Overwhelmed With Content Marketing? Here’s A Framework To Follow

A lot of content marketing strategy blogs out there can give the average person a headache, overwhelming you with all of the steps to follow. Often they talk about metrics of success, planning your advertisement strategy, and lots of other advice that you could have trouble immediately putting into use. This isn’t exactly your fault, as some SEO marketing agencies are known for using convoluted industry jargon.

With that said, we wanted to create an easy to follow, highly actionable content marketing framework that you can start using right away. It’s so simple that nearly anyone can start using it, no matter what content niche you belong in.

Research popular content in your niche

Creating unique content doesn’t mean covering topics no one has ever covered before. When content marketing experts recommend ‘unique’ content, they mean covering popular topics with a unique perspective.

If a topic is popular enough for a lot of other blogs to cover it, for example, you can still cover the same topic – just make sure you write interesting information that the other blogs didn’t cover. This comes from either being an expert in the topic, or by compiling in-depth research on your topics.

You can always use Google to find relevant topics in your niche, and cover topics that have high engagement (comments, shares, etc). But another way to find interesting topics is directly through content aggregation websites, such as Reddit.

In addition, you can look at episodes for the most popular podcasts in your niche, and find inspiration from their podcast summaries.

Finally, this content marketing checklist gives some great advice on creating topics your audience will want to share.

Plan your keywords effectively

Keyword research tools are a thing of the past except for very niche topics. It’s incredibly easy to discover the most popular keywords in 2020, and all you need is Google and YouTube.

The auto-suggested searches by Google and YouTube are in fact the most popular searches related to whatever is typed in. This also works on Amazon and pretty much any other website that uses autocomplete. Another gold mine of long-tail keyword ideas is Google’s “Searches related to _____” at the bottom of search result pages.

Once you have your keywords, you can figure out more easily what kind of topics they’d naturally fit into – emphasis on natural.

Focus on the format that you feel natural to you

There are a lot of different ways to present your content, and you should focus on the one that feels most natural to you. If you’re a great writer, then focus on writing great blog content. If you’re talented in video editing, create engaging video content for YouTube and social media. If you’re good at graphic art design and research, put together interesting infographics.

Focusing on the format that naturally fits you doesn’t mean stopping there, because you can always outsource for content creation in other formats. You can also focus on the same topics across multiple formats.

For example, you can create a YouTube video on the top five guitar string brands, and link in the video description to your blog article on the exact same topic.

Publish amazing long-form content with minimal schedule

Some marketing blogs recommend frequent updates, such as publishing 500-word blog posts three times a week, or 15 minute videos twice a week, or a similar routine schedule. The problem with that advice is that brilliant content doesn’t adhere to routine, so many people end up publishing short bursts of low-quality content, trying to stick to a schedule.

It’s much better if you post one or two amazing, high-quality contents per month. This takes the pressure off you from trying to come up with new content all the time, and allows you to focus on creating well-researched, unique content that people will find really actionable. After you’ve built an audience, demand for your content will grow, and only then should you consider increasing your content volume.

Some additional tips for creating amazing content:

• Make your content super actionable. Create points that viewers can immediately put to use.
• Use a lot of examples in your content. Research shows that examples make learning significantly easier.
• Polish your content UX for maximum traffic funnel, such as your blog theme and video annotations.

John Pearson is a serial entrepreneur and writer who is passionate about helping small businesses launch and grow. His work has been featured in Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and Forbes.