Why have a content creation strategy?
I’ve written previously about the long tail of search, and why your business should care about it—when it comes to getting traffic to your Web site from the search engines, “content is king.” The same applies to getting repeat visitors: if you aren’t adding new stuff all the time, you aren’t giving people a reason to return. (And, as Alan Weiss says, “absence does not make the heart grow fonder; it makes the brain forget.”)
Even if your site has spectacular content, if it doesn’t have enough of it, you won’t reach your full potential in terms of traffic from search engines (especially the “long tail” queries), repeat visitors, and ultimately revenue.
To this end, having a strategy in place for the long-term, regular creation of content on your site will help grow your audience and your list of prospective clients.
What kind of content do we want?
When we talk about creating content for your site, not just any content will do. You want to write “meaty,” quality stuff that your site’s readers will love. Some (preferably large) cross-section of your audience should get real value out of what you write. (So-called “content farms” are great at creating huge amounts of thin, low-quality content—they are not your role models here!)
Note: Throughout this article, I talk about writing your content, but graphics, videos, charts, and other media can be just as valuable to your customers.
One more note about the word “content”: Don’t ever call what you write “content,” at least not publicly. Call it an article, a white paper, a position paper, a tip, a guide, or anything else that seems appropriate.
Your readers have no use for “content,” but they might find a guide to your topic very valuable. I get to call it content only because we’re talking about writing in the most generic form. A similar prohibition applies to talking about word count: your visitors don’t care if you’ve authored 1,000 word blog posts, they care that you’ve authored high-quality ones.
Never forget your goals for your content
As with all forms of marketing, your focus when creating this content should be on building trust with prospective customers and establishing a reputation for your business. Your content needs to
- make you look like a professional,
- show your expertise in your field, and
- provide value to your readers.
If it doesn’t do all of the above, it isn’t ready to be seen by the public.
How long should it be?
I hate talking about word count—much the same way I hate talking about generic “content,” because it cheapens what you’re creating—but sometimes it’s necessary. The target length for each piece of content that you publish should be at least 500 words. (That’s about 1 page single-spaced, if you’re used to thinking in those terms.)
There’s virtually no topic that you, an expert in your domain, shouldn’t be able to write 500 words about. Likewise, there’s probably no topic in your domain that can be adequately covered in under 500 words!
I’ve chosen that 500 word target arbitrarily, but not at random. The SEO firm serpIQ ran an analysis of the top hits for 160,000 different searches and found that higher word counts were correlated with higher rankings in Google searches (and thus greater traffic). Likewise, the top 10 results for a given query average over 2000 words in length. This really isn’t surprising—the most authoritative writing on any given topic is probably not a 4-sentence blurb. However, this is almost certainly not a causal relationship: quality, not length, is what gets your pages traffic; it’s just that higher quality coverage of a topic tends to be longer.
For that reason, I treat 500 words as a target minimum, but you shouldn’t go crazy trying to hit it. If you have, say, a blog post that’s under 500 words, you have a few options. If it could be an addendum to an existing piece of content, you might consider simply adding it there. Or, if you can legitimately add more detail, do so. However, under no circumstances should you artificially inflate the length. These attempts are totally transparent to your readers, and you’ll wind up driving them away more than convincing them to stick around!
Often, though, you’ll find that by the time you’ve adequately covered a topic, you’ve hit 1,500 words or more. If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that I would prefer to create a super-long, definitive guide to a topic than to break a post up into many smaller (less useful) posts. This is also a service to my readers: I’m aiming to please people who genuinely want to improve their site, not the typical attention deficit, rapid-fire clicking Internet user.
At the same time, though, your posts should be just long enough to get your information across. If you could say the same thing (and thus provide the same value to your readers) in fewer words, do so. No one likes having their time wasted.
What do you write about? Where do ideas come from?
It can be really, really difficult to consistently generate new ideas for content. The best way to avoid this sort of creative block is to cultivate a long list of places you can look to for inspiration. Here’s where I go:
- Keyword research tools. Google’s Keyword Tool is the canonical source for this sort of thing—you put in your existing Web site, or keywords you already have content written for, and it will suggest related topics that you might be able to write about. (Note that you’ll have to create an AdWords account, for free, to use the tool.)
- A newer tool, but one that I believe may be much more powerful in the long term, is HitTail, which will suggest new keywords for you based on how real visitors find your site. It even orders them by competition and traffic. That’s great, since one key to your success at optimizing your site for the long tail is to write about topics that haven’t been covered well by other sites, but which have relatively high numbers of people looking for them.
- To that end, HitTail is seriously appealing. Note, however, that it works best when you have over 1,000 visitors per month to your site—if you’re still getting there, you’ll have to get inspiration through other means.
- Responding to other people. If you regularly read blogs, newspapers, or journals in your industry, you can almost always find something that you either strongly agree with (and can expand on for your own readers) or strongly disagree with (and can rebut in your own writing). You needn’t respond to particular articles, either—you might just be responding to a general trend in your industry. For me, this might be a post titled “Why social media is not a gold mine.”
- Client work. If you’re in an industry where it makes sense to do so, consider writing about the interesting challenges you faced with a recent client. If you’re like me, no two clients are the same, and you learn a tremendous amount from each engagement.
- Forums, question-and-answer sites, and more. If you participate in a community centered around your topic (and, for the sake of establishing a reputation, you probably should), you’ll periodically come across topics that resonate with you, or that you struggled with yourself. I do this with questions I ask on StackExchange (a technical Q&A site)—my post “See How Your Site’s Small Goals Lead to Conversions” began as a question of my own.
- Your unique data sets. If you operate a business that generates a lot of data, sharing insights from that data can be really popular among your readers. For instance, if you ran a video streaming service (à la Netflix), you would probably put out an annual report on the most popular videos of the year. If you were really creative, you would write about the growth or decline in popularity of some of the classics—for instance, was Casablanca watched more or less this year compared to the previous decade?
- Even if your business doesn’t normally produce data, you can generate it—consider surveying your customers or your competitors about a topic relevant to the future of your industry. Many will be happy to give you 5 minutes of their time if you promise to keep them apprised of the results.
- Customers and readers. If all else fails, ask your readers what they would like to see, either in an email or via social media. You might be surprised what they suggest—since they aren’t as close to your content, they might very well have ideas you hadn’t considered.
This is not the content you’re looking for
When generating ideas for things to write about, there are a few things you should avoid:
- News. You want to write about things that will be just as relevant 5 years from now as they are now—so-called “evergreen content.” That’s how you get the most bang for your content buck. Now, I don’t want to ban news entirely from your site, but you shouldn’t count it as part of your content creation strategy. It’s not that you shouldn’t post, for instance, that version 8.3 of your software is now available, you just need to be creating new stuff for your readers outside of that.
- You should also avoid simply commenting on the news. If you write about how the recent fall in Apple stock affects your customers, it will be stale in a couple weeks. On the other hand, if you were to write about how your customers should respond to stock changes in general, that would stay “fresh” for years.
- Repetition. If you re-hash the same handful of topics, your regular visitors (who you should be treasuring, as they’re probably your best customers!) will catch on quickly—and they won’t be impressed. A lot of companies who have hired an SEO “expert” in the past make this mistake: they might have 3 posts on their blog titled
- “Things to know when selling your house in Colorado Springs,”
- “How to sell your Colorado Springs house,” and
- “Tips for selling your house fast in Colorado Springs.”
- After seeing those 3 articles, how likely do you think a visitor is to come back? Why bother?!
- With that said, if you really do have a different perspective on a topic that you’ve already talked about, by all means, write another article! For instance, I’m in no danger of running out of new things to talk about when it comes to marketing—my posts won’t be “variations on a theme,” but rather in-depth explorations of different facets of marketing.
- Furthermore, this prohibition doesn’t apply across media types. If you have a white paper on a topic, creating a webinar to discuss similar things is probably not going to be seen as rehashing by your audience, as long as you keep the duplication within reason. These are very different formats, and it’s likely the two pieces of content won’t appeal to the same people.
“Won’t I give away the farm?”
A common concern among my clients is the idea that, if they write too much or too well, their customers will have no reason to pay them! After all, “why buy the cow when the milk is free?”
The reality is that you probably can’t give too much away. If you have to choose between guarding your intellectual property fiercely and making everything publicly available, you should err on the side of the latter.
Luckily, though, you don’t have to make that decision. You can protect what needs to be protected, and make the rest freely available.
I suggest you give away anything you don’t sell to customers directly. That means if you’re a video game company, you should write about creating new levels, modeling characters, writing scripts, making your games more enjoyable, and so on. Your competitors already have a handle on these things (and if they don’t, they can learn online with or without your post!), but your customers might be fascinated. Your source code (which is, essentially, what you’re selling) should probably be kept private, but sharing pieces of the knowledge that went into creating it won’t do you harm.
In my case, this means I write about everything I do. I want potential clients to know I’m an expert when it comes to the things I do. I want them to (rightly) say “If he gives this much away for free, how much value would I get from hiring him?!”
I’m not worried that this will put me out of the job, because I know how much time and energy it takes to master this stuff. Plus, I’m always learning—I could literally stop providing every service I’ve offered to clients so far and still supply serious value. Something I might not give away, though, is proprietary software that I create and sell to clients. (Though I’d at least consider giving it away for the publicity…)
Importantly, “giving away” this knowledge isn’t charity—it’s a strategic decision designed to build a reputation for your company and trust with your customers. (In my case, though, it’s a happy side-effect that my writing helps bootstrapped startups and the like who couldn’t afford my assistance otherwise.)
Who writes the content?
When it comes to the actual creation of your content, don’t feel like it has to be you, the business owner or department head who actually does the writing. Your content should reflect your business’s expertise, but it doesn’t need to be by your own hand, so to speak.
Scalability and sustainability are key to having a content creation strategy that is successful in the long-term. If you’re a one-man show trying to put out 2 blog posts a day, you’ll burn out quickly. Instead, you want your content creation to be just like an advertising venue: you spend $xxx each month and make back $xxxx in revenue generated.
Outsourcing your content
In some cases, the most straightforward way to achieve this is to get outside help. Hiring a marketing intern or two from your local college to write a blog post a week for $15/hour often pays off in the first month. For instance, Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator does this to great effect: he pays a “virtual assistant” halfway across the world to create new bingo activities, which get posted to his Web site for customers to download. Click the image below for a full-size version (adapted from Patrick’s own graph).
If you could do the same, and pay $5 for a page that nets you an average of one $30 sale each year (or, better yet, a thousand sales!), you’d be crazy not to!
“Insourcing” your content
Outsourcing doesn’t work for every business, though. Creating bingo cards for your prospective customers doesn’t take any special skills, but I certainly don’t want just anyone writing about SEO on my blog! (Life may be like a box of chocolates, but I prefer to know exactly what my readers get when they come to my blog!)
The other alternative is “insourcing”: getting people in your organization on-board creating content. If you have 5 or 6 of qualified employees each writing just one high-quality article a month, you’ll be publishing at a respectable clip. One article per month is sustainable, in the sense that you’ll each have weeks for inspiration to strike, and writing the content itself will take just 2 to 4 hours of your time.
The down side, of course, is that this is less scalable—you can’t simply start spending more and get more content (at least not sustainably). On the other hand, if your organization is large enough or is growing, you can get more people creating content as time goes on.
Guest blogging
Guest blogging—having people outside your organization publish on your site—is a third source for content, which you’ll want to combine with either in- or outsourcing. “Guest” content may come from the following sources:
- Customers writing about their experiences with your products or services,
- Your organization’s partners writing about things of interest to both your audiences, or
- Other bloggers creating content on topics relevant to your industry or customers.
One big advantage to guest posts is that the author will likely promote the content to their own audience (at least in the latter two cases). These people will also often write for the visibility only—or at worst, for a bit of reciprocity on your part (you write for their blog).
(Despite the fact that I call this guest blogging, it can apply to whatever kind of content you’re focused on—white papers, webinars, data charts, etc.)
How often do you add new content?
I suggest publishing one post per week at the minimum. If you have a lot of people contributing, you could push this to two a week without much trouble—as long as your content is timeless (and it should be!), the faster you can sustainably create it, the better!
When you first start implementing your content creation strategy, you’ll probably pump out articles much faster than this. That’s great, but I suggest storing them up—consistency is more important than getting your content out as soon as possible. Pick your schedule and stick to it. If you have content stored up (i.e., scheduled) for a creative dry spell, so much the better.
The last thing you want to do is become involved in a content arms race. In some spheres, competitors find that they’re competing with one another to pump out more content faster. If this is your business, pause.
You need to evaluate whether continuing the arms race makes sense. If you slowed to a more reasonable pace, would your bottom line be impacted? (The answer may be no—if your competitor is putting out garbage, they probably aren’t taking business from you through it!)
Even if the answer is yes, you should re-evaluate your strategy: can you work smarter, either through outsourcing or creating different kinds of content (video, webinars, etc.)?
The bottom line: content creation should be generating new revenue for your business all the time. If it ever starts being detrimental, just stop.