Creating A Successful Content Strategy Plus Generating and Curating Content
If you’re struggling to gain quality leads to your website, it might be time to revisit your content strategy. Content, whether it’s a blog post, video, or whitepaper, is what drives potential customers to your site. That being said, your business needs to have a smart and effective content strategy in place to ensure you’re reaching all your potential customers.
Get Your Ducks in a Row
If you don’t yet have a content strategy in place, here are some tips to get you started. First, you need to take your time creating your content strategy. It’s not something that can be whipped out in a couple of hours. It’s going to take multiple people to create and publish your content, so you’ll need to organize your content team as the first step. Ask yourself these initial questions to start forming the basics of your content strategy:
- What is the ultimate goal of the campaign?
- What is your current lead-to-sale conversion rate?
- Why are prospects dropping off?
- What is your brand identity?
- How do you want to position your brand in the market?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses as a business?
Get to Know Your Market
Create detailed descriptions of your prospects. You may even want to create audience personas so everyone in the company can understand your prospects. You’ll also need to identify who is influencing your customers, where they are being influenced, and what they are talking about. Finally, examine your competitors to see what they are doing well, and where they are falling short.
Once you’ve examined your market, it’s time to take inventory of your current content. Create a list of all the content you already have. Make note of any pieces of content that received more engagement than the rest, and see if you can figure out why they are more popular than the rest. Then, decide what content types you think your potential customers will respond to best (articles, infographics, emails, polls, contests, memes, photos, etc.)
Create A Universal Content Calendar
Create a content calendar that can be shared with your entire team across and accessible from anywhere. The calendar should include the title of the content piece, the media type, the distribution channel, publishing dates, keyword targets, and goals.
Pay to Have Content Created and Curated
There are tons of businesses that offer content writing services if you feel overwhelmed creating all your content in-house. Take a look at some of the top content writing services, pricing and main features.
Zerys is a project management tool designed specifically for content projects, with a built-in marketplace of thousands of professional writers. Think of it as a comprehensive content strategy planner, content production platform, and professional writer marketplace… all rolled into one! Here’s how it works: (1) Tell the writer what you want, (2) Post your titles to the writers, (3) Writers create your content and submit back for your review, (4) You review content and either approve, request revisions, or reject, and only pay when you’re 100% satisfied, (5) Finally, export or auto-publish your content to WordPress, Hubspot, and more. The way pricing works with this is you essentially select the start and max bid you’d like to pay per word, then choosing your bidding options and set your schedule.
Scripted is a provider of freelance writing including blog posts, white papers, social media posts and custom product descriptions. Basically, your business will get matched with the perfect right team for your industry. You can pay per blog post, white paper, web page, etc. As a bonus, you can even have the writer’s pitch you story ideas so that you don’t have to spend all day coming up with topics. Script also offers account management services if you need a high volume of content or have very specific requirements for your writing. Scripted is very affordable, with standard blog posts costing you $49 and white papers costing $299.
Constant Content lets you buy unique articles, reviews, and tutorials. You can commission freelance content writers to create original content for your web site and find SEO content writing and writers. It is a large and established marketplace for SEO friendly content and connecting web publishers to the best content writers online. With a roster of nearly 70,000 professional writers who have written hundreds of thousands of articles, Constant Content offers a comprehensive and high-quality article and custom content writing service for businesses of all sizes. Constant Content’s service is two faceted and includes a large catalogue of unique articles for sale as well as a no-risk custom content writing service. Whether you need blog posts, article writing, copywriting, copyediting, SEO writing, press releases, white papers, technical writing or any other written content, Constant Content can do it. You can buy articles ranging from $10-60 and can choose to purchase just to use or purchase for full rights to the articles.
Contently empowers journalists and brands to engage audiences with compelling content. The writers on contently are professional journalists so you don’t have to worry about subpar content. Contently also offers some of the best content creation tools as well as advanced management and workflow tools. Finally, Contently gives you easy options for publishing, sponsoring, and distributing your content. You must contact a sales rep for pricing information, which as most people know, means it comes with a slightly higher price tag than pay-per-post services, but usually also means it comes with more sophisticated packages and all-in-one software.
Godot Media is another one stop shop for all kinds of writing requirements. Find services like article writing, copywriting, SEO writing, blog writing and social media, even technical writing at Godot Media. The pricing is offered in three levels of quality – premium, standard, and basic for most of the writing services. They are running a promotion where customers can get up to 40% off on orders this month only.
Have you ever tried one of these content writing services before? What’s your biggest challenge in producing quality content?