IDEA GENERATION
Blogging is the most effective way to help your inbound strategy. It allows you to regularly publish content related to your industry. It helps attract and convert prospects interested in your voice. More traffic means more leads and more leads means more sales. Naturally, you might be thinking “how do I come up with content ideas for my site?” or “how do I produce content for my site?”. Write down the most frequently asked questions you hear. This could be directly to you, overheard at tradeshows, or questions posted on the web, anything. The idea is to provide the information that you know a lot of people are looking for. Other ways to get ideas are through company brainstorms and keyword research. Ask yourself...
What does your audience need help with?
What do you wish people knew about you or your industry?
What is the rest of the industry talking about?
What are you competitors talkng about?
EXTERNAL RESEARCH
Once you have created your internal ideas, it is time to search externally. The following sites will give you a good idea of whats relevant and popular as it pertains to your keyword or industry.
Hubspots Blog Topic Generator
Buzzsumo
Quora
CREATING CONTENT
Remember to create content based on what you want the prospect to do. Do you want them to be aware of you? Consider you? Go with your company? Also write clear and concise, the objective is to give the visitor what they want, not fill the page. If the can absorb pertinent information easily, they will come back. The whitespace is your friend so don’t create huge blocks, utilize the empty space and remember to incorporate...
Section Headers
Sub Headers
Bullets
Numbers
Images
CTA: A Call to action, an action oriented button of what you want your visitor to do next.
Optimize your post for Search Engines
DISTRIBUTION
Now that you have created your content it is time to repurpose what you have made into different formats and distribute. You can showcase your piece through your website, emails or the various social media channels. Repurposing content is highly effective because it will save you time and allows you to use different distribution channels. For example: The information from your blog post could be turned into a video or an infographic.
Blog Posts
Email Newsletter
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
ANALYZING YOUR CONTENT
Now that you have gone through a complete cycle of content production and distribution it is imperative to analyze. Monitor the successes and failures of your content to see which approach best suits your audience. You can do this through simple observation or dive deep by implementing Google Analytic's tracking tags on the content. Questions to ask yourself are...
Are certain formats or topics performing better than others?
Are certain authors?
Are certain distribution channels?