At Great Legal Marketing and Foster Web Marketing, we advocate for the extensive use of high-quality content to generate leads for your business and to create website traffic. Successful businesses try to add at least one piece of content for every business day, with no less than three new pieces per week.
As you can imagine, this type of upkeep can be difficult when it comes to thinking up new ideas for your content. After all, keeping things fresh keeps Google, Bing and Yahoo! happy. (Say the next part with a zombie/robot voice) And we must all appease the internet overlords.
Even business owners just starting out on a content-driven marketing strategy can have a hard time getting the first bit of momentum. Since we here at Make Marketing Happen understand the issue, here’s a helpful formula/strategy for putting together your first pieces of website content (video and/or articles).
- Frequently asked questions: These should be a no-brainer. What are customers always asking you and your staff? Write down the questions and answer them! It’s really simple and it gives you a future wealth of information to consult when you want to give standardized answers to customers. You should be able to knock out 25 to 50 questions by sitting down with your staff to figure out this list.
- Geo-specify: As you rotate through the content creation process, create articles that specifically mention a certain town/city in your region. Then cycle through all of the surrounding areas. You shouldn’t bunch this content too tightly together. Also, always remember to make the articles different in wording from the original piece or else you will be punished by search engines that see duplicate content. (If you have 25 FAQs to answer and 4 different cities in your region, you’ve got 100 pieces of content already!)
- Google Alerts: Set up Google Alerts to notify you when your area of expertise is mentioned in your locality (or through the nation). You can then create a piece of content that acts as a third-party news source or comments on the piece of news. Get involved in the news cycle and use other news feeds as well to supplement your knowledge.
- Original ideas: This should be the “duh” part. Keep a running list of thoughts you have relating to your business. I have a little journal in which I write notes on whatever I see that draws a reaction for me. It means that on days that I feel a little stuck, I just refer to my notebook. The inspiration comes from all areas, including television, books, the news, and good-ol’ random thoughts. (Often, these too can be geo-specified.)
- Make a video for everything: It pretty much speaks for itself. Creating a video for everything means double the SEO (search engine optimization) juice for each idea. If you were to make one video for each of 25 FAQs in 4 different cites, like above, you would have 200 pieces of SEO-rich content driving traffic to your site. You can also imbed the videos in the actual articles, which can give the articles a little boost as well.
Content creation doesn’t need to be difficult. It just requires diligence. You must be willing to do the work to reap the rewards. Of course, if you need help with the creation, you can always turn to services such as We Do Web Content. Just make sure that they are top-notch services aware of things like the Google Panda update. Otherwise, you may end up with a content farm that rapidly destroys your Google rankings through black-hat linking techniques and other nefarious practices.
Do you have a particular way to help you think up new content? Share it with us in the comments section below!
Image c/o Jeroen van Oostrom / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I tell my clients to start off using a modified version Mike Koenig’s 10x10x4 formula.
First, write down the 10 questions you get asked the most by your customers.
Then write down the 10 questions that your clients HAVEN’T asked you BUT SHOULD be asking you.
(If you can’t come up with 10 do as many as you can)
Then using an inexpensive flip cam and a tripod or even the web cam on your laptop film yourself introducing the question and answering it just like you would if a friend was sitting across from you. Try to keep your answers under 15 minutes. Three to five minutes is perfect.
Some of the clients I have worked with have set up a dashboard mount for their video cameras and record their videos on the way to work each morning just sharing ideas and advice creating great content.
Do this for each question. And always ask for comments and additional questions at the end.
Have the videos transcribed. There are several inexpensive services online or use internal staff.
Edit the transcription to clean it up and get rid of any typos or UMMs or AHHs. For me editing is always easier than writing from scratch. Plug your articles and videos into your Word Press Blog. You can even create all the the posts and schedule when you want each one of them to be published/posted using WordPress’ content scheduling feature. I recommend posting one or two articles/videos a week.
And to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.
1. Post all your videos to your YouTube Channel (if you don’t have one create one) and imbed the YouTube version of your video into your blog post. There are ways to optimize your YouTube posts but that is a article in itself.
2. Make sure your blog is connected to all of your social network accounts, most importantly your Facebook Business/Fan Page, your LinkedIn account and your Twitter account and that your RSS feed is being published out to RSS aggregators like Feedage.com That way when your videos/articles are posted it will create entries in all of those social accounts as well and increase interest and traffic to your site.
So we are thinking exactly the same way just using some different tactics and flow. Thanks for sharing your article.
Take care,]
John “Jack” Schoenberger
Hey Jack!
Mike Koenig’s method is excellent! I’m an advocate of the strategy as well, and I’m glad that you shared it!
Jimmy and I LOVE video as well…it’s a fantastic way to compete in an arena that hasn’t been flooded just yet.
Also, transcription is a great bank-for-your-buck service. You can “write” so much just by talking.
Thanks for dropping the blog!
~Charley