Content Marketing: The Key to Creating Relevant Content Every Time

If you've spent any time in the world of SEO, it's clear that promotion is a process. It's repeatable, it's measurable, and it gets results. Is the same true for content? We believe so, even if the more common perception is that content is the domain of artistic types with no real strategy.

With that in mind, here's a step by step strategy to produce relevant content every time you sit in front of your laptop.

1. Create an Agenda

Content production seems ten times harder when you sit down and don't know what you're going to write about. Always plan your subjects in advance. Here is the basic process you should use to create your agenda.

• Keyword Research - You know the drill. Find keywords that are popular and relatively low in competition. Create a list of keywords and come up with a publishing schedule for each of them.

• Draft Titles - Brainstorm title ideas. Get creative. Mash ideas together and allow your mind to wander. We've written on this subject elsewhere. The key is to come up with a title idea that will grab attention and doesn't look like anything else in the search results. Most of your ideas will be terrible, and that's fine. Pick the best ones and move forward. Always try to have a list of titles that you are going to write for the next month or so.

2. Research and Outreach

Now that you always have a clear idea of what you are going to work on next, you can focus on the two cornerstones of exceptional content: research and outreach.

• Research

Don't conflate research with keyword research. By now you should have moved past the keyword and you should be thinking about the problem you are trying to solve for your readers. This should allow you to start your research with more innovative search queries that don't necessarily contain any of your keywords. Look for interesting information that's not easy to find.

A few good hacks:

-- Exclusively search .edu and .gov domains. -- Go to Reddit and look for a subreddit on the topic. -- Use StumbleUpon's explore feature to find good info on the topic. -- Search Topsy and FollowerWonk for the topic. -- Try a Google Scholar search, especially if you have access to a university library account

Jot down all the best information you come across, focusing most of your efforts on facts and data rather than other people's opinions. Actionable steps like how-to guides fall somewhere in between. Use your judgement. Always record the source of the information. You'll see why in a few seconds.

Once you've collected a fair amount of data, take a look at what you have and organize it in the most logical manner. Try to organize it into a narrative, and make sure that it solves the problem posed in the title.

• Outreach

Revisit your sources and look for a way to contact them. Let them know you're writing an article and that you're going to use them as a source. Let them know what the general layout of the article is going to be and ask them if they have anything to add. This is a great source of quotes and genuinely unique information that can't be found anywhere else, so be sure to mine their responses for gold.

You become at least twice as authoritative the second you quote somebody who said something exclusively to you. News stations do this all the time with random people on the street, and it makes them seem more authoritative. Consider what it does for your reputation when you quote genuine experts.

3. Writing

This is the only part of the process that involves a little bit of "magic." Learning what separates great from mediocre writing is a skill that just takes practice, but you can expedite the process by getting feedback from others, especially the people you have already done outreach with. These steps should help make the process more formal:

• Turn each fact into a subheading or paragraph - Take each interesting piece of data that you jotted down and expand upon it with additional research, your opinions, and quotes from the people you spoke with. Write like you're speaking directly to the audience, not like you're writing an essay. Trying to sound too professional usually backfires because you lose connection with your audience. Most people end up trying to write above their writing level and it actually comes off sounding worse than it otherwise would.

• Write a hook - Approach the beginning of the article from an interesting angle that catches readers off guard and encourages them to read more.

• Write a conclusion - Finish up with a very brief overview of the basic point of the article, and ask a question or two to encourage participation from your readers.

• Review for impact - Go back over the article and spice up the bland parts with humor, innovative wording, and other emotional tones.

• Review for language - Go back over the article a second time to check for poor language, confusing wording, long sentences, and so on.

• Review for visual impact - Go over the article a third and final time to check for aesthetics. Look for big blocks of text and break them up into smaller paragraphs, taking care to add bullet points and additional subheadings where it makes sense. Consider bolding your most important sentences to draw attention to them.

Conclusion

There are additional things you'd want to do for promotion. (Hint: it involves talking to the people you cited as resources again.) That said, this is just about everything you need to know in order to write relevant content every single time.

This is what works for us. What works for you?