Originally published on July 17, 2011 and continues to be relevant. Enjoy!
How do you develop quality online content? What does a good content strategy look like? How is your content strategy tied to your Web marketing and SEO efforts?
Having fresh, relevant content on your website is important. Consistent content development can be a challenge. Relevant content and online marketing success go hand in hand. How do you do it?
We recommend creating a content strategy. At a minimum, develop a monthly content calendar to define what you’ll need and when. A calendar is a great way to ease into the world of online content. It will serve as a guide to plan, organize and maintain your digital content.
Create your content calendar
Get started by asking questions that customers and prospects might have. Consider what they would want to know.
- Does seasonality impact your business?
- Are there industry trends or annual association meetings where speakers are talking about what’s currently impacting your industry?
- Are you introducing new products? New services? Or new team members?
For every topic you write about, be sure to incorporate keywords and phrases that your prospects and customers would use when searching for this information online. These keywords are part of SEO content writing and should be used in your online copy, photo and video tags, and headlines and posts. This is how content drives online success.
Content is more than copy
It also includes:
- Photos
- Videos
- Whitepapers
- Case studies
- Blog posts
- Articles
- Social Media Posts – Facebook updates, Tweets and LinkedIn updates
As you can see, online content comes in any format that you make available to your target audiences.
Sound like too much? Use content you’ve already created!
That’s exactly what we’ve done with this blog post. It was originally posted on July 17, 2011! We simply reviewed our analytics and identified this post was originally very valuable to our target audiences based on the traffic and downloads it generated. So we’ve updated it, along with our latest content calendar template, requiring little effort while providing you with a lot of value again.
Great content comes in many mediums and can be repurposed in many formats:
- A Web page topic becomes a blog post
- That blog post becomes an educational article to post elsewhere online
- A case study or white paper is created around one of your products/services and made available as a download from your website
- You create a video testimonial with the client featured in the case study, and so on…
Two options to get started
A | Let us create a content calendar for you for free
Now you have an idea of what type of content you should be creating and repurposing. However, managing your content can be difficult to get a handle on. That’s where we can help! Let us produce a free calendar for you. The calendar will organize your content and schedule when and on what channels you should share it. Simply contact us with a list of all the pieces of content you want to market.
B | Download our content calendar template
You can download our updated content calendar template and get started immediately!
