How To Increase Your Income and Engagement Through Content Creation
At its heart, content creation is about answering questions, solving problems, and entertaining. Writing for business explains the why’s and wherefore’s in a way that your perfect customer is searching for.
We all have questions and problems we need solving, and every day, millions of us turn to Google to find the answers. Once you’ve typed in your query, Google will then speedily search through the entire world wide web and link you to the best pieces of content that answer your question.
These can take any number of shapes, from podcasts to videos, written blogs, infographics, and much more, but they all aim to answer your questions, solve your problems, and entertain.
So, What is Content Creation?
Content creation is about more than just putting out sporadic, random pieces of content, it’s about forming a coherent plan to continually publish high-quality pieces relevant to your audience, in particular, your perfect customer.
One of the key components of this is being able to understand your target audience – understand the problems that they have, and the questions they are asking. From there, you can set about creating content that’s going to start to build a relationship with your visitors.
The Importance of Content Creation
Content creation is a key component of inbound marketing, where you attract customers by providing your target audience with the content they are looking for. Inbound marketing is extremely popular for several reasons:
- It’s a great way to build a relationship with your customer
- Great content gets you ranked – Google LOVES content!
- It has an excellent ROI (return on investment)
Here’s an example:
You are in the gym working out on your own, the gym instructor spots you doing something wrong and pops over to give you a few pointers.
Now, it hasn’t cost the gym instructor anything to spend a few seconds helping you out, and yet you’re thinking “wow, this guy/girl knows what they’re doing, perhaps I need to book myself in for a session?”
Content creation does the same thing but for an online world.
By giving people helpful information, you’ve positioned yourself as the expert.
You’ve started to cultivate a relationship with the reader where they think “perhaps I need this business’s help.”
When Google starts to recognise your expertise and send you free organic clicks, then you’re going to find you’re converting a lot of customers without having to invest huge sums in advertising.
The more you write relevant, engaging, quality content, the better your standing in the search engines will be.
The Process of Writing
Everyone will have their unique way of putting content together, but there are some considerations that everyone must make.
You want your content to be coordinated and come together to answer all the questions your audience has, so you must approach it logically.
Planning Content Strategies
This is where you consider your content as a whole and form the goals you want to achieve with your writing.
Your content should be focused on the reader, and that means you’ve got to put considerable effort into understanding what content they want to consume. There are lots of different ways of doing this, and this is where your keyword research is going to come in.
If you already have a good number of visitors to your website, then another great option is simply to ask people what they want to see! People don’t mind filling in little surveys if you make it easy for them, and this way you’re getting the information straight from the horse’s mouth.
Understand your audience’s needs and start to formulate some goals about how you’re going to address them.
Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
This is the part where you take the knowledge you have about your target audience and turn it into content ideas. Another word often bandied about is ideation.
A great way to look at it is through content clusters.
With this technique, you write one larger pillar post which deals with the macro side of your topic, say “How to Become an Astronaut,” and then you delve into the more micro aspects of becoming an astronaut with articles like “10 Fitness Tips for Becoming an Astronaut,” and “Classes You Should Take to Become an Astronaut.”
You can then links these articles to each other, creating structured content that addresses your audience’s questions at all levels.
People often say things like “I’m not writing much content because my industry isn’t very interesting.” The thing is, expertise is interesting, and that’s exactly what you have. People want and need your knowledge, you’ve just to got to express it in the right way.
Format? Blogs, Articles, Video, Social Media?
You’ve answered the question of what your audience wants to know, now you’ve got to figure out how they want to learn about it.
Different people like to consume information in different ways.
For example, if I want the answer to a question, I’ll always opt for a written article, but my brother more often than not will go to a YouTube video. Since we both have the same question, we fall into the same audience, which means content creators need to be able to accommodate both of us by making use of different formats.
You’ve got lots of different options here, so make sure you’re using formats that appeal to as much of your audience as possible. The more options you give people the better, so make sure your pages are mixing in written content with other formats such as infographics, images, and videos.
Promoting Your Content
It’s no use just putting something on your website and hoping people are going to find it – you’ve got to get out there and promote it.
There are lots of different ways you can do this through social media platforms, your email lists, push notifications, guest posts, and much more, so make the most of the tools you have available to you.
If you’re writing amazing content that’s going to help lots of people, then you should be shouting it from the rooftops, so don’t be afraid to promote your content.
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing the best articles in the world, if nobody reads them, then they’re not going to help anybody, so you’ve got to do a little self-promotion.
Content Creation Takeaways
Our takeaways are not food orientated! But, just like choosing your favourite takeaway, pick one or two points and incorporate these into your content creation. When you find they work, pick another, rinse and repeat the exercise.
- Find out what questions/ problems your audience has and answer them in an informative, easy to consume way.
- Understanding your target audience, so you’ve really got to invest time in your research. Once you know what kind of questions your audience has, then it’s just a case of developing a system that works for you.
- Make use of all the different formats that are available and don’t be shy to promote yourself when you’ve done great work!
- When you start to see some success and you’re converting customers and showing up in the rankings, then it’s just a case of repeating the process and tweaking it for maximum results.
If you’re looking for help creating your own content, why not consider Working With Us? We will help you put together a content creation strategy that perfectly fits your business, pocket, and timescales. We will write articles for you and help you repurpose them to spread your message far and wide.
If you are strapped for time and want to make the most of your online marketing, contact us now, and arrange a dedicated strategy session.
