6 Proven Content Strategies That Actually Work
I had the pleasure of attending the Mesh Marketing conference here in Toronto this past week. It was organized by the founders of Freshbooks and assortment of consultants and writers.
Aside from the plethora of standard “you need to be engaged in Social media” and “content is king” sessions, there were some interesting speakers from which I did pick up some golden nuggets throughout the day. One major standout which caused plenty of buzz on Twitter and in conversations was Marcus “The Sales Lion” Sheridan’s panel on content marketing and his closing side-splittingly funny presentation on 7 Unique Content Strategies.
Marcus is no stranger to developing insanely great, relevant content to his readers. He started off in the pool business and started crushing it online when there was virtually no players from the traditionally blue-collar pool industry.
He took a very traditional approach to content creation – he wrote damn good quality content. Eventually Google took notice and rewarded his business and blog with high ranking. And considering how early he started, he was probably the only player in town doing it until the competitors took notice.
What’s great about Marcus’s strategy is that he didn’t look at SEO as a marketing channel that he needed “to do”. He just started blogging about what he thought would be useful to his customers. At a certain point he started to realize what type of content was more popular than others, and he started to tailor his blogging to reflect the needs and interests of his customers.
Seem obvious? Of course it is. Sadly many, many businesses don’t do it or just don’t how.
Here are his 7 Top Content Strategies:
- Tap into the long tail. What he means by the long tail is the multi-word strings of words that searchers type to get answers to their questions. An example of this is “where do I buy covers for hot tubs”. These long tail keywords don’t necessarily provide tons of traffic individually, but add up several dozen long tail search terms that point to you in the #1 ranked position, and it starts to add up.
- Your client & customer questions make excellent blog topics. Seems like a no-brainer. Chances are that more than one customer have this question – so why not address more extensively?
- Vs. and comparions. These are powerful content ideas because they are really common search terms that many content creators don’t think about. My Bluehost vs. GoDaddy post, as an example, is the most trafficked piece of content on my blog Period. I wrote it a year ago and it still ranks #1 in Google for the keyword bluehost vs. godaddy. Nuff said.
- Write about rewards. In any industry there are likely numerous awards organizations that dole out this prize/trophy/plaque to recognize said leader in said category. Writing about it generates traffic.
- The Beauty of real-time. The one is huge and absolutely genius. Write about what’s happening in the news write now in your niche. There’s a reason why news spreads quickly – because news gets republished again and again in the hopes of getting eyeballs. Is there some interesting news within your industry that people might want to know about it? Write about it.
- There was a #7th content strategy, but I don’t have it in my notes. If anyone has it that attended #mm11 please help a brotha out!
