Developing Content
We’re going to be exploring Content Marketing pretty extensively here at the Home Base Learning Institute Blog, because it’s one of the most beneficial and effective forms of marketing available to small business owners and new startups. Content marketing is a practice that involves research, development, creation, and promotion of any piece of content … it’s a form of marketing that costs nothing, yet takes time.
Content Development is one aspect within content marketing in which most business owners tend to get stuck. This is the first real creative step in the process, so many run into the old writer’s block issue when trying to create content … regardless if they’re creating written articles, audio content, or videos.
What Do You Want Your Blog to Be About?
Approaching the process of developing content broad at first by considering what categories and topics you want to cover with your blog. For example, if you’re selling hunting supplies you might want to cover everything from archery equipment, hunting rules, locations, rifles, targets, ammo, and tips. With that in mind, you could brainstorm ideas until you come up with a few possible articles to write for each category. This provides you with enough content to explore over time, which in turn will sculpt what your blog is about.
Look to Your Research
Discovering what people are searching the for and then positioning yourself in front of them and providing what they’re looking for is what search engine optimization is all about. Creating content is a major aspect of that process, and so it’s crucial to execute research on an ongoing basis. Once you have a basic foundation of research, you can refer to it for ideas regarding what you need to create. Again, keyword research is an ongoing process, so targeting those keywords is also an ongoing process.
Research Your Competition
If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas for content, consider looking to your competition for inspiration. This will help you discover things you overlook and sculpt your blog into something that might compete with the others in your niche of business.
Let the Content Take You to New Topics
One of the easiest ways to save ideas for later as you stumble across them, which often happens while writing content, is to actually create a new post, document, or page with your idea in the title section along with a brief description or notes regarding what you’d like to do with the content. This will enable you to create content that you might not have normally thought of, as well as expand what your blog is actually about. Adding on to the first example, if you were to writing an article about your crossbow, then you mention something about how important it is to keep your sights clean, you might create a new document right there and save it as content under “maintenance” or “cleaning.” That will provide a foundation for an entire new category or topic that you hadn’t thought about originally.
Overall
The key to content development is executing your keyword research, discovering what the competition is writing about, defining the topics you want to cover, then spending time creating your content.
Content development is a process, but with a little practice, business owners can master the step by step process and publish the content their prospective customers are searching the web for at this very moment.
The higher the quality the content, the more likely it is to reach the first page of search engines.
cc image credit: JuditK