Be a Real Content Provider!

How to Create Quality Blog Content

So… you’ve set up your blog. Now what?  What is going to make you stand out from the rest of the 300 million+ bloggers out there?  

And if you’ve set up a blog specifically to market your business, how do you go about doing that?

Will you blog or vlog or set up a podcast? Will you lean on influencers or become one yourself?

Some excellent ideas for you from choosing the right medium to driving traffic in this well-crafted contributed post. Don’t miss the final section on raising the bar.

Be a Real Content Provider!

Content is king, as this overused expression has been reiterated to us for many years. And, content has been the bread and butter of many different advertising agencies, freelance writers (especially the remote workers) and any company that needs to get their business to transcend up to the next level.

This means that your content has to be of such oustounding quality, that it keeps the interest of customers, clients, and anybody passing by.

So, when it comes to making your content better than average, what is the best approach, not just to the content itself, but how you get it seen and give your business the traffic it deserves?

Creating The Content

The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said. So, when it comes to creating urgent and vital content, the first thing you do need to think about is what format or platform suits your message?

We are very spoilt for choice with regards to the content we have for all sorts of products and services. There are podcasts, blogs, video blogs (vlogs), and these are used effectively as part of an overall marketing campaign for a specific company.

By creating suitable content for your company, this will work to encourage interest from people. But what content platform is suitable?

When it comes to getting your message across, too many companies go for the standard approach of making a blog about the business and update that on a regular basis. Now, as a regular means to update followers, this is great, but when you have to entice people into your company to buy your products, you need something a little bit more.

There are many different approaches to getting your content up to speed, but when choosing the right medium, it isn’t always that clear-cut. This means that you need to have workers who are knowledgeable in different formats.

Many companies now implement a multi-pronged attack by using blogs as a reference point, but also have video blogs and podcasts as options for those people who have the time to invest in the other mediums.

Something like a podcast, for example, is very good for businesses that need to communicate a lot of information; so, something like a health business will be a better approach to getting the information across, because of the various technical terms involved.

The best podcasts out there have notes to go with the show, and this is where you can bring people back to your website, and hit them with insightful content that adds to what your podcast has been discussing. In choosing a podcast, it’s a big ask to have people invest an hour of their time, but the age of the podcast is now. And, with so many people commuting to work on a daily basis, podcasts are the best medium to take advantage of.

Regardless of the medium, the blueprint behind it has to be solid. This means hiring people who are well versed in creating written content for various platforms.

Making your content accessible and emotional are two of the key tenets of endearing people to your business or products, this means hiring people who are well versed in telling stories.

Many businesses make the mistake of hiring people who have background knowledge of the technical aspects. But if you have the time and energy to upskill people on these technicalities, especially when they have a knack for storytelling in the first place, this means you are killing two birds with one stone. These people can weave a tale and create this engaging content that you so desperately need.

Making content engaging is a very difficult task, regardless of the product. But if you have someone who can speak the language of engaging with an audience, by creating this content that transcends barriers, you are going to see a better return on investment.

Getting It Seen

You’ve created the content, and it’s engaging, so now what? Getting up the search engine results ladder is one of the biggest priorities businesses face now. This is why there are so many different approaches and resources out there that are showing people the best way to do it.

However, there are a few fundamentals that need to be in place before getting up the SEO ladder. Getting a distribution strategy in place is a key consideration because that content deserves to be seen widely.

Most people go for the basic approach and sharing it via social media, but your distribution strategy needs to go far beyond this. You might want to be thinking about going via content curation sites, inbound links, as well as bookmarking sites. If the content is universal enough, it will continue to be shared and reassured over and over again. This is the goal for every item of content because this is what will generate more traffic in the end.

Another thing to think of is utilizing the knowledge of influencers in your contacts. Remember, it’s not what you know, but who you know. And while you may not know Bill Gates, by referencing these sorts of touchstones in your work, it immediately puts you in a far better niche.

And while it can be impossible to actually connect with these influencers, by going for the key people in your immediate niche that you can access, this is the perfect way to start a relationship with them that will get your content widely distributed.

For those at the outset of developing a company, this can be very tiresome to get influencers to reply to your messages, and in this respect, you need to play the long game, which doesn’t solve any problems right now. A positive solution in the interim is to hire marketing companies and companies that have specific search engine optimization knowledge.

Undertaking the research into the ones that are suitable for you is a vital component of expanding your company, and sites like Posirank have had many positive reviews, and you can check out these Posirank reviews and see for yourself.

As well as utilizing influencers, you could benefit by becoming one yourself. The way to do this is to get yourself on other sites, as a guest poster.

This benefits your business because you are getting it seen by more people, but also your content is deemed good enough to appear on other websites. By becoming an influencer in your specific field, this is going to encourage others to flock back to your website.

Raising The Bar

This is where it becomes a big mountain of a task. The more people you have clicking on your website and viewing your content, the more professional you need to be. Your next lot of content has to be bigger and better.

This is the biggest challenge in creating content because raising the bar is something that every business has to do, but they tend to focus on consistency instead.  Raising the bar is the essential goal, but this is all about hiring the right people to help raise the game.

Gradually, as your business expands, you can upskill and upscale when it comes to creating content that is more wide-ranging, dynamic, yet also has higher production values, for these are the little touches that will add an extra few listeners or viewers at a time. And that is the key to getting more followers.

You may think about aiming big, but by keeping your content close to the source material, this is where you would organically create a following.

Raising the bar always sounds like a mammoth task, but if you can raise it a little bit at a time, this means you will be serving the content with a keen eye, meaning that you won’t be tempted by the decision to be as general with your content as possible.

Many websites now take this general approach and have varying subject matters covered, for example, money saving on a beauty blog. But while this is arguably a common sense approach to earning a living, this means that you will never escape out of this “consistency” idea, and will forever have the same amount of traffic come to your website.

This is where content comes into its own. There are still fundamental approaches to making your content accessible, and these have never changed. There are many SEO techniques you can implement but the fundamentals are always the same.

The goal is always making your content better than the average content provider, but this is all about a long process, one where you find your voice, and utilize this voice in conjunction with the best distribution methods you can find, which, in the end, is all about who you know.

So, by making your content vital and indispensable, your business will gain more followers, and more people will buy your products. Sometimes, if you are struggling to find the followers, you might need to go back to the basics. These basics have always been in place, and they always will be in place, for evermore.

Feature Image Credit – Pexels

Shoo, so much food for thought. I felt challenged by this post to go back and look at my own content and see where I can improve. I’ve also been dabbling in my first few attempts at vlogging and considering setting up a podcast for a while.  Perhaps I should consider this as a project for 2018.

What’s your Content Strategy for the coming year? Are you planning to raise the bar?