Tag: content creation

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Content Marketing

8 Tips on Creating High-Quality Content

What is the true key to creating high-quality content? Is it word count? Keyword density? Or, even, originality? The answer is no, no, and surprisingly, still no. High-quality content is many things, but most importantly, it’s incredibly difficult to quantify.

Google generally promotes content on the basis of a few important factors that count towards search engine optimization, or SEO.

As with most things in life, there are about a dozen tips and techniques that can be considered low-hanging fruit, and thousands of factors that improve your ranking in miniscule ways.

Creating high-quality content is somewhere in between, on one of the branches that might be higher up on the tree yet are still within reach.

The importance behind content quality goes beyond what Google’s algorithm thinks of your site. There’s the human factor, too – high quality may be subjective, but there are a few objective ways of distinguishing between different sources of information, and it’s in these objective ways that we begin to see why some people are more likely to use one page or site as a resource over another. Here are a few of them.

What Are People Looking For?

Reader interest is important when quantifying quality. While a piece of content can be good, its usefulness to others is what makes it a high-quality resource. To that end, try to figure out where the Internet might be lacking.

It could be that there isn’t a concise guide to raising a specific type of succulents in subtropical weather. Or, if there is, then there isn’t a good long-form guide to the topic instead.

Figure out what topics of relevance to your business are inadequately explored or explained online and create your own resource for them.

Focus on Readability

It’s not enough to compile an infodump for unsuspecting readers. There needs to be structure, intent, and even rhythm. Good typography matters too. Keep sentences short. Don’t ramble on for too long and soliloquy. Use stories, parables, or examples to help reiterate something or provide a break from dry information but avoid getting lost in analogies.

Yes, grammar and formatting are important as well. But while most readers won’t be professional literary critics, people can tell the difference between something that’s informative, and something that’s both informative and pleasant to read. They’ll probably remember the latter.

Keep a Finger on the Pulse

In other words: research, research, research. Once you’ve figured out what people are looking for, it’s time to find out what else they might be looking for.

Search and trend analytics are immensely useful here, as they help you figure out what people who searched for any given term are most likely to search for in addition to that first search.

Don’t Worry About Being Completely Original

It’s nearly impossible to be “completely original” on the Internet. That does not mean you should plagiarize other content wholesale.

But think of content online as more of an exercise in creating a kaleidoscope of information from existing resources and references and providing your own unique input to bring in a touch of something new.

Even if that touch is something as simple as taking information from a number of disparate sources and formatting it in a way that’s easy to navigate and understand and provides a single page for people to use as reference in the future.

Do More Than Just Write

We aren’t talking about video content or infographics, although those are important topics in their own right. We’re talking about breaking text up with multimedia, from short clips used as reference, to GIFs and images for humor or visual information.

On one hand, the use of multimedia can help improve readability and provide a break for readers of a post. On the other hand, it allows you to represent a point made in text through an image, and reinforce an important tip or quote. This is especially important in information-dense or difficult-to-understand topics such as medicine and research.

Review and Improve Older Posts

As your website matures and your content begins to take on a certain style or flair that sets you apart from the competition, it’s worth taking the time to rehash old topics, revisit old posts, and renew old information.

While you can’t go back and drastically edit an old video on YouTube, you can take the time to edit and improve old blog entries, articles, or other forms of content on your own site.

Note that Google tends to rank pages that are older and have a considerable history of traffic quite a bit higher – leveraging this and improving on the information on your older and most successful content can help you retain new visitors and improve the trustworthiness of your site.

Don’t Ignore the Data

One of the worst things you can do is continuously put out content without taking the time to examine how certain editing and production trends are affecting your metrics. Toy around with different formatting styles and ideas.

Figure out what’s reaching people the most. Use impressions, views, clicks, and leads to gauge whether your new approach is successful or a step backwards – whether it’s a change in editing, a different tone in your videos, a different writing style, a different topic, less or more text, less or more pictures, and so on. You can even do this in real time through A/B testing.

Find Your Niche

At the end of the day, there’s a lot more you can do to make your content better. But is it what people want out of your site? Identify what brings you the most interest from your readers or viewers and invest in that idea.

Don’t think of it as something banal as chasing eyeballs – at the end of the day, you’re putting your time and energy into producing content that people want and are looking for, whether just for entertainment, information, or both.

It’s worth repeating that you should take the time to revisit old content at least once a year, if only to figure out what exactly made some posts much more successful than others.

Is it the editing? Is it the use of multimedia? Is it formatted differently? Is it the topic, the content itself, the references, the research, the readability? Some videos, posts, blogs, or images are a bit like catching lightning in the bottle – and trying to force it a second time might not go as well. But we can still learn a lot from our successes.

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Content Marketing

How Monitoring Online Activity Helps Produce Better Content

Monitoring online activity is pivotal in producing better content. By analyzing user engagement metrics, social media interactions, and search trends, content creators can identify audience preferences and pain points. This data-driven approach allows for the creation of more relevant, engaging content tailored to the audience’s interests and needs. Such targeted content enhances user experience, boosts engagement, and strengthens overall content strategy effectiveness.

Marketing isn’t about shouting from the rooftops – it’s about listening. Here’s how monitoring online activity produces better content.

When I say “monitoring online activity,” I am not talking about using spyware and keyloggers to see what people are doing online. I’m talking about relying on analytics from your website, social media channels, social listening tools, and search listening tools to help you learn more about the audiences you’re creating content for.

Daily, there are more than 3.5 billion Google searches. Annually, it’s 1.2 trillion. Lots of people are asking Google questions, much the same way they’d ask a friend or family member. Questions like:

  • How to crack an egg without breaking the yolk?
  • Is it okay to wear white after Labor Day?
  • How to test a steak’s temperature without a thermometer?
  • Why does my dog eat grass?
  • How many feet in a mile?

But, thanks to the advent of smart speakers and voice search, more than 20% of all searches haven’t been seen before.

Chances are you’ve spoken to Google like this in the past week, and, likely, you’ve also asked something a bit more personal, too. Many questions you face every day aren’t worthy of crowdsourcing to social media because of fear or embarrassment, but Google can still come to the rescue because of the “anonymity” of the white search box. You may ask things like:

  • Am I depressed?
  • How do you ask a friend out on a date?
  • Am I pregnant? (This is one of many widely searched questions, actually.)

Social Listening vs. Search Listening

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ve heard me talk about social listening before. It’s the process of using social media to “listen” to what people are saying about your company, brand, products, services, etc. You can use it to find out what people have to say about your competition, too.

Search listening, on the other hand, is a form of research that dives into what people are sharing with Google. With its insights, you can better understand what your audience really needs, what motivates them, and how they behave. Going beyond SEO to understand search behavior can have a major impact on your marketing results, but many marketers fail to do that. SEO is about the words that go into the search box, and search listening is about understanding the people who are putting them there – either by voice or typing them into the box.

Keyword Research vs. Audience Research

Keyword research is focused on “right now” and is literal and tactical. It shows you the most common words and phrases people are searching for around a specific topic and provides search volume to help you decide if you want to try to target the keyword or not.

Audience research, on the other hand, is focused on the future and strategy. You spend time crafting personas for your audience and comparing those personas to who really is visiting your website – who your customers really are.

Monitoring online activity helps you create content that speaks to your audience, and that’s also easy for them to find because of keywords and other SEO efforts. You need both keyword and audience research to succeed in content marketing – and both search listening and social listening help with all of this.

Related: 21 Analytics Tools for Digital Marketing

Building Your Content

It’s better to create content for the right people instead of creating content for the largest group of people. Content marketers often want to cover as much as possible, with the broad approach. There’s nothing wrong with writing to a larger audience, but there are also more targeted questions specific to certain people and things – so you need to create plenty of options to help them answer questions.

Even if you address only a small subset of your audience with a piece of content, you can replicate it with other segments as you go through creating more content. To be successful, you have to be able to meet your audience at the point where they are at the time. Keeping your content evergreen – so it can stand on its own for a long time is key.

As you plan your content, it’s crucial to build pieces of content for each stage of your customer journey – from awareness through post-purchase. What information are people looking for regarding your brand, product, service, etc.?

Tools to Help You Get the Information You Need

AnswerThePublic – a tool I’ve talked about before, is a great tool to find out what people are asking about any particular keyword. It can be targeted by country.

For example, if you’re a sports equipment vendor, you could search for “soccer equipment.” You’d see questions like:

  • How much does soccer equipment cost?
  • Where do donate used soccer equipment?
  • What soccer equipment do you need?

While most people think of something like this for B2C, it also works for B2B.

Take a look at “search engine optimization” there. You’ll find questions like:

  • What does search engine optimization do?
  • How does search engine optimization work?
  • Is search engine optimization important for business?

Quora and Reddit are question and answer platforms where you can find a ton of information about what people are talking about or wanting more from.

Facebook Pages are a good place to look at your competition. Look closely at the type of content they’re posting on their pages – the types of content, when they go live, and so on, to learn more about how their audience is responding.

Google Analytics provides some audience insights – to show user behavior on your site. You can also use Google keyword tools to learn more about keyword volumes, etc.

YouTube – look at search activity and your competitor’s content. The search activity can help you find questions to answer and new content ideas, and the competitor activity can let you see how people are responding – so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

Of course, these are not the only platforms you can use for your audience. If there is a place where you know your audience is, you should be there to see what’s going on.

Ultimately, using the information you find, you can find patterns that help you develop the content your audience needs and wants. It’s important to serve your audience first, in everything you do in your online marketing.

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Content Marketing

What 912 Million Blog Posts Tell Us About Content Marketing

Here’s what 912 million blog posts tell us about content marketing: Longer posts typically generate more backlinks, a crucial factor for SEO. While most posts don’t receive external links, those with more in-depth research and unique insights do. Engaging headlines and visually appealing formats enhance shareability. These findings underscore the importance of quality, relevance, and strategic distribution in successful content marketing.

Backlinko and BuzzSumo partnered together to analyze 912 million blog posts to glean insights about content marketing today. They looked at factors such as content format, headlines, and word count and how it correlates with backlinks and social media shares. The findings they discovered were quite interesting.

In this article, we explore what

Long-Form Content Gets More Backlinks

When it comes to building backlinks, long-form content significantly outperforms short articles and blog posts. There are other industry studies that find a correlation between long-form content and achieving first page Google rankings.

But, it doesn’t seem that anyone has investigated why that longer-form content tends to do so much better. Does the algorithm prefer longer content? Or, is it that longer content is better at satisfying searcher intent?

While the study doesn’t make it possible to draw conclusions, the data suggest that backlinks are part of why long-form content tends to do better in Google’s ranking.

Content longer than 3,000 words gets an average of 77.2% more referring domains than content that has fewer than 1,000 words.

Want to Maximize Social Media Shares? Aim For 1,000-2,000 Words

Long-form content gets more social shares than short content, but once you go over 2,000 words, your returns start to diminish. That makes content that falls between 1,000 and 2,000 words the ideal option for maximizing the number of shares you get from social media. Content in that range gets an average of 56.1% more social media shares than content that comes in under 1,000 words.

Most Content Online Doesn’t Get Backlinks

Backlinks, or the number of external links to a piece of content, are an important part of how Google ranks content – as shown in their How Search Works report. We found that getting links is difficult. The data showed that 94% of the content earns no external links.

Getting someone to link to your content is hard. Getting links from more than one more website? That’s even tougher. Only 2.2% of content on the internet gets links from multiple websites.

Why is it so hard to earn backlinks? Again, this is a situation where you cannot answer the question from the study data lone, but it’s most likely a result of the fact that there is so much content published every day.

WordPress reports that 87 million posts were published on their platform in May 2018, 47.1% more than in May 2016. In two years, that’s 27 million monthly blog posts, making it harder for each piece of content to earn backlinks.

Looking at a 2015 study, 75% of the content in the study had zero links, and when you consider that this study’s data showed 94%, it demonstrates that it is much more difficult to earn links to your content than it was five years ago.

Social Shares Aren’t Distributed Evenly

The data in this study indicated that only a small share of outliers get the most social shares. 1.3% of the content in the study received 75% of the social shares. But when you look closer, it becomes even more disproportionate. 0.1% of the articles in the sample accounted for 50% of the total social shares. That means half of the social shares go to a small number of viral posts.

No Real Correlation Between Social Shares and Backlinks

There is no correlation between the number of social shares a piece of content receives and the number of backlinks it earns. Content that gets a lot of backlinks doesn’t typically get shared on social media. And the content that gets a lot of traction on social media, doesn’t usually earn a lot of backlinks. Those shares on social media don’t translate to more backlinks.

This is a surprise for many since one of the SEO “best practices” involves sharing your content on social media. The idea behind this is that by getting your content in front of more people, you’ll increase the chance that someone will link to you. In theory, this makes sense, but it doesn’t play out the same way in the real world – because people share and link to content for different reasons.

Create content that caters to your goal. If you want to go viral on Facebook, try a list post. If you want to get more backlinks, opt for visual content like infographics.

Longer Headlines Correlate with More Social Shares

Other industry studies show a relationship between long headlines and social shares. The data in this study also found that to be true. Very long headlines do better than short headlines by 76.7%. “Very long” is defined as being between 14 and 17 words. It plays out the same way when you consider the character count at 80+. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule.

Question Headlines Get More Social Shares on Average

Interestingly enough, headlines that use a question mark at the end perform well right now. Headlines using a question get 22.3% more social shares compared to headlines that don’t follow the question format. This could be because they add an element of intrigue that boost click-through rate. Many people decide to read a post because they want to know the answer to the question in the headline. That said, they aren’t a magic bullet guaranteed to boost all your social shares and traffic.

There’s No “Best Day” for Publishing New Content to Maximize Social Shares

While social media platforms have best times of the day and best days of the week to get engagement, there doesn’t seem to be a best day of the week to publish your content if you want to maximize social shares.

Though Sunday had a slight edge compared to every other day of the week, the difference in shares between content published on Sunday vs. other days of the week was only 1.45%…hardly a reason to only update your blog on Sundays.

Rather than focusing on a best day of the week or best time of the day – learn what works for your audience based on metrics you have on hand. The best time is always when your audience is available to consume and share your content.

 

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Social Media

Creating Personalized Content for Social Media Marketing

Advertising to the prospect or consumer on social media is a growing craft—and an increasing area of competition. Consumers prefer content tailored to them, making them 40% more likely to make a positive buying decision after seeing that content. With so much riding on catching the audience’s attention on social media, creating personalized content for social media marketing has become a major area of focus for many marketers, particularly in the ecommerce sphere.

What is Personalized Content for Social Media Marketing?

Personalized content is a means for building interest, engagement, and trust in a brand via personalization on social media channels. That is, to the prospect or customer, personalized content is not only targeted, but feels bespoke and valuable. It creates familiarity, reflects the desires of the viewer, doesn’t at all annoy the consumer, and establishes a personalized ad delivery experience.

Above all, personalized marketing is centered around real, relevant data collected via survey, buyer persona creation, or real-time analysis.

Why Invest in Personalized Content?

The statistics have it: customers want brands who know them by name and deliver specific recommendations based on past purchases and cart items. A majority (63%) of customers don’t like generic ad content. To get the consumer’s attention, providing personalized experiences, particularly in a way relevant or not disruptive to their social media experience, has become key to sales conversion.

They’ll Trust the Brand—Even if They Don’t Trust the Platform

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other revelations about who controls, posts, and sways public opinion using persuasive content and data on platforms like Facebook, a post-2016 election American audience remains dubious and skeptical about content posted to their social media platforms. It’s understandable that they wouldn’t trust the platform—which means your brand trust needs to supersede their trust of social media platforms.

After all, they won’t trust the platform, but they still understand that it’s a primary advertising space for brands like yours.

Organic Search is in Decline

Organic traffic—that is, the search results-oriented website hits that come directly from Google and other search engines—is the holy grail of content marketing, proving content to be worth the investment for many brands. However, your organic searches may decline due to multiple factors, including minor adjustments in Google’s algorithm.

Your organic search strategy may be top notch, but inbound traffic should never be about organic search alone. Investing in personalized social engagement is like a back up plan for your business. Think of it as operating with insurance for your content and product pages.

User Control and Agency

In a world where many internet users feel a lack of control or certainty over their lives, they want agency over their experiences. From “dark mode” to social media polling and selection choices, every opportunity for the audience to personalize their experience on social media is potentially a win for your brand.

Using social media, how can you provide users with a sense of control over their experience?

Examples of Personalized Content

Some of the internet’s most popular services rely heavily on serving personalized content. They include:

  • Netflix: This streaming service serves up recommendations for you based on what you like. They hope you’ll retain your subscription and continue to use the service as a result.
  • Etsy: This boutique forum for independent craftspeople, artisans, and antique dealers does a fine job of suggesting further items for purchase or perusal based on what you’ve viewed. Considering the unique nature of each item, their categorization and word-matching process is top notch.
  • Amazon: The internet’s retail giant got that way for a number of reasons, including personalized content recommendations. Add plugins like Honey or Wikibuy to ensure you get the best bet, and the price-matching is basically built in.
  • Spotify: Like music and want to discover more? Spotify offers a gentle push in the direction of music discovery with their platform. You can listen to an artist radio, for example, “The Beatles Radio,” which will play the artist in addition to similar sounding music.

What makes all of this social, though, are the websites’ abilities to share. With a click of the button, browsers can share to friends, family, and followers via email or social media.

This can result in further ad retargeting—that is, when someone shares a piece of content without buying it, they’re later served an ad for the same product (or similar ones) from the retailer and competitors. That’s pretty powerful advertising—not to mention extremely personalized.

How to Create Personalized Content for Social Media Marketing

Creating personalized content for social media marketing should involve as much data as you have about your existing consumer. If you’re not sure where to begin, try this short exercise to personalize a social media message for your audience:

  • Gather your data: Gather all the available data on your consumers. This includes anything from real-time data to existing information about your customers. Examine how you can leverage this data to personalize content.
  • Define your buyer persona: Who is your average customer? Create and consider your buyer persona when creating personalized content for social media marketing.
  • Choose the ideal platforms: Personalizing the experience is all about making sure you’re finding your customers where they live—that is, on their preferred social media platforms. Before you can target ads, you need to find out where they go. Aside from analyzing existing data, you can use buyer persona and demographics information to determine where your ideal customer spends their time.
  • Determine audience segments: Further segment your targeted audience with ads and organic social media content based on recent searches and interests. This is especially important for ecommerce marketers.
  • Move the user to email marketing: A sale isn’t the only conversion that matters: think about that email marketing list. You can create an extremely customized experience when you make a user feel like they have one on social. Asking for their name and preferences at email list sign up allows you to personalize and distribute extremely relevant messages to the consumer on an ongoing basis—an experience that can loop back to social media content, engagement, and ads.
  • Use Facebook and Instagram Stories: Forget text-heavy advertising. Users gravitate towards ephemeral content, like that which appears on Facebook and Instagram stories. The platforms also seem to be pushing “stories” content, meaning your personalized efforts are more likely to become part of the user’s daily experience on these platforms, even if the individual messages themselves are rather fleeting. Effective stories tend to be low in text, and high in graphic and video-rich content.

Get Personal with Messaging Apps

Chatbots and messaging apps have also increased in popularity due to their level of personalization, engagement, and conversion. Automated messaging apps, or even regular Facebook page messages set to answer with a pleasant greeting, allow your brand to answer your customer 24/7, even if it’s just acting like a modern day answering machine service.

Messaging apps can set personalized expectations by addressing customer concerns and providing a time frame for response.

Since 79% of companies surpassing their revenue goals had personalized content plans in play, if you’re not already personalizing your social media content, it’s time to consider it. Ultimately, you may not need a bunch of fancy tools and metrics to begin personalizing a social media experience today—a solid, personalized reply can make all the difference to a concerned or grateful users on social media. If you’re not sure where to start, begin with that kind of engagement and grow.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Chase to Use AI for Marketing Content Creation

Chase to Use AI for Marketing Content Creation. JPMorgan Chase embraced AI for its marketing content creation, partnering with AI firms to generate compelling copy. This strategy aims to increase efficiency and effectiveness in ad copywriting. AI algorithms analyze data to produce optimized headlines and ad content, potentially revolutionizing traditional marketing approaches by combining creativity with data-driven insights.

Are freelance copywriters and in-house teams soon to be out of a job? We’re in the v. Writing algorithms have been available for purchase or a while now. Major companies are using them and they are creating well written articles supported by data.

When it comes to content writing bots you’ll see a lot of phrases such as intelligent narratives, automated storytelling technology, and natural language generation. Let’s take a closer look at some of the major players in the AI content field.

Quill by Narrative Science

Narrative Science began in 2010 as a Northwestern University experiment turning baseball scores into stories. The following year it raised more than $6 million to study the landscape of creating stories without humans. In 2013, they raised another $11.5 million for further development. Today, will generate news stories, headlines, and Industry reports all without human intervention. Though it’s limited to the confines of data backed content and news reports, it generates that type of content at scale.

Narrative Science rents their platform to mostly financial clients who can get reports 10 – 15 pages in length within a matter of moments. A writer would need weeks to put it together. Reports show that Quill turns out over a million words a day creating content for clients such as Forbes, USAA, T Rowe Price and Groupon.

Though pricing is not listed directly on the Narrative Science website,  other sources indicate that pricing is based on story types. One story type could generate up to 100,000 stories and cost $70,000 a year while using three story types would cost $175,000 a year.

Persado

Persado is an AI platform that focuses on creating digital marketing copy. Recently they announced a five-year partnership with banking giant Chase. Their pilot relationship began three years ago using the toll for its card and mortgage business. The relationship now expands across all of the financial giant platforms. Chase says that ads created by Persado’s machine learning performed better than ads written by humans with a higher percentage of click-through rates twice as many in some cases. The company works alongside chases marketing team and agencies.

Chase says their relationship with Persado has not had an impact on their staffing structure. Persado says that the chase is the first brand to use their AI technology across platforms they already work with 250 marketers across a variety of Brands including Expedia, Williams-Sonoma and Dell.

Automated Insights and WordSmith

The Associated Press, one of the nation’s oldest news networks, founded in 1846 are now using robots to write thousands of news stories. Their platform Automated Insights was used to combat the low output of corporate earning reports by their writers. Using the AI technology they increased output 1200%.

Using Automated Insights, the Associated Press now produces 3,700 quarterly earnings stories which are short.

Automated Insights has gone on to create their own smart content robot called Wordsmith. Automated insights maintains that Wordsmith is the world’s first public natural language generation platform. The catch is that a lot of human content work is required to make the algorithm work.

You must add your data to the software with a few data points for the story then write a template for the story. Then preview the output of the software and edit it. Then, you publish your half robot and half human-created story from the app.

Because Wordsmith is essentially a mutation of a bot with a human, we could see many marketers going in this direction. Hundreds of businesses, such as Microsoft Yahoo and Allstate have invested in using the platform which generates more than one and a half billion pieces of content every year. It can develop content in more than 20 languages and generate content in seconds compared to taking a team of writers possibly weeks to develop.

Access to Wordsmith starts at $2,000 per month with an annual contract. Managed services are an additional fee. Set up costs associated with each stories data points are also an additional fee.

Heliograf

The Washington Post has published more than 850 stories in the past year using its in-house automated storytelling technology.  More realistically however, it may be better referred to as in-house reporting technology because it generates news articles and social media posts.

The Washington Post sells Heliograf technology through Arc Publishing. Pricing starts at $10,000 a month and can increase to over $150,000 a month. As the Wall Street Journal reports, profitability is huge with 60% to 80% margins.

The good news for content creators is there is still plenty of room on the market. As the more advanced AI tools are very expensive and out of range for many small businesses, human writers still hold a lot of value. Though more bots are coming onto the scene on a regular basis, it will be a while before the technology is perfected to the point where it produces stellar copy at an affordable price.

Categories
Content Marketing

4 Industry-Proven Methods for Better Content Creation

Neil Patel. Ann Handley. Joe Pulizzi. Lilach Bullock.

What do all of these people have in common? If you guessed marketing or entrepreneurial spirit, you’d be right, but that’s just the beginning of their stories. These four influential people are also four of the world’s best content creationists spanning across nearly every delivery format, including speeches, video, books, articles, and more.

They’re also all people who regularly share their expertise with other content creators, often for free. That outreach to the marketing and content creation communities makes us all better at what we do, and it’s a big part of the reason why we believe in “sharing the love,” too.

In that spirit, we put together some of our favorite content creation tips for marketing campaigns. If you find them useful, send us an email or connect with us on social media and tell us what you think. Your feedback is always appreciated.

Publish Often (And Regularly)

One of Patel’s most common suggestions is also the most simple: no matter what you’re publishing, you should be publishing often and on a regularly scheduled basis. This is true for social media platforms, articles, blog posts, email newsletters, email marketing, and just about every other form of content creation out there.

How frequently is “often?” Well, it depends on your business and the type of content you’re producing, but most sources say at least one to two times per week. Social media pages often benefit from a slightly faster publishing rate, while articles, blogs, and white papers can be stretched out a little bit further when you’re short on time.

As for what everyone else is doing, this study from 2015 highlights that nearly all content marketers now publish at least weekly, if not more often. But do keep in mind that you can potentially publish too much – multiple times a day, for example, is probably over the top.

Focus on Your Audience

“You do need to be audience-centric in your approach. You’ve got to make sure that you’re not wasting your audience’s time, and you’ve really got to respect that relationship.” This quote comes from Handley, who often advises marketers on how they can become influential writers themselves – even if they’ve never written a word. It’s sage advice that may seem too surface level at first, but in reality, touches on something marketers and writers often misconstrue: exactly what it means to be “audience-centric” in the first place.

There are two schools of thought here. The first suggests that in order to be audience centric, you need to pick a category and topic you think your audience is interested in and never stray from it. The other suggests you should loosen it up and mix up your content types and topics to keep people coming back for more.

They’re both wrong – well, not so much wrong as far too surface level to really explain what you need to be doing.

To be audience-centric isn’t as much about what you write or how you write it; instead, it’s about how much effort you put into getting to know your audience to ensure that you create content that they actually find useful. Get away from simply throwing down text or images to fill quota and use up SEO keywords and take some time to research your audience, what they find useful, and what they need. Then, structure your topics, categories and content around that, instead.

Don’t forget that content format also matters in usefulness. Someone who is busy and on-the-go will naturally gravitate to content that’s easier to see on mobile, such as video or simple graphics, than long-form text content. Experiment to discover what works best without increasing bounce rates.

Content Isn’t (Always) Sales Communication

This tip from Joe Pulizzi covers one of the most common and under-appreciated mistakes in the content world: assuming your content should always sell something or push your products and services. “That’s not content marketing. That’s just sales collateral,” Pulizzi shares. “We talk to the smallest and biggest brands out there…We say, ‘show us your content marketing’ and it’s all about the company’s products and services, their new widget, their latest award.

The problem with this approach is that most content channels are already oversaturated with similar messaging. We see it on social media sites, on websites, in apps, even embedded in YouTube videos now through video advertising. And that’s exactly what your content becomes when you make it about your products – a form of advertising.

To clarify, there isn’t anything wrong with content as advertising when your true intention is to advertise the product. Without it, there would be no such thing as product descriptions, sales brochures, or landing pages. But content-as-advertising should be a part of your content creation strategy, not its defining characteristic. And that means mixing it up and re-evaluating your content and how it serves your audience.

Pulizzi also says that content marketing should be about making yourself a leader within your chosen media channel. We share his sentiment that the best way to do that is to create “compelling, interesting” content your audience really finds useful and interesting. He suggests auditing all of your content and asking yourself:

  • Is it helpful?
  • Is it interesting?
  • Is it well-targeted to your audience?

Then, become one of your industry’s best “information providers” – someone who shares the latest and best information either first or in a more digestible format than everyone else. Your goal isn’t necessarily always to sell, but to compel.

Use (And Interact With) Your Influencers

Lilach Bullock’s area of expertise is social media, so her content tips are often targeted very specifically to sites like Instagram or Facebook. One of her most pressing themes is the idea that some of the best content doesn’t come from content marketers, but from the influencers they hire to create content. So, use influencers to your advantage if and when you can.

Think your business can’t afford to use influencers? You’re probably over-estimating the cost. Bullock mentions this in her blog post, The 4 Principles of Psychology, where she highlights that you don’t need to wait to lock down the “best of the best.” Instead, you should look for influencers who have at least a small reach and can somehow make a real difference in your marketing or your brand. If that’s a small-time influencer from your area of operation, that’s just fine, too.

Once you get involved in influencers, do your best to foster that relationship because it’s truly a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” arrangement. Mention them on birthdays or special achievements and don’t be afraid to interact with them. They’ll tweet or share you in return. And every time that interaction happens, you’ll both enjoy increased attention.

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