The gig economy: If you’re here, you’re likely a part of it. It’s a cute term but belies the fact that 35% of the U.S. workforce is comprised of freelancers, and more than half of U.S. workers will be freelancers in less than 10 years. With more freelancers comes more content creators.
There are currently more than 170 million active websites (and nearly 2 billion total websites), and 380 websites are created every minute. In other words, content creation is a growth market and content creators are the driving force!
Behind the growth is digitalization — an ongoing push toward freelance management systems and even blockchain-based ledgers. Digitalization increases the need for content creators but also makes it more difficult to get noticed …
… so how does your content stand out in a proverbial sea of copywriters, bloggers, journalists, marketers, etc.?
Step 1 – Content Ideation
Before you write anything, it’s vital to have a plan in place. Ideating your content ensures you or your company are more productive in your editorial efforts. My two favorite methods of ideating content are top-down and bottom-up research.
From a bottom-up perspective:
Keyword research: Determine what content you want to rank for in search. There are a number of keyword tools at your disposal, including Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs. If you’re a content creator with a website about the stock market, for instance, you may want to rank for “stocks to buy.”
Search intent: Once you discover a healthy list of keywords to rank for, you should understand what content Google and other search engines prioritize in search engine results pages (SERP). A keyword like “stocks to buy” will yield very different results than the keyword “what are stocks?” The former provides more news-pegged results that change daily while the latter populates with evergreen content answering a very specific question.
From a top-down perspective, you can create a content plan in the following ways:
Competitive analysis: This is simple — check out what the competition is up to. If the biggest brand in your space focuses its efforts on a very specific topic, it’s because they’re getting results. And it’s not a bad place to start. If nothing else, you can get a sense of what your competitors are up to, and beat them at their own game.
Industry news: You should always stay up-to-date with best practices and trends in your industry. It’s not wise to compete with more established competitors on straight news stories, so this is your chance to ideate content adjacent to the news.
Step 2 – Content Creation
Once you’ve come up with a strong plan for your content, you can start creating.
Content type: You should by now have a list of story ideas and keywords to rank for … now it’s time to decide how to convey that information to your audience. If a content creator’s goal is to inform, their article should answer a specific question in the best possible format. For instance, a listicle titled “10 Reasons to Buy a Home in Miami” probably isn’t the best way to answer the query “find a real estate agent in Florida.” It would, however, answer a query of “should I buy a home in Miami?”
Writing: Ten years ago, this bullet might inform content creators to find a keyword and stuff it in every place imaginable. In 2019 and beyond, content creation should respect that the search engines, especially Google, cannot (and should not) be gamed. Great search engine optimization (SEO) takes into account semantically linked keywords — avoiding keyword stuffing and putting the experience of the audience first.
Editing: This is where you really get a leg-up on your competition. The internet is rife with errors and mistrust (and a certain two-word phrase I won’t dignify here). A team of editors is the last line of defense against inaccuracy and poor arguments, and editing ensures your content is optimized according to audience and content type.
Publishing: It’s time to send it out to the world — scary! But once your content is published, there’s still plenty of work to do.
Step 3 – Building Links
Properly SEO’d content isn’t the only step toward ranking (and staying) on top of Google’s SERPs. Your site and its pages should have a strong backlink profile from quality websites.
Syndication: One way to build a strong backlink profile is by building beneficial relationships with your non-competing companies in the same niche and even with direct competitors. Everyone needs more content, and offering to syndicate your own content on another website will give you the backlinks you need and potential exposure to a new audience. Forging these relationships takes time, which highlights the importance of having someone in your corner who knows what they’re doing.
Off-site content (Guest blogging): Share your company’s expertise by writing original content for the top influencers in your industry. You’ll need to make sure that your links back to your site get whitelisted by the website you’re writing for, however, to gain a useable backlink.
Step 4 – Content Auditing
Phew! Now that you’ve got a plan in place and actual content out in the wild, the hard part’s over, right? Wrong.
Understanding your audience through analytics: Once your content has been published, you need to reflect on who is actually reading it. You set out on this journey with a particular audience in mind, and if you’re not reaching them (or not reaching anyone for that matter), you need to know about it. This is why it’s critical you keep tabs on content that wins and loses, and evaluate the myriad variables of what went wrong/right. Google offers its own analytics platform, but even the savviest of content creators need help parsing the data.
Republishing your winners: Once you discover what’s working, it’s time to go back to square one — planning content. This time, you’ll plan on content that you can republish. It’s not as simple as changing the date on the story, though, and we’ll walk you through it from beginning to end in a future entry.
Until then, have a look around Revverst’s services for content creation, designed to make your business and brand stand out in an ever-growing digital economy.