How to Produce Attractive Content that is a Step Above the Rest

Content marketing is essentially very simple: Produce content that brings visitors to your site and is a step above the competition. Yes, very easy…until you sit down and try it. Great content may not appear at the snap of your fingers, but smart thinking and smart work will allow you to effectively accomplish your goals. Answering some questions about what you’re trying to do is a good way to start. What is it going to be about? Great question. You could write the world’s greatest blog post and drive ALL the traffic to your site until it breaks the internet, but if the post has nothing to do with what you sell your conversion rate will be abysmal. Align your content with your business and your visitors are more likely to turn into customers. Find relevant ideas for content by using a keyword tool like SEMrush. Search for a few keywords that describe what your business offers and take note of the most popular related terms.

Source: semrush.com

How are other people doing it? If you’re wondering whether anyone else may have covered the same topics you found in the last step, the answer is yes. It’s true that competition makes things harder, but it also makes things better. Use BuzzSumo to discover the content that is resonating with people who search for your keywords. You should also Google those keywords to find out what types of content are ranking. Look for commonalities and take plenty of notes. Are lists a big deal? How about image galleries? Your goal is to learn how the people who do it best are doing it.

Source: buzzsumo.com

For example, most people probably laugh when they hear about chicken saddles, but they’re real. BuzzSumo reveals that there is enough interest in the topic that hundreds of people have shared content about it. They wanted their friends to know. A chicken saddle blogger can take a look at this content and brainstorm ways to improve it. It looks like there’s a lack of instructional videos embedded in these pages. Including something like that would be an egg-cellent idea. (Please don’t stop reading this post because of that bad joke.) How can it be done better? The next step is to one-up the competition. If you noticed that lists were ranking high, then make a list but make it longer. If it turns out that infographics are driving traffic then add info that’s missing from the others. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just add a cool white stripe around the rim. Now that your fancy new content is driving interested traffic to your website, make sure that you set up an email capture on those pages. Sometimes the offer in your email capture isn’t exactly what the readers of that particular blog post are looking for. Remedy the situation by offering a content upgrade. Your blog post may contain so much information that visitors would find a nicely designed PDF summary very valuable. Make your best pitch to readers with a strong call-to-action to download the content. Or maybe your blog post is about how to create a content calendar. A great content upgrade is the Excel spreadsheet that you created your content calendar in. This technique usually converts at a higher rate than a generic email optin. It’s worth your time to give special consideration to all of your high-traffic posts.

Source: twelveskip.com

Another thing to consider is that you don’t have to wait for all your new content to start driving traffic if you already have content that’s doing the job. Use Google Analytics to find your most visited blog posts and build content upgrades into those pages. If you’re running dry on ideas for content upgrades this post from OptinMonster has 30 examples that will solve your problems. With some practice and testing, you’ll be an expert upgrader in no time, having a good sense for what your readers find valuable. And the best part is that the email list growth you thought was impressive before is about to increase even more! The next step is executing an effective email strategy that convinces people to take actions that are beneficial to your business. Have fun adding content upgrades to your arsenal of traffic-driving blog posts.]]>