If you’re new to content marketing, you might be of the view that page views, social shares, and comments will start rolling at the moment you publish a blog post or share a social media post. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.
Based on the latest data for 2021, a staggering 1.75 million blog posts are published every day, while over 500 million tweets and 2.45 billion Facebook posts are shared each day on social media. Your content is competing with all of them, so how do you stand out when it comes to your target audience? By producing high-quality, conversion-oriented content.
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Tips for Creating Great Content That Ranks
Here are some effective tips to create great content for users:
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Today, a large number of small and large businesses are investing in content marketing, but only a few are able to produce truly engaging content that ranks. The underlying reason being marketers fail to consider their audience when developing content.
While 71 percent of businesses include customer stories and case studies in their content, only 3 percent go deep enough into those stories to relate them to their targeted users, according to a Forrester study.
Marketers need to understand that reading is the reason they’re producing content, so their posts need to offer something worth talking about. The only way you can do this is by understanding the mindset of the audience. Developing buyer personas is a proven way to know what your ideal buyer looks like.
Once you know how your targeted users think and what drives them, you’ll find yourself in a much better position to successfully target a specific person and their path toward a potential purchase. You’ll be providing solutions to their most pressing problems. So, there’s no reason why a qualified or relevant user won’t read your content.
2. Nail Your Headline
The first thing users read upon visiting a content piece is the title. If this element is intriguing enough and grabs their attention, chances are they’ll go on to read the rest of the content. Thus, by developing catchy headlines, you can increase the likelihood of users clicking the link to open the content and consuming it. But how exactly do you nail your headline?
Suppose you’ve written a blog post and have a simple title for it. Incorporate the following four U’s to transform your headline:
- Unique: what makes this blog post unique and compelling?
- Useful: What makes the post valuable?
- Urgent: Why should the user go through it now?
- Ultra-specific: What learning will the user derive from the post?
If you’re able to combine all these qualities in your headline, there’s no reason why a relevant user won’t open and go through your content. If you feel short of ideas, you may use one of the title-generating tools available online.
3. Obtain Ideas from Others
Great content ideas don’t come your way; you need to go out and search for them. Professional writers also get stuck, but this doesn’t stop them from developing excellent content. How do they do this? They seek someone else’s inspiration to get themselves going. Here are strategies to obtain superb content ideas:
4. Leverage Name Recognition
Using name recognition is a powerful way to encourage users to click through and read a post. It involves combining two unrelated subjects into a single content piece. Both subjects should be something your audience should be familiar with and want to learn more about.
For example, you can take a business topic along with a well-recognized figure such as “What Dwayne Johnson Has to Say About Investing in Cryptocurrency”. The content can be about the celebrity’s views on crypto investing.
Ideas for the name recognition methods can be obtained from popular movies and TV shows that are popular among your target audience. You may even use popular Author names or even superheroes like Batman to develop content themes. In addition, check out Google trends to determine what’s trending right now and work those subjects into your content.
5. Use Your Past Content
Producing original, unique content doesn’t necessarily mean you need to develop your content from scratch. In fact, this can rather be risky because you don’t know whether your audience will even be interested in the new subject. There are times when you should work smarter rather than harder.
Assuming that you’ve been posting content for a while now, you must have developed a fair idea about what’s working and what’s not. Go back and see which content pieces are getting discovered on their own.
Check the analytics to determine which posts are generating the most shares, views, and leads. Once you’ve discovered the highest-performing content pieces of the past, learn from them and think of ways to replicate that success.
Instead of just picking topics, identify your blog’s sweet spots using web analytics. It can be the subject matter, format, author, title, or something else. When you know exactly what’s working, develop a blog editorial calendar to replicate past successes.
6. Use Graphics to Make Your Point
Your content pieces such as blog posts don’t need to be entirely text-based. The content itself can be of different types such as images, videos, infographics, text, graphics, tables, process charts, and so on. A much better way to communicate is to use visual content along with the information provided in the text.
Search engines and social media networks value and reward visual content because they increase engagement and shares. Thus consider adding unique graphic design content such as images and GIFs, branding visuals, or video content to your blog posts, social media posts, marketing emails, and webpages.
This will not just lead to an appealing and engaging presentation of your content but also boost conversions. Including flow charts to explain processes and graphs to depict data also prove highly effective for those looking for factual information.
7. Don’t Ignore SEO
While high-quality that genuinely delivers value ranks itself, it’s important to take some extra steps to optimize your content for search and social. Starting with the title; while incorporating the four U’s discussed earlier in this guide, be sure to include your keyword in the title.
If your title exceeds 60 characters, it will get cut off on search engine results, so respect that character limit. Assuming that you aim to share your content on Twitter, keeping your title under 120 characters will leave you with enough room to insert links and allow attribution.
Beyond the title, you should also include your targeted keyword in the metadata. Both title and metadata optimization are part of on-page SEO, a powerful way to improve the searching visibility of your blog posts and other web content. Other key factors of on-page SEO include:
- Originality
- Presentation
- Author credibility
- Content quality
- In-depth Analysis
- Formatting
Apart from on-page SEO, you’ll also need to work on off-page SEO, which is all about link-building or creating back-links for your content, as well as work with your web developer, who will take care of technical SEO that happens on the backend such as developing a sitemap for your business website.
Conclusion
There’s a lot of content on the web nowadays, which is why marketers should constantly look for ways to stand out from the competition. If your existing content marketing strategy is not producing desirable results, the aforementioned tips to create great content can easily turn things around.
Ideally, you should have a passion and experienced content writing professionally by your side who knows how to surprise users by producing conversion-oriented content.
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