Content Strategies for Small Businesses and Startups
1. Have a Strategy
Create a “plan of attack” in advance. In English class, you were almost certainly taught that, when writing an essay, writing an outline beforehand helps. No one liked writing them, but it really was helpful to have your trajectory planned out instead of stumbling blindly into the writing. It is the same story with content marketing: preliminary planning may be a hassle, but it keeps you on track and does not let you deviate from your final destination.
2. Take Advantage of Pop Culture
At any given time, there will be an array of hot topics trending in the media, and you should look for ways to “ride the coattails” of those popular topics by tying your content to them. If a large event like the Olympics or the presidential election is going on, write posts that relate the event to your topic. This instantly increases the relevance of the posts in addition to creating an association in a reader’s mind that will pop up every time the popular topic is discussed.
3. Create Soundbites
Studies show that people spend an average of less than one minute on a webpage, even if they are interested in the content on that page. This means that readers will most likely not read large blocks of text. They instead need to be able to browse and quickly digest the most integral parts of the content. Use easy-to-skim formatting, like bullet pointing or at least very short paragraphs, to create “soundbites,” or short snippets of important info, that the readers can take away.
4. Repurpose Content
If you are doing writing for any purpose other than the blog, you might as well milk it for all its worth by including it, in some form, on the blog. If you write a presentation, for example, you can write a summary of the key points as some killer blog content. This is also a trick to save time.
5. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Use tools like Google’s keyword tool to find which phrases get the most traffic in your business’s field. After you find the phrases, incorporate them into your content as much as possible. This will not only help you move up in the search rankings; it will make your content more on-point and focused.
6. Create User-Centered Content
Incorporate surveys or a forum on your site. This will enable you to gather feedback and “statistics” from users, which will allow you to create totally original and informative content. Because the content will be written around data straight from the primary source (the users), it will be viewed as extra-scholarly and may very well cause more backlinks to the site be created, increasing SEO.
7. Don’t Be Afraid to be Weird
Insert eye-catching images or intriguing first lines of text into your posts to make them “pop.” 90% of the information that makes its way to the brain is visual, and an image that grabs the reader’s attention is, by far, the best way to make them want to read the content surrounding that image.
8. Build Up A Cache
Nothing kills blogs like inconsistent intervals between posts. To avoid this pitfall, it is a good idea to keep a reservoir of about 12 weeks’ worth of posts on the backburner. Of course, the posts have to be more general than the topical content you can produce on the spur of the moment, but having them will make sure you always have something to post, even if other business keeps you from writing for a while.
9. Supplement with Video
Youtube makes it fantastically easy for anyone to create video and effortlessly embed it for streaming on their own pages. All content creators should take advantage of that fact and use video, a very appealing and easily-digestible form of content, to supplement their writings. Although understanding the principles touched upon above is one thing, actually incorporating them into content production is quite another. Luckily, services like Designhill specialize in complimenting your content in order to attract readers. Something as simple as applying to receive an attractive logo design can make all the difference. If you run a startup or a small business, it is never too soon to pursue professional content assistance.
