When you are developing a content marketing strategy, its a good idea to go out and see what has worked, what hasn’t and what just hasn’t been done yet. The goal of content marketing is to generate leads for your website as well as to rank for more related terms in the search engines. If you’re not sure how to funnel users through your website, then check out these tips on how to generate leads with your website.
Research Content for Brainstorming Ideas
One way to do it is by starting to research your content by going to the source, Google. It’s a little more difficult now than your basic keyword research. You now have to think semantically as the web is evolving. Latent semantic indexing keywords are basically the relevant searches that you see at the bottom of every search.
Think more like a human and what they are searching for. What questions might they ask about your industry in a Google search? Compile those questions for each topic, find relevant and synonymous keywords, and then develop your content strategy to include these phrases by answering those questions.
Another way is to just search to see if a certain infographic or piece of content has been done before. If you find something that has been done, but its outdated then you can put a spin on it and make it better.
A great way of specifically looking for outdated content is using the outdated content finder from Greenlane. It lets you search for a certain topic and the date ranges you are looking for. Depending on the statistics and content, if you find that it hasn’t been covered in some time and you have some added value then move forward with that content.
Keep in mind to try and make your “linkbait” evergreen and not just following a trend. While trending topics will work if you get the timing right, they may not work in the long run in your content strategy. If you’re developing mostly evergreen content then there’s nothing wrong with adding in a trending piece here and there.
Buzzsumo is another great online tool to determine what kind of content has worked by showing how many social shares it has gotten. You can filter by dates and by the type of content: articles, infographics, guest posts, interviews and videos.
Promoting Your Content with Outreach
Use Followerwonk to find the social influencers in your niche and introduce yourself to them. Getting a link is great, but building a relationship is way better.
You can also go back to Buzzsumo and look at the top influencers. It gives you stats like the percentage of their tweets that are retweets and how many times their tweets get retweeted.
Market your content by snowball effect. Reach out to the industry leaders and authority sites. So reach out to industry experts and influencers first because they want to be the first to break the story. Once they link to it and mention it, others will follow suit. Link prospector, Cision, Buzzstream, Boomerang for Gmail, and HARO are all great tools to use to determine link prospects, organize your campaigns, and develop a productive outreach strategy.
Content that answers a searcher’s question is valuable for the search engines. Users want to get their answer fast, and Google wants to list the ones at the top that do just that.
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