study all the competitor results on the search engine results page (SERP)
• Note what the ranking pages do well and implement the same techniques in your content
• Note what’s missing from your competitor’s content and add it to your content
• Aim to create a piece of content that’s 10x better than your competition

This technique is known as the Skyscraper Technique.

Again, this is about the mindset behind SEO. You can think all you want about using a strategy like the Skyscraper Technique, but actually doing it is about 100x harder than reading a blog post about it.

Rule # 2 – Prepare For Obstacles in Advance

Roadblocks are inevitable.

You’ll write content constantly without getting the results you expected.

You’ll invest money that doesn’t pay off in rankings and traffic right away.

At a certain point, you’ll wonder if content marketing is right for your business.

Spoiler alert: it is, but you need the right mindset to make it work.

Here are some simple ways to prepare for these roadblocks in advance:

• Plan, plan, plan – From keyword research to creating a content strategy, to adding time-blocks on your calendar to work on content, the more you prepare, the easier content creation will be.
• Wait – If you decided to commit to content marketing for a year, wait a year before you judge the success of the campaign. Sure, make adjustments along the way, but commit to seeing the strategy out first before you throw in the towel.
• Why – Remember why you started creating content (or hired someone) in the first place. You wanted to grow your business, build your brand, and connect with more people. Focusing on your “why” can help you persist when times get tough.

Rule #3 – Quality and Quantity

As mentioned in Ahrefs guide about the top SEO creators, they had this to say about Natan Gotch with Gotch SEO:

He consistently puts out HUGE, in‐depth guides. Some are even custom designed.

I’ve seen at least one of his posts garner 750+ comments.

The downside? Putting together such massive guides clearly isn’t the easiest job ever, as Nathan only publishes one post per month on average. Regardless, Nathan is undoubtedly one to watch.

On the flipside, blogs like Search Engine Journal produce multiple blog posts per day.

Both strategies work. Not only that, but quality and quantity don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

A few dozen posts per year provide excellent quantity if all the posts make up for it in quality. Also, you can create great-but-not-insanely-long guides at a faster pace and rank well, too.

There are no one-size fits all solutions.

Use these benchmarks instead:

• The harder it is to rank for a keyword, the longer and more in-depth your content should be
• The higher your site authority, the more chance you have of ranking for competitive keywords
• The lower your site authority, the more you want to focus on creating lots of content that target low to medium competition keywords

Don’t “Try to Become a Thought Leader” Do This Instead

Thought leadership is a hot topic. 

What does it mean?

If you’re a thought leader, it means you’re one of the “go-to experts” in your space.

Content creation is a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader, but not if you focus on becoming one.

Right now, you should focus on creating the best content you possibly can.

You should promote your content and connect with people in your niche.

Do this for a long enough time, and you’ll earn the right to be called a thought leader. It will be self-evident.

Content marketing has created an awesome path for anyone to demonstrate their expertise.

Sadly, the majority of content creators focus on the prize instead of just doing the work.

Just do the work. Do it often.

The traffic, sales, and admiration will come later.

Don’t worry about those for now.

Now, stick with us to learn about the nuts and bolts of a solid content creation strategy.

Keyword Research 101

Keywords are the life-blood of a content creation campaign.

Have you ever typed something into Google looking for an answer, a location, a service, etc? Those phrases you type in are keywords.

When you do keyword research, you’re looking to find the right phrases to use in the content you create.

So what qualifies as a good keyword?

Here are some good benchmarks to follow:

Search Intent

The keywords you target your content around should match a goal you have for your business. You want to make sure that someone who types in that keyword will be happy to find your site and you’ll be happy they landed there.

We’ll use an example from our industry. We could create content around the keyword “SEO” but it’s a broad and vague keyword. Someone searching for the keyword SEO might be a curious browser, not someone who’s serious about working with an SEO agency.

Something like “content marketing services” matches our goals better. A person searching for that is at least interested in learning about a service we provide.

Or take this blog post, which we targeted around words like “content creation” and “quality SEO content.” Not everybody who reads this post will want to work with us, but that’s not the point. We provide education about SEO and content marketing so that you either:

• Decide to work with us
• Decide to take our recommendations and use them on your own

Both are good options because they meet our overall goal: being a leader in content marketing and SEO. Helping people for free is a big part of reaching that goal, so creating quality content for free is part of our strategy (and will likely be part of yours too)

Competition

Different niches have different levels of competition.

Marketing is, to say the least, a very competitive space. We’re competing with all the marketing blogs in the world.

If you’re a local plumber in, say, Wichita Kansas, your strategy will be different because your competition will be different.

We will talk about the steps to keyword research shortly, but let’s look at some of the ways you can size up the competition as part of your content creation efforts.

Site Authority

Google doesn’t outright tell us who’s site is the most authoritative.

There are third-party tools that give you a pretty good idea though.

Here’s a screenshot from a tool we like to use, Ahrefs:

Authority Score 101

Take a look at the two numbers on the right, UR and DR. Here is the explanation of what these scores measure directly from Ahrefs:

Domain Rating is a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality).

URL Rating (UR) shows the strength of a target page’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with latter being the strongest. Both internal and external links are taken into account when calculating this metric

Domain Rating

Every page on your website has the same Domain Rating (DR) that are based on a few things:

• Linking root domains – This just means the total number of websites that link to you. 3 links from three different websites are better than 3 links from the same website. Make sense? Ok good.
• Authority of the linking root domains – Quality beats quantity here. 1 link from a high authority domain can be more important than many links from low-quality websites
• Link profile – A link profile is all the links you have on your website + how they are linked. A good example to help you understand: a link from a medium authority domain that links out to a handful of other websites can be better than a high authority domain that links out to a ton of other sites. The authority of the whole site, in a way, gets split up by the total number of links. This concept is called “link juice.”

URL Rating

Each page on your website has its own unique URL rating (UR).

Here’s how to think about this. Website pages show up on Google, not entire websites.

Here’s a page on our website that ranks on page one in the search engine results page (SERP):

Google wants the best pages to show up on the SERP for a query (what people type into the search bar). In this case, it’s providing results for people who search for things like “Minneapolis SEO” “Minneapolis SEO company” “Minneapolis SEO agency” etc.

So instead of looking for which websites have the best information about these topics, Google chooses individual pages to show up on the results page.

One of the factors it uses is the authority of individual pages that are targeted for “Minneapolis SEO.”

This authority is measured by UR.

Some of the factors that affect UR are:

• Linking root domains to the page – Each website that links to this exact page – https:/www.mltgroup.com/minneapolis-seo.php boosts the authority of the page itself
• Linking root domain authority – You want to get links from pages with high DR and UR pointing to pages you want to rank on Google
• Internal links – Internal links are links from one page of a website to another page of a website. Why is this important? Internal linking tells Google, “Hey, this page is important!” When you create a page you want to rank, you should link to it from lots of other pages on your website. This screenshot shows how this structure can work

Via – Moz

How to Use These Scores

When you’re doing keyword research, you want to think about the authority of the pages who rank for the keywords you’re trying to target.

It’s not an exact science, but here are some rough guidelines:

• Low authority sites/pages – If you have a newer website that doesn’t have much authority yet, you want to first focus on keywords that have low to medium authority themselves (low = 10-30)
• Medium authority sites/pages – As you create and promote content over time, your site authority increases, making it easier to rank for more competitive keywords (medium = 30-50)
• High authority sites/pages – If you publish and promote great content over a long period of time, you can start to rank for highly competitive keywords. High competitive keywords usually get more total traffic volume, which means the number of people who search for that keyword in a month. You will need to write the best quality content possible to rank for these terms (high = 50+).

Other Site Authority Considerations and Tools

Site authority is just one of many metrics you can use to gauge your chances of ranking a page on Google.

Just because your site pages have lower authority than others doesn’t mean you can’t rank them. You just have to go the extra mile to beat out the others.

Here are some ways you can do that:

• Write 10x content
• Get a handful of top quality backlinks. Nathan Gotch has an excellent backlink guide you can use to get started
• Use smart outbound links. We will talk about this in more depth, but the quality of the links you put on your pages that link to other sources can help your page rank, too
• Be bold. You won’t succeed in content marketing unless you’re willing to do what others won’t. Sometimes you have to think outside of the box and over deliver. A great example of this: Neil Patel spent tens of thousands of dollars and essentially wrote a book worth of content to rank for “online marketing“

Keyword Research Essentials

Keyword research is a topic that can go into great depth. Here are the cliff notes of a great keyword strategy and some excellent resources you can use to learn more:

• Steal your competitor’s keywords – With tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEM Rush you can plug your competitor’s URLs into their dashboards to see what keywords they already rank for. Then, you can create better versions of their content to outrank them 🙂
• Good old fashioned brainstorming – You know what products and services you sell. You also have an idea of what words people might use to search for products and services in your niche. Start with those as a baseline. Take a pen and pad, write ideas down, and cross-check with keyword research tools
• Make up your own damn keywords – If you have a unique strategy or insight that helps people in your niche, create content about it and make up a name for your strategy. It’s a nice hack you can use to get on page 1 fast. Some people go as far as to give their companies a unique name. As their brand gets recognized, they create a total keyword volume out of thin air! Remember earlier when we said to be creative? This is an example of what we meant.

Keyword Research Resources and Tools

The basics are enough to get you started, but if you’re looking for more in-depth resources to start your content creation campaign, these guides will be a ton of help:

• Keyword research for SEO: the Definitive Guide
• How to Do Keyword Research: the Beginner’s Guide to SEO
• How to do Keyword Research for SEO

Here are some keyword research tools that we didn’t already mention:

• The Ultimate SEO Tool: Ubersuggest 3.0
• The Google Keyword Planner
• Wordstream

Remember those unique ‘thin air’ keywords we talked about earlier? Here are some cool examples you can model:

• The Skyscraper Technique
• The Wiki Strategy
• Fizzle (company name example)

Market Research 101

On top of doing keyword research, you can perform market research to make your content even better.

Part of this research involves studying your competition.

The other part involves studying your potential customers and people in your target audience.

Study the SERP

We wanted to rank this post for keywords like “quality content” and “SEO” content.

When studying the SERP and the blog posts we found, we noticed a few things in common between the posts and saw ways to create something better.

First, we noticed most of the posts used short tips and tidbits on how to create quality content that was a bit vague:

If you wanted to create content using these tips, you’d have a general idea, but not a step by step process or useful resources.

That’s why we put together step by step information with screenshots, resources,  and concrete processes you can use right now to create quality content yourself (and if you don’t have the time, our company will use this exact process for your business.)

We also noticed the posts talked (mostly) about ways to impress Google. 

Yes, you have to optimize your content for search engines, but your number one goal is creating content your visitors find useful.

In a later section, you’ll see our step by step process for creating user-focused content.

A final, and really important item, we saw missing was a lack of focus on the content creators themselves.

Nowhere did we find tips on the mindset and tools you need to be a successful content creator.

Or, for business owners looking for content creation help, we didn’t see any tips on finding the right type of agency or content marketer to work with. We included sections on both in our guide.

Studying the SERPs is just one of a few important tasks for content creation.

Stick with us to discover the true keys to content marketing success…

Use The World’s Largest Customer Research Center

If your business doesn’t have a product, service, or content related to something on Amazon, you have a very obscure niche.

Amazon reviews offer great insights you can use to create content.

We looked at some books on content marketing to see what readers thought about books on creating quality content:

Even though we’re writing a single post, we can use insights from book reviews to help make our post more useful.

We looked for 3-star reviews, which usually have a good mix of praise and criticism. We found some interesting insights.

Some readers were looking for relatable ideas for their kind of business instead of the “create epic content to grow a massive company” style content you often see:

This led to us creating a section with examples and scenarios for normal small and medium-sized business owners.

We also noticed many comments about formatting and ease of use for finding information:

We added a table of contents, FAQ section, and worked to make our in-depth guide as simple to read as possible.

We also noticed a theme where readers didn’t feel the content was catered to their experience level:

In our tips section, you’ll see sections for different skill levels.

Customer Research With Quora

Quora is a question and answer platform. Users ask questions about a wide range of subjects. You can plug keywords into Quora to see what questions people are aking in your niche. You can use these insights to create content that answers people’s questions, which can help your posts rank better on Google (remember Google likes user-focused content).

Digging through Quora, we found this question, which led to us creating a section with our top recommended tools:

With the keywords and insights in hand, you can start to plan for the different types of content you can create for your business’s website.

Different Types of Content You Can Create

Different types of content require different strategies to be successful.

If you’re a content marketer (or you’ve hired an SEO agency to help you out), it’s important to know what goal each type of content serves.

If you want to get technical about it, there are lots and lots of different categories content can fit into.

For this guide, we’ll focus on the basics (pro tip: mastering the basics is often better than trying all techniques at once.)

Blog Posts

You’re reading a blog post right now.

Why? Probably because you’re looking for information to help you create your own content or insights you can use to get somebody to do it for you.

Either way, you’re here because you need or want information.

If you don’t think this post is going to deliver what you want, you’ll leave.

If you think the post does deliver want, you’ll read through the whole post, maybe sign up to get even more marketing tips, or reach out to us directly because you want our help.

We write blog posts to educate people about content marketing and SEO.

We want our content to be so in-depth and useful that you can implement the strategies on your own.

Why? Because we’re building our brand as content experts. Getting every single person who reads our posts to buy our services would be nice, but that’s not our goal. Done strategically, creating a company blog can help your business stand out as an industry leader.

Blog Post Best Practices

If you want your blog to be successful, it has to hit certain benchmarks like:

• Content length – Studies show a correlation between blog post length and rankings. The longer your post the better – as long as the content is useful. (As Rand Fishkin points out in his Whiteboard Friday Episode there is no *perfect* content length)
• Intent – Search intent means people who visit your blog post get what they’re expecting. Study the posts that rank well for your target keyword to get insights on intent.
• Optimized – Each blog post you write must be optimized for a certain topic or keyword to rank on Google.
• Media – Pictures, videos, infographics, and other forms of media keep readers on the page longer. “Dwell time” is a ranking factor search engines use.

With these benchmarks in mind, focus on the content marketing done in your industry. Blog styles and formats vary from industry to industry.

A simple recipe that works for any industry, though: study the blog posts your competitors create and make your content undeniably better.

Service/Product Pages

Services and product pages have a simple goal: get people to buy or request more information.

Your service and product pages should be more focused and, for lack of a better word, aggressive than your blog posts.

Each services page should include:

A Unique Selling Proposition or Tag Line

You have to provide reasons why your product or service is better than the others and communicate it well.

Look at content marketing expert Neil Patel’s service page for his agency, Neil Patel Digital:

He does a couple things well here. The call to action at the top of the page is simple, straightforward, and compelling at the same time. Who doesn’t want more traffic?

On top of that, he displays logos of the companies he’s worked with. Why? Two persuasion techniques are used here: social proof and the power of association.

Social proof is basically evidence of why something is good, e.g., positive book reviews. Us humans like to know other people trust a brand or product before we purchase it. Then there’s the association bias.

Whenever you can, it’s smart to associate yourself with other trusted brands. Who doesn’t know Facebook, Google, and eBay? Neil leverages his partnerships with these companies and it’s persuasive because they’re so well known.

Highlight the Benefits of Your Product/Service

Content creation often boils down to one question:

What’s in it for me?

All the content on your product and services pages should answer that question.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes for a second. Say they visit one of your services pages and the first paragraph they see is something boring about how your company “was founded in 1965 in a one-room shack” or whatever.

Does that information really drive decision-making? Perhaps, but more often than not business owners use their service and product pages the wrong way – to talk about themselves and talk about the features of their services instead of the benefits.

Nobody cares about the fact your riding mower has x, y, and z capabilities. They care that your lawn mower mows lawns faster!

Focus on the benefits your product or service provides.

As the famous saying goes, “People don’t buy drills, they buy holes.”

Look at this example from Legion Athletics. On a product page for one of their supplements, they start the page by addressing the problem and providing solutions in the form of benefits:

They list all the features of the product on the bottom of the page. Much more time is spent on highlighting the benefits of the product and the transformation it will provide people who buy it.

This is how smart marketing works.

Other Considerations

Many of the guidelines for creating great blog content apply to creating product/service pages:

• Content length – Your content has to be as long or longer than the competition to rank. For product/service pages, use images to “break up” the words on the page
• Media – See how the video was used in the example above? Adding media to your product/service pages can make them more persuasive and keep people on your pages longer.
• Optimization – You’ll need to do keyword research and optimize your product/service pages, too. You can use modifiers to get more clicks like “Buy” “Discount” “20% off” “Free Trial” etc.
• Calls to Action – Make sure to prompt readers to either buy or learn more about your product/service in an overt way (see screenshot below)

Landing Pages

When we use the phrase landing pages, we’re talking about highly-target pages that provide readers two options:

• Engage by signing up or buying
• Leave

You won’t see menus on these pages. You won’t see any links pointing you somewhere else.

These pages are focused.

Landing pages are often used to get e-mail subscribers.

Let’s say you’re running Facebook Ads to get more customers. The last thing you want is to spend money, have them click on your ad, and then leave without subscribing.

This is why most landing pages make it crystal clear what they want you to do next:

This is a landing page Leanne Regalla used to get more subscribers from her guest post.

She used this call to action at the end of the post, which directed people to the landing page shown above:

The page itself displays benefits and has a dead-obvious call to action.

How to Write Copy for Landing Pages

You only have a split-second to get someone’s attention when they visit your landing page. If your offer doesn’t compel them fast, they will leave.

How do you get them to convert?

You have to make an offer so good they can’t refuse it.

You can do this in a few ways.

Create a Compelling Headline

This example uses the word “free” highlights how valuable the offer is (16 parts) and speaks to the results you’ll get from signing up and using it:

Via Henneke Duistermaat at Enchanting Marketing

Use Bullet-Points to feature the persuasive benefits your offer provides:

Via Meera Kothand 

And Make Sure You Make it Clear What to Do Next:

Other (Optional) Forms of Content

Content means more than the written word.

Other forms of content exist and are useful. We focused on written content creation for this post because it’s a core type of content you must master.

Once your content marketing campaign is in full swing, you can try other formats to pour gasoline on the fire.

Video

Video can be an excellent content marketing tool. Some people prefer visual content to written because…they don’t like to read all that much! No worries, video is a great way to repurpose your content. Each blog post you publish can be transformed into a video. Each video can be broken up into smaller pieces and shared on platforms like Instagram. You can take one video and feature it across multiple platforms like Youtube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Some great in-depth guides on using video are:

• Video SEO: The Definitive Guide
• The Secret Guide to Video and SEO
• How to Repurpose Video Content Across Multiple Platforms

Social Media

One blog post can be turned into several content pieces you can use on social media.

Some examples are:

• Sharing links to your post across all social channels
• Making quote-cards with visual displays of quotes from your content
• Sharing video content across social media platforms
• Adding click-to-tweet buttons from your content that share highlighted quotes instantly

There is a lot you can do with social media and content marketing. So much so that there are awesome guides solely dedicated to that process. Check them out:

• How to Repurpose Top Content for Social Media Posts
• 12 Social Media Promotion Ideas You’re Not Using

Conclusion

Content creation can help you grow your business, but only with the right strategies, tools, insights, and effort.

What do you think?

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