Category: Create Content that Sells

Content marketing is all about creating high quality, relevant content that your prospects will respond to, but don’t be fooled; there are more ways to build successful campaigns than just with article or blog content.

When just starting out in content marketing, you’ll likely hear that your focus should be on creating content that will drive the most traffic to your website, maximizing your exposure, but if you want to build truly successful campaigns, you must make sure that your campaigns convert that traffic into either return customer’s, leads, or sales.

If you are basing your content marketing on articles alone, you should consider switching gears, and start focusing on additional content formats that will generate a positive response from those who visit your site. Providing prospects with different content types will satisfy all visitors, rather than those who only wish to read text-based content.  

So, what do you need to do?

You need to jack your campaigns up so that you are tapping into all of the most powerful content formats and really drill down into what your niche market really wants from you.

Makes sense, right?

The purpose of creating highly-informative, engaging and interactive content that will compel visitors into clicking on your purchase links, signing up for your newsletter or successfully completing another action that will likely result in a sale is all that really matters. That’s where your focus needs to lie, and the easiest way to achieve that is to expand your outreach by providing the types of content your readers want most.

The great news is that content marketing is one of the easiest ways to connect with your prospects, especially if you have a pulse on your market and know exactly what visitor is most interested in.  

So, why do so many content marketers struggle to generate traffic and sales from their content marketing campaigns?

Out of the dozens of content marketing strategies that we’ve evaluated over the years, one thing stood out to me time and time again: so many marketers were focusing on just one type of content!  And for the most part, that was the written word.

This included articles, reports and newsletters that offer regular content to those who subscribe. 

Now don’t get me wrong – this type of content can be exceptionally valuable, and every content marketing campaign should provide at least one option involving this form of content. However, content marketing should reach far beyond just articles themselves. If you truly want to maximize your revenue and build a recognized brand in your industry, you should harness the power of alternative content marketing strategies. 

For many, these alternative formats will accelerate their campaigns and boost traffic and revenue almost instantly.

So, what kind of content should you create that will yield the best results?  

This special report will reveal a few different types of content that visitor’s will absolutely love, leaving you with return customers while providing them with a memorable on-site experience. 

Let’s begin!

What You’ll Learn:

• Creating A Content Pillar
• Video Killed The Radio Star
• Visual Winners
• SlideShare Presentations
• Content Will Always Be King

Creating A Content Pillar

Before we dive into the different content formats that you should be tapping into, let’s take a quick look at the importance of creating and understanding a content pillar, and how you can utilize this strategy to cover all your bases.

A content pillar is simply a structure that includes 3 key types of content:

• Content designed to educate – typically the cornerstone of every campaign.
• Content based on news, current events and data-driven material. This is where you tap into what is currently popular and use it to drive traffic to your website.
• Content designed to entertain and encourage social distribution and sharing. This is the kind of content that most often goes viral.

 

Content that is designed to educate will consist of your most informative, useful content. Depending on your market, this could include straightforward, utility content that your market will find educational and informative. 

It also works towards portraying you as an expert on the topic, and an authority figure in your market, which is critical.

Content that is based on news, current events, or popular topics help drive in ongoing traffic, and while it can be time-sensitive material that can’t be used on a long-term basis, this type of content used to easily drive in massive traffic based on current hot topics that your audience are actively looking for.

And finally, content that is designed to encourage sharing via social media, email, or word-of-mouth, is always an important part of content marketing campaigns because this is the stuff that can go viral.  

This content should be interesting, fun and entertaining and is more often light-hearted and sometimes not particularly relevant to your product or service, but used to get more eyes on your videos and encourage click-through traffic.

Consider using all three content types when creating your campaigns to form a rock-solid content marketing strategy.

Video Killed The Radio Star

Do your content marketing campaigns include video content? If not, you are missing out on a huge segment of the market! 

Video can be highly engaging, interesting, and can capture attention faster and easier than almost any other content marketing vehicle.

With video, you can provoke emotion, encourage response and connect with your prospect in a far more meaningful way than nearly any other type of content available to you.  

If you aren’t using video content in your marketing campaigns you are leaving a ton of potential prospects out of your reach, and these prospects are going to go to your competition – the guys with video content.

Think about it:  Not everyone enjoys reading, and not everyone has the time to read lengthy articles.  But everyone watches video. 

Video content can be as short or as lengthy as you like, and if you aren’t experienced in video creation, there are several online tools that will help you create compelling videos in a matter of minutes.  (I’ll provide a few resources at the end of this report to make it easier on you). 

With video content, your focus needs to be on delivering a compelling message to your prospects.

Your video campaigns should always include:

• Content that creates brand recognition. 
• Entertains your viewer.
• Content that is unique, compelling and fresh.
• Content that takes your prospect on a visual journey.
• Content that involves emotion. You want to make them remember you!
• Content that reminds your visitors of the benefits of using your product/service.
• Content that builds trust.
• Content that reinforces your brand.

Using video to create viral campaigns that people will thoroughly enjoy will skyrocket traffic AND sales. 

Plus, with video, people can easily share with their friends, family and colleagues so without any extra effort on your part, you could end up with a viral campaign that is being distributed to millions of people, all around the world!

In my list above, I mentioned “reinforcing your brand” and “creating brand recognition”.  These are two very different things, but you’ll want to make sure to include both elements in every video campaign.

Reinforcing your brand simply means that you want to leave your visitors in a positive mindset in regards to your business. You want them to walk away (or click away) from your video feeling better about themselves in some way. If you can connect your brand with personal feelings of empowerment, your campaigns will skyrocket.

And when I mentioned creating brand recognition, here’s what I mean. You don’t just want to offer your visitor with one video. The more people see multiple videos from you, the more likely it will be that they will remember your business, and your brand.  

So, consider creating a series of videos that are all connected in some way – whether it’s by topic or genre.

Visual Winners

Infographics took the Internet by storm years ago and continue to be amongst the most popular forms of content online. 

With infographics, you are providing a clear and concise visual guide for those who visit your website, capturing their attention quickly ensuring that your material doesn’t get lost in the information-jungle.

Infographics are an innovative way to draw attention to your material, while giving your visitor’s something new and interesting. And because it’s basically text transformed into an image, it’s also very easy to create.

And best of all, infographics can make your content go viral, especially as it will enable you to tap into an extended network of visitor’s by featuring your graphics on websites like Pinterest and Instagram. Infographics go far beyond just telling people what your brand is about – instead, you can show them.  This is a far more effective method!

>> Click here for examples of popular infographics.

It won’t take you long before you realize just why these graphic-based promo tools are so popular. They lay everything out in one quick snapshot, engaging visitors and making it really easy to read through a ton of information in a short amount of time.

The power of visual content can be witnessed just by looking through your Facebook newsfeed as well.  Look at how many people are sharing pictures (and infographics), liking the content and spreading the word amongst their followers and friends!

And infographics are just plain easy to use. You can embed them into your website easily, and you can also provide that embed code to others so that people can easily integrate your infographic into their own blogs or websites!

And finally, infographics can simply make your content easier to understand. People tend to respond to visual aids far easier than they do to text-based ones, so by incorporating infographics into your content marketing strategies you are giving your prospects bits and pieces of relevant content in bite-size chunks that are easy to understand, and act on.

I’ll include a couple of resources at the end of this report that will help you create stunning infographics quickly, and easily.

Slideshare Presentations

Video and infographics are just two easy ways to increase exposure and maximize the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.

Here is another way to build a successful campaign: Slideshare Presentations!

Do you really want to capture their attention? Consider creating a video presentation in the form of a slideshare for your website visitors! 

Slideshare is owned by Linkedin. It’s basically a community for slideshow presentations where you can upload your presentation (also called “Decks” by people in the industry), and drive in traffic!

Slideshare also allows you to add videos and infographics as well, so you can build different types of campaigns using this one powerful resource. 

By creating SlideShare presentations, you are combining two of the most popular content types: visuals and written content. By combining these two formats you can build highly engaging presentations, all within one easy-to-use platform.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your Slideshare presentations:

• The first thing you should do is create a storyline (also called a storyboard) that outlines your SlideShare from start to finish.  Keep it simple and very clear so that your viewers can quickly grasp your core message.  Break content down into bite-size chunks.
• Outline your goals for each SlideShare presentation. What do you want to achieve? What to hope for viewers to do after watching your presentation? Are you creating these to entertain, get email subscribers, build authority in your market? Knowing your objectives early on will help you build laser-targeted presentations that will yield the type of response you are looking for.
• Come up with a catchy title for your presentation. This is a very important step because you really want to get noticed and ensure your SlideShare stands out, and speaks to your audience.
• Use bold fonts, headlines and sub-headlines to capture attention and keep viewers engaged in your content, and use bullet-points to highlight important notes that you want them to pay extra attention to.
• Make sure your presentation is meaty, provides value and then add a call to action to the end of your presentation in order to encourage responses. 

That’s all there is to it!  Are you ready to get started? Visit: http://www.SlideShare.net to sign up and build your first SlideShare presentation.

Content Will Always Be King

Regardless of the different content types that you incorporate into your content marketing campaigns, high-quality, informative and relevant content that your audience is desperate for will always be King.

Consider other ways of transforming static article content into highly-engaging content magnets.

For example:
Could you create a how-to guide for your market that provides useful information on a certain topic?  

You could present this in a series of blog posts, articles, a website or a downloadable guide (encouraging opt-in’s and building your list). Or, you could deliver the entire thing as an email series!

Take advantage of every opportunity you can to demonstrate to your audience that you are an authority in your market and that you are here to help them make informed decisions, learn something new, or stay abreast on important topics and information in your industry. 

Double-up with a combination of visual and text-based content campaigns.

Example:  Create a highly informative blog post and embed an engaging video into the content. Or, create an illustration that will provide extra dimension to your content, or perhaps create a graph or data chart that highlights the material that you have just touched on.

Take it a step further by providing access to additional components or resources that tie into your main content, such as spreadsheets, data charts and graphs that support your information and make it easier to understand.  

Doing this will have an incredible impact on your audience and amplify your marketing message (while keeping your user’s attention).

Provide case studies that showcase your offer and the success of those who have followed your system or used your product or service successfully. 

Nothing speaks to a potential prospect than by seeing live examples of those who have achieved success!

And don’t forget the power of memes!  Memes are shared all over the Internet, especially on social sites like Facebook and twitter. Consider creating a series of memes that are funny and entertaining (and likely to be shared).

Final Thoughts

If you expand your content marketing campaigns to include various formats that give your website visitor more options, you’ll quickly see your campaigns soar, and response rates will skyrocket. 

Try to incorporate at least 2-3 content options into your current marketing funnel, and keep a lookout for what your competitors are doing successfully, and what people are responding to so you are always on top, with a strong pulse on your market.

Content marketing is a powerful way to connect with prospects, get to know your market, and deliver exceptional value that will put you in your customer’s line of sight, while building a recognized brand as a leader in informative and useful content, while providing potential customers with many reasons to return to your website again, and again.

I wish you the very best with your content marketing endeavors!

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Even in the age of video, live streaming, and social media, content marketing is still the reigning King when it comes to building successful campaigns that will drive in traffic, and bolster sales and prospect activity. It’s also still the most effective way for both new and seasoned marketers to connect with potential leads, and to build organic traffic funnels from the major search engines.

But the days of writing a short article, getting a few backlinks, and sitting back while the traffic pours in are long gone. There’s just too much competition for those forms of marketing to be effective, and the search engines have changed the way they place value on content in terms of providing exposure through keyword searches made by those in your niche.

Successful content marketing requires more effort and thought, and it requires a more complex strategy than ever before, but it’s certainly not difficult to do. If you create a powerful strategy based on the smarter content marketing tactics in this report, you’ll be able to quickly funnel traffic into your websites while ensuring that your campaigns are designed to achieve long-term success.

In this article, you’re going to learn about some of the key metrics you can use to judge whether or not your content marketing strategy is a success, and how to formulate a winning strategy right from the beginning, requiring fewer tweaks and limited trial & error.

There is a system – an absolute formula – for creating successful content marketing campaigns, and I’m going to lay it all out on the line for you in the coming chapters.

You’re also going to learn about some very specific ways you can generate even more traffic to your website through content-based campaigns, and how to figure out exactly what your visitors are interested in, so you can deliver the best possible on-site experience to your prospects.

So, without further delay, let’s get started!

What You’ll Learn:

• Out With The Old
• Key Performance Metrics
  ◦ Traffic
  ◦ Impact
• How To Create Content  That Converts
• Setting Yourself Apart
  ◦ Create A Content Plan
  ◦ Don’t Forget Existing Content
  ◦ Include Multiple Formats

Out With The Old

To begin, I want you to know that the older (and outdated) methods of content marketing are simply no longer effective. They’re either marginally useful, not useful at all, or, at worst, damaging to your ability to generate leads and create effective traffic-generating campaigns that will stand the test of time.

For many years, content marketing relied almost exclusively on search engine traffic, but that strategy is no longer as viable. There’s just too much competition and search engines highly favor older sites that have established trust and authority, over new sites that have yet to build on an overall quality score, or history. Getting ranked as a new site is very difficult, though definitely not impossible.

At one time, all you had to do to rank well in search engines was use targeted keywords throughout your website content. In addition, repeating keywords throughout different areas of your website (such as meta keywords, page title, header tags, etc.) would also help score a better ranking in search engines. This was often referred to as “keyword stuffing”.

When ranking based on keyword stuffing became extremely competitive, and search engines grew wise to the methods people were using to manipulate their website’s ranking, it became far more difficult to get anywhere by using those methods.

They simply became outdated and ineffective.

To combat the changes in the way search engines determined what websites should appear when specific keywords were entered, website owners started to focus instead on building backlinks from authority websites, essentially leeching credibility from other established pages. With a decent number of backlinks pointing to your website, and with on-page SEO used to optimize your pages to target those keywords, you could usually count on your website ranking in the first few pages of the major search engines.

Then, the search engines changed their algorithms yet again, and webmasters were scrambling to figure out exactly what the search engines wanted to see on their website to assign decent ranking.

Here are a few tactics that either don’t work anymore, or don’t work as effectively as they once did. Keep an eye out for these, so you don’t end up penalized by the major search engines:

• Keyword Stuffing – Never, ever include the same keyword any more than necessary to convey the point of your article. You could get penalized or even banned from search engines if you try stuffing too may keywords into your content.
• Backlink Farming – While it’s still important to build backlinks to your websites from authority sites, getting too many backlinks too quickly, or obtaining a lot of low quality links will do nothing for you and may even cause your site to be penalized by the search engines. Instead, focus on building quality links over a longer period of time. Slow, and steady.
• Keyword Domain Names – The tactic of registering keyword-based domains in order to rank better in the search engines isn’t always successful. While it won’t get you penalized, it won’t necessarily help your ranking either. Instead, register domain names that are easy for visitors to spell, are relevant to your website’s content, and help you build brand recognition. And make sure they’re memorable!
• Overuse Of Anchor Text For Backlinks – Years ago, it was vital that you use your main keyword in all, or most, of your backlinks, but these days you could be penalized for that. Instead, you should spread your backlink anchor text amongst a range of components, such as your page and article titles, main keyword used within content, keyword variations, etc.
• Pages For Every Variation Of A Keyword – Many people used to create a brand new article (which was usually just a slight variation of another similar article) for every single variation of a keyword, but these days that’s not a good idea. One long, high quality article is much, much better than 10 or more thinner articles.

So now that you know what to avoid, here’s the great news. You don’t have to rank in the search engines for major keywords in order to be successful! In fact, you can run a successful business without any search engine traffic whatsoever.

So, what DOES work for SEO and content marketing? Well, that’s a tough question to answer because SEO is such a complex topic. It would take a lot more than a short report to cover it all.

Since it takes so long for newer sites to gain traction in the search engines these days, it’s actually a better idea to focus more on getting traffic from other sources, like social media, rather than specifically focusing on search engine traffic. Not only will you get more traffic faster, but you will actually boost your SEO rankings significantly!

A basic strategy would look something like this:

• Write long, high quality articles between 1,500 and 3,000 words each and post them to your website or blog.
• Optimize them for the search engines with relevant keywords used throughout content, article titles and create a linking strategy that directs readers to other relevant articles on your website.
• Make sure you have social like/share buttons on every page of your website or blog.
• Share all of your content to your own social media profiles.
• Ask your followers and visitors to like, share, and comment.
• Build links naturally.

Key Performance Metrics

In order to gauge the success of your content marketing efforts, there are a few key performance metrics you should pay attention to. Most marketers just look at their traffic logs to judge whether their content marketing is successful, but there’s so much more to it than that.

Let’s take a look at a few of the different metrics you should be paying attention to when deciding if your content marketing strategy is working as it should.

Traffic

Obviously traffic is your most important metric. Not only should you pay attention to your overall website traffic, but to a few other important traffic metrics, as well such as:

• Traffic to individual articles – This will help you decide what your visitors are most interested in reading about, and whether or not you’ve been delivering that to them.

 

• Where your traffic is coming from – If you’re getting very little traffic from certain sources and more from others, you can either choose to focus on those you’re successful with to get even more traffic from them, or focus more on those you’re getting very little from in an attempt to increase traffic from those sources.

 

• How many people are sharing your content – It’s very important to find out how many people are liking and sharing your content, because this will tell you whether you’re truly reaching your audience or not. People won’t like and share content that didn’t interest them.

 

• Comments – Comments are always a good indicator of whether or not your content is living up to the standards people expect. If you receive very few comments, or people don’t have a lot of positive things to say, it might mean you’re not hitting the right points with your content.

 

• Conversion rate – Pay close attention to your conversion rates to see if your content is doing its job. Your content is useless if all it’s doing is attracting traffic. That traffic must also convert into email subscribers, CPA leads, sales, etc.

Impact

The bottom line is making sure your content marketing efforts have a positive net effect on your business rather than a negative one. There are several ways your content marketing can actually have a negative net impact on your business, and that’s something you want to avoid at all costs.

Negative impact can be caused by a number of things:

• Poor quality content that leads people to believe that you are not an authority on the topic. You need your readers to have faith in your comprehension of the topic, and look to you as a leader of informative and accurate information.
• Content that doesn’t resonate with your audience will hurt your chances at encouraging repeat visitors while also showing a lack of understanding of your market.
• Content that sells without informing is a common mistake that new marketer’s make. You want your content to provide useful information while also entertaining your audience. Creating engaging content will drive in traffic and ensure return visitors. Failing to do that will destroy your chances as converting leads into customers.

Positive impact happens when you create high quality content that truly connects and resonates with your target audience.

This is why it’s so important to know your market (the niche) and your audience (the people) extremely well. You want to know exactly what they will connect with, what kind of content provokes a positive response, and how best to help or educate potential customers.

The more you have a pulse on your market, and the better you know your target audience’s deepest needs, hopes and desires, the easier it will be to create content that will drive in traffic and convert into sales.

In the next chapter, we’re going to talk about how you can figure out exactly what kind of content your audience wants to read so that you can build wildly successful content marketing campaigns!

How To Create Content That Converts

Anticipating exactly what kind of content your audience is most interested in is difficult to do without first conducting market research.

The key is to research potential content before you write it, and there are a few ways to accomplish that quickly and easily.

The first easy way is to evaluate social media, like Facebook or twitter, to look for articles that have received a high number of likes, retweets and shares. That’s a clear indication that the type of content being shared is well received and in demand by your target audience.

Makes sense, right?

You can also keep tabs on the type of content that has very few likes and shares to see if you can spot why it may have performed so poorly. You can look for the differences between poorly received content and information that generated a positive response from your target audience. Quite often it isn’t just about which author had the larger following, but about the type of content itself.

Social media provides you with a clear and concise snapshot of content that is being widely distributed through sharing, and content that is stale (no retweets, limited sharing), making it easy for you to create content based on the formats proven to be successful.

This type of market research also puts you in the seat of your potential prospect, providing you with a different perspective on what you would find engaging, and what kind of content truly reaches out to you and pulls you in.

Would you want to share content that contains factual errors, inconsistences, or grammatical mistakes? Would you want to share content that was thin on value and thick on advertising? And you certainly wouldn’t want to share content that was boring or uninteresting.

It’s important to create the type of content that you personally would want to read and share, but you must also make sure this content is right for your audience. That’s why it’s important to research carefully before you create content.

Another easy way to research what people are looking for is to explore the comments pertaining to an article on popular websites in your market. Make sure to also include Facebook comments, blog comments, etc. This type of direct feedback can be an absolute goldmine of information and will help to shape the type of content you decide to create for your audience.

For example, a comment on an article might say something like:

“Great article, but you didn’t mention what qualifications one might need. Is a degree required, or would a certificate be enough to land a job in this field?”

This would tell you exactly what information you might want to include in your own article on the subject to make sure you hit all the points a reader might expect to see and be most interested in.

This is especially true if you see the same type of comments multiple times. Taking note of how often a particular question is asked, or comment made about something that is lacking, the easier it will be for you to craft compelling articles that answer burning questions in your market.

By studying your competitors’ content, focusing on the comments it receives, and the level of distribution it gets through sharing on social media, the better understanding you will have about the type of content will be most appealing to your average prospect.

Setting Yourself Apart

Beyond figuring out exactly what your visitors are most interested in, you also need to deliver an experience that goes above and beyond, if you want to truly stand out from all the competition and build a brand recognized for quality and trust.

Let’s take a look at some ways you can set yourself apart and develop the most effective content marketing strategy possible.

Create A Content Plan

Most people go into content marketing without a plan or strategy in place. They think simply writing articles for their blog or website, and sharing links to those articles through social media is enough.

It isn’t. If you want to create high performing content marketing campaigns you need to take things a step further, and develop a plan of action as well as a content plan.

To start, think about your primary goal, which is probably to make money, as well as any secondary goals, such as increasing your social media followers, reaching new customers, or building an email list.

Every article you write should somehow help you achieve one of those goals. One article might focus more on helping you sell a product or service, while the next might lead to an opt-in magnet to increase your subscriber base. And yet another may be a knowledge-based content that simply lends credibility to your brand and helps to educate your customer.

No matter what, each article should have a purpose that will help you reach your goals.

You can create an editorial calendar of upcoming article ideas, and be sure to write down which goal that article will help you work towards. That way you can space out your content in a way that helps you work towards all those goals simultaneously, and you’ll see at a glance that you aren’t overlooking important aspects of your content marketing plan.

Don’t Forget Existing Content

If you’ve been in content marketing for a while, you may already have a base of content you’ve built up. Maybe it’s not performing well or isn’t receiving a lot of exposure.

It can be remarkably effective to go back and edit that older content in order to add new information, update material, remove anything that has become outdated, and improve the quality of the content itself.

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Include Multiple Formats

You can also take existing content and rebrand it into other content formats, such as by creating a SlideShare, a video or an infographic. Repurposing content is also an affordable way to breathe new life into content, while providing your website with new material at no cost.

These days, people are looking for content that goes above and beyond simple articles. They want to see interesting images, info graphics, videos, slideshows, reports, and more. They are looking for magazine-quality content, or even better, and if you can’t deliver that, there are thousands of other sites that can.

As an added bonus, any additional media you add has the potential to boost your search engine rankings, as well as getting you more traffic from places like YouTube or Pinterest that rely on forms of media other than the written word!

Final Thoughts

Content is still King, and it always will be. Without high quality content, you will struggle to draw in prospects, gain interest from new customers, or build a recognized brand in your industry. 

It takes more work, more effort, than ever before, but that means you have a chance to stand out. While others still cling to that bygone era of easy traffic through outdated methods, you can create a user experience that will not only gain favor with the search engines, but will attract the right kind of buyers, while expanding your outreach, increasing your social media presence, and making more money.

Make sure to study your metrics carefully and research well before you write a piece of content. This will help you write content that will please your audience and help you achieve your goals.

Good luck!  

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“Content is king.” You’ve probably heard that many times, and there’s a reason for it, obviously. Without great content, your website simply is not going to be successful.

Think of content like a magnet. Every piece of content you create is going to attract search engine spiders and, ultimately, visitors. Without that content, you’re not going to attract a thing.

Of course, content is expensive and time consuming to make. It takes time to think of topics, research them, and write long, quality articles complete with other forms of media like videos and pictures.

In this particular guide, we’re going to focus on content marketing as far as blogging and other similar content sites go. Specifically, we will focus on content marketing as far as SEO, social, and viral marketing, and using that content to drive traffic and sales.

You’ll learn the easiest ways to create content without wanting to pull your hair out over the obscene amounts of time and money it usually takes to create great content! So let’s get started.

What You’ll Learn:

• Defining Your Purpose
• Planning Your Content
• Creating Killer Content
• Easier Content Creation
• Using PLR
• Other Media Types

Defining Your Purpose

The most important thing you can do – the one thing you really MUST do before you develop another piece of content – is to define the one main purpose you have for creating content.

This could be to:

• Drive sales to affiliate products
• Drive sales to your own products
• Get clients for your services
• Increase your blog subscriber base
• Increase your email subscriber list

You may want to do several, or even ALL of these things at some point, but for now you need to figure out what your main purpose is for creating the content you’re working on.

Why is this such a critical step?

Because you need to figure out exactly what to promote within each article, because you can’t have a dozen calls-to-action in each post you make on your blog or website.

You will want to include one main call-to-action in every post you make. Whether this is asking people to join your email list or buy a product or whatever else, you need to include this in every article.

Does it have to be the same one in every article?

Absolutely not!

Let’s say you make a post on container gardening. You could definitely link to a squeeze page that offers a beginner’s guide to container gardening as your lead magnet.

Then you make a post on urban gardening. You could create a different lead magnet specifically on the topic of urban gardening.

You obviously won’t want to have a different lead magnet for every single article you write. That would get ridiculous pretty quickly. But the closer your lead magnet is to the exact topic of your article, the more effective it will be.

Here’s another example:

Let’s say the product you have to promote is a build-your-own greenhouse kit. That may be the ultimate product you’d like to promote, but is it the best thing to promote on every single article you create? Probably not.

What if you write an article on how to grow a garden on an apartment balcony?

If you were to promote a build-your-own greenhouse kit in an article on apartment balcony gardening, the odds of making a sale would probably be pretty bad.

The average apartment dweller simply doesn’t have anywhere to put a greenhouse, even if they’d very much like to have one.

As you can see, it’s important to think about the purpose of your content before you create it. If that build-your-own greenhouse kit is your product, and the absolute main purpose of your website, you probably wouldn’t even want to write that article on balcony gardening at all, because this market is NOT your target market.

Once you’ve figure out your main purpose for all the content you create, it’s time to start planning your content. (And planning is an important step!)

Creating Killer Content

Once you’ve created your content plan, it’s time to start creating the content itself. Remember that you must keep your main goal in mind at all times so that you remember to place those calls-to-action in every single article.

What calls-to-action might you have?

• A lead magnet to get an opt-in subscriber
• A link to purchase a product
• A request to follow you on a particular social media property
• A request to leave a comment on the article
• It could even be a link to another related piece of content on your site or someone else’s

These calls to action should all support the purpose you defined earlier. Whether it’s to grow your traffic, sell a product, get more opt-ins, or whatever else you’ve decided your primary goal happens to be.

Each piece of content you create should also somehow support that particular goal. For example, if your main goal is to promote your knitting patterns membership website, you probably wouldn’t want to create content on jewelry making. (Unless you have a secondary jewelry-making product you can promote.)

Don’t create content simply because you think it will bring traffic to your website unless traffic is your ultimate goal. (And it may be if your goal is to get the highest possible traffic to meet a specific goal, such as bragging rights or because you intend to sell the site later.)

All content should directly support your main goal, so keep that in mind.

If you’re struggling to think of topics, you can browse other similar sites in your niche, as well as social media websites, to see what is currently popular.

Pinterest is a great place to find out what’s currently trending in your niche, because you can take a look at the popular section as well as seeing which articles have been re-pinned the most.

Looking at other sites in your niche will also help you with the next topic we will discuss, which is creating content without having to write something unique every single time.

Easier Content Creation

Content creation can be incredibly expensive and/or time consuming if you create 100% unique content all the time. The trouble is, you really need unique content if you hope to rank well in the search engines.

But there’s good news. You can actually turn other people’s content into unique content without plagiarism, without spinning, without theft, and without a lot of time involved.

The answer is curating content, and there are a number of ways to do this. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can benefit from other people’s content.

1. Roundups – Create lists of related posts from other websites. For example, you could make a post called “The Top 10 Ways to Save Money on Plane Tickets”. Then you’d link to ten different articles on the topic on different websites.
2. Lists – This type of post is easy, because all you have to do is think of several similar things on a particular topic and list them. For example, “10 Essential Lures for Bass Fishing.”
3. Videos – You can embed a YouTube video into a page on your website and give a short description of the video. Your description is unique content, but you don’t have to create any actual content yourself other than the description or summary of the video.
4. Single Article Curation – Link to a single post on another website with a short description.
5. FAQ Posts – Create a list of frequently asked questions on a specific topic and link to articles that answer each one.
6. People to Follow – Create a list of blogs, websites, YouTube channels, social media profiles, etc. in your niche.
7. Comparisons – Create lists of multiple similar items and compare and contrast the items. For example, “Which Brand of Painter’s Tape Works Best?”
8. Profile Posts – Write a quick profile about someone who is important in your niche and then link to a more in-depth article about the person.

These are a few ideas of the types of posts you can make without creating a ton of original content yourself.

Using PLR

Don’t forget about PLR content. Private label rights content is written by someone else and the rights are sold to individuals for use on their websites or other projects.

PLR content should NOT be used as-is. This may have worked at one point, but Google and other search engines are much wiser now. There simply is no room for untouched PLR.

The same holds true for “spun” content, where the same content is spun into multiple versions using software that substitutes words and phrases in the article for similar ones. Google can spot spun content easily, and there’s a good chance your site will get penalized if you use it.

Instead, you can use PLR content as a basis for your articles, combining multiple PLR articles into a single article, or perhaps splitting a single PLR article into multiple articles by expanding on several topics within the article, each in its own new article.

You don’t want to use PLR content as it is, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to generate ideas. Just turn your PLR into something totally new by putting your unique spin on it.

Other Media Types

Don’t forget that articles are not the only type of content you can create. There are other media types that will help attract traffic to your site, too.

Remember that images and video are much easier and more popular to share than written content, so it’s a great idea to include those media types on your site. It’s much easier for visual content like pictures and videos to go viral, and ultimately viral content is key, because it draws more traffic in than content that is not so shareable.

If you don’t know how to create your own quality images and videos, you can easily use OPC (other people’s content) to draw this type of traffic. As we looked at earlier, you can use OPC in your own posts by simply embedding their content or linking to it. This will increase the sharability of your own content.

Here are some different ideas for other media types you might want to use:

• Infographics (stats, charts, etc.)
• Picture collages
• Memes (pictures with funny sayings)
• Inspirational images (pictures with inspirational quotes)
• Videos
• Audio
• PDFs

Final Thoughts

Content is undoubtedly critical for any website. Without content, you’re just not going to get the kind of traffic you’re hoping for. Content is the backbone, the very foundation, of the internet.

As you’ve seen, you don’t have to spend a lot of time or money creating content. Having a solid editorial plan, combined with content curation, makes creating great content a breeze.

Remember:

• Always remember your primary goal when creating content
• Always create content people will want to share
• Combine other forms of media with written content

By keeping these things in mind, you will start getting more traffic, because you’ll be creating content people will want to share.

Plus, by using OPC (other people’s content), you will be able to focus on content that’s already gone viral, making it more likely that your own content will be shared wide.

Best of luck with your content creation efforts!

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