Why develop good content?
Content is what drives everything on the web. It affects your search engine ranking, whether or not people will interact with you on your blog, social media, whether or not people will click through from newsletters and ads.
How to develop content?
Any time you are in the car, in the shower, reading a book, having breakfast, watching TV, working … these are all times when a good content idea can pop into your head. You can scribble a note or send yourself a quick email reminder of the idea you just had that might be in some way relevant to the business.
What exactly IS content?
Content is “good ideas” converted into a 2-3 paragraph blog post with an image. That blog post is then available on your website, can be posted to social media, is used to populate next month’s newsletter but most importantly over time is building the amount of “stuff” you have on your website. The search engines respect larger sites with lots of good RELEVANT content. As such you are able to reuse one piece of blog content for multiple purposes!
What types of content?
Content development for your biz does NOT strictly have to be “fire retardant clothing” (or whatever) related. Remember you have to sell credibility before you can sell your product/service. So how do you build credibility with your client base? Well, you think about things that would be valuable to them.
Dry Canyon FR, a local Salt Lake safety apparel company may pay the bills by selling flame retardant clothes for utility crews, fire and rescue and oil workers but they earn credibility and respect in order to grow and be taken seriously. In other words, Dry Canyon’s focus should not be on selling clothing but rather developing THE fire safety brand in the US, by building themselves into a credible resource where people can find support, information, help, directions, ideas for anything and everything related to fire safety.
By positioning themselves as the authority on the the fire safety topic, they then become the goto online site for buying safety gear.
So how do they do that? They have to LIVE their business, integrate it into their daily lives such that they truly understand the needs of their user base. They can develop content on topics like linehand safety, new legislation in the industry, reporting on accidents that happened and what can done done to better protect workers in the field. Content can be about apprenticeship opportunites, available jobs etc. The key is to really think on what linehands will find useful and what is valuable to them.
The use of pain points is another great mechanism: By understanding the problems people have, you can zone in on how to help them thus providing useful content and a reason for people to visit your online presence (be it the website, social, newsletter, chat groups etc.)
It also pays to incorporate as much as possible the keywords you want to be found for if people Google search you.
Example:
This how-to blog is itself an example of a blog (albeit a long one, there is no need to write long posts every time – short informative ones are just as valuable, especially on mobile devices):
– The content is relevant to our business purpose.
– I know it has value as I needed to create it, to send it to a client.
– I have peppered it with keyword phrases (web marketing, content development, Salt Lake, Basebuild …) for which we want to be found.
– It’s relatively digestible as it was written in broken up paragraphs.
– I was able to give one of our clients Dry Canyon a little plug in the process of giving an example.
– Never use cheesy stock images – the image is the first thing you get judged on – ask yourself, is this image relevant, even just fun to look at, intriguing?
Final thought
Frankly, without a consistent source of relevant, authentic, honest and most importantly VALUABLE content, there’s a good chance your web marketing efforts will fail. Having a “website” by itself doesn’t do much for you in 2017. Posting poor or cheesy content on social media in 2017 won’t do much for your popularity.
Spamming newsletter subscribers with content that isn’t relevant will potentially not only lose you subscribers but could in some way damage your brand (e.g. “Why do these people keep sending me crap!”).
The irony is that this post was actually written to help a client understand just a little more about content and why Basebuild needed them to work with us on it. I don’t see this post getting ranked but rather I decided to throw together a blog post (as opposed to just sending it to the client via email) on the off chance that it might help someone else randomly browsing our site. I won’t post it on social and it will never reach our gadgets newsletter. But it does hopefully, in the least, hit on that VALUE criterion we mentioned earlier.