Tag: content creation

Categories
Content Marketing

Unique Blog Post Ideas to Keep Your Audience Engaged

Consistently coming up with engaging and unique blog post ideas can be a struggle, especially when it feels like you have covered everything. with millions of blogs across the internet covering nearly any topic you can imagine, it doesn’t seem like anything is unique anymore.

So, how can you write fresh, search engine optimized content that is interesting enough that your audience actually wants to read it?

If you are overwhelmed with the idea I was coming up with more ideas, don’t worry. There are a number of ways you can come up with unique Burger ideas without relying solely on your own creativity.

Writer’s block is universal so even the world’s most well-renowned writers and content creators have come up with their own shortcuts for developing topics on a whim. In this guide, I’ll share with you a variety of ways to come up with blog post ideas so you don’t have to stare at a computer screen for hours to come up empty-handed.

Round Up Posts

This can be done in multiple ways. You can write around up post of your favorite industry quotes, or reach out to experts or influencers in your industry to get them to answer the same question. This will provide multiple inside around a single topic that you can then used to create additional blog posts later.

Year in Review Posts

We are quickly approaching the end of 2019. This is fairly monumental as we reach the end of a decade. As the year comes to a close, consider the lessons you’ve learned. What kinds of Trends should your audience look out for in the next year? what can your readers take away from what you’ve learned over the past year?

If your business has been around since before 2009, you can also do a decade in review post and link back to some of your most popular posts over the past few years. Plus, year-in-review posts have the added benefit of being able to Target New Year’s related keywords to get an annual traffic boost.

Answer the Public

You’ve heard me sing praises for Answer the Public in many of my blog posts. It is a free visual keyword research tool that gives you an expensive list of questions related to any Focus topic. Each of these questions could be something your audience is looking for and therefore could serve as the basis for a number of interesting blog posts.

Quora

Quora is a question-and-answer forum where people can post their questions about nearly anything you can imagine. Community members provide answers. Responding to Quora question is commonly used to build backlinks but you can also use these questions for blog post ideas. If you see the same few industry-related questions coming up again and again, it may be time to cover the topic on your own blog.

Once you do, you can return to each of those questions and provide a short answer with the link to your blog post included. This not only helps the people asking the questions get the answers they need but can also help increase traffic to your site.

Facebook Groups

If you thought of it, chances are there’s a Facebook Group built around it. Many Facebook groups consist of hundreds of thousands of members so there is no shortage of people to connect with and learn from. Take time to join industry-related groups and you can learn about the questions that people have or ask them what they would like to know about your chosen topic. Using the feedback from the group members allows you to come up with blog posts you know people will want to read

Resource Posts

Compile resource post that features your favorite industry videos, e-books, tools and more. Your readers are most likely looking for the best resources to help them grow their businesses and improve their lives. These posts are also a great way to earn commission through including affiliate links. However, if you make use of affiliate links be sure to include the appropriate FTC required disclosure.

Industry Event Overviews

Were you part of a local event there would be of interest to your audience? Did you attend a conference?

Write a blog post that shares your experiences and the things you learned on your blog. Chances are there are many people in your audience who would have loved to attend the event but were unable. Through your blog post, they can still get value by reading about what you learned. Plus, if people are searching for information about the event, you may be able to take advantage of that traffic.

Pinterest

A visual social network once thought only to be valuable to those in the cooking or lifestyle niche, Pinterest can be much more than a bunch of projects you’ll never get around to doing.  Take a look at the trending ideas section to find trending topics, or start your search with a keyword to see what comes up.

Your results will include a mixture of images, videos, and blog posts. With it, you can learn about what other brands are posting and think of some blog post ideas on your own. Even if you take something from Pinterest for inspiration, you can find a way to add your own spin to it by including your personal perspective or adding other information the original blog post did not include.

Audience Surveys

Though this approach doesn’t work very well for new blogs that don’t have an established readership, audience surveys are a wonderful way to connect with your subscribers and loyal readers. You can create a quick survey with Google Forms to ask your audience what they are most interested in reading about. This way, you’ll come up with topics they are definitely interested in, but they are likely to be topics people search for, too.

Categories
Content Marketing

How to Create 50+ Pieces of Content Every Day

If you want your brand to stick around a while, you’ll need to have plenty of content ready to go every day. You’ll need content for your social media channels, content for your email subscribers, for your advertising campaigns, for your blog, for other publications so you can establish credibility, and so on.

If you’re on a budget, that often feels impossible since you can’t afford to hire a team of people to create the content for you. You’re only one person, and there are only 24 hours in a day. You can’t spend all your time creating content, so what are you supposed to do?

It all comes down to using hacks to multipurpose as much of your content as possible, and to keep things simple.

Posting the Same Piece of Content Across Different Platforms

You can and should do it. However, it’s important to adjust it accordingly for each platform. Referencing the platform you’re posting the content to helps keep it more relevant and contextual.

Tweets

Active on Twitter? Each tweet is a piece of content. It’ll take you about 20 seconds to create. If you don’t have a lot of followers, you’ll need to focus time and effort on engaging with others here to build your brand.

You’re not done with that tweet yet. You can take a screenshot of it and use it as an Instagram post. Use your phone’s photo editor to get rid of everything else but the tweet itself. It’ll take you about another minute to create the Instagram post from your tweet.

But – we have to keep everything contextual to the platform. Twitter uses short copy and more causal content. With Instagram, there’s longer copy and more context, in most cases.

Memes

A meme is a piece of content. Make it work for you by finding the memes that are trending right now, and add a layer of text or labels that make it contextual to your audience and authentic to your voice. This can easily be done with a tool like MemeGenerator or Canva. You can even use Microsoft Paint on Windows or the Preview App on Mac.

Slide Decks

You can create and upload slide decks as a series of images on Instagram or a PDF on LinkedIn. If you want to make something fast, all you need to do is screenshot between 4 and 8 of your best social media posts. In a lot of situations, you can get this done in under five minutes.

Using a Notes App

Find a Notes app on your phone. Type out your thoughts. If you’re in a hurry, use the voice to text options on your phone to speak your thoughts and then clean up the transcript. Take a screenshot. Post it to Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

At this point, you have 9 pieces of content, and you’ve spent less than an hour creating them. Let’s move on to your smartphone camera.

Smartphone Camera

This is the easiest tool for creating content, as long as you feel comfortable on camera. Record a 60-second video where you recap your day, share an insight or a feeling. Post it. That in itself adds another 5 pieces of content because you can post it on Facebook. Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

Live Streaming

Live stream videos or podcast interviews with a guest. You can go live on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. That provides you with 5 more pieces of content.

Cartoons and Drawings

If you’re on the artistic side or have a bit of a budget, you can create drawings, cartoons, or comics. Pick one of your tweets that got more engagement than average. Create a cartoon with any software. Post it to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for 4 more pieces of content.

You can easily create comics without being artistic. Draw something out on a whiteboard with a speech bubble. Fill in a quote. Take a picture of it. Post it as a tweet. Change the quote and post another tweet. Take the pictures and post on your Instagram Stories, post a selfie video on Snapchat, and do a short Instagram live. You have  5 more pieces of content from a drawing you can accomplish in under 30 seconds.

Total content so far: 23 pieces

Video Slideshows

Combine your photos, screenshots, cartoons, quotes, and anything else you’ve created earlier into a video slideshow around a theme. You create the slideshow on Facebook with the Multimedia option. Post it there, then download it as a video to post on the other platforms later. You can use it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, so there’s another 4 pieces of content.

Photos

It’s a good idea to put content out there about yourself (and your employees, if you’re more than a personal brand) including your hobbies and interests. It humanizes your brand and helps your potential customers create a connection to you. It goes a long way toward building relationships.

It separates you from other people in your space and gives you a chance to share what makes you unique because there is no one else that’s you – and that’s the strongest power you have.

Share photos of the places you visit, humorous moments or inside jokes with followers, older photos, and photos with partners, clients, and customers. For the photos with others, you’ll want to provide a lot of copy to provide context to the audience. Use these on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for 4 more pieces of content.

Video Micro-Content

Add titles and captions to your videos to make it easier for people to consume. You’ll also get wider reach. Record video from your phone’s camera, or create micro-content from long-form videos and live streams.

Take clips from keynotes and post them on Instagram. Use tools such as Biteable, Promo.com, or Kapwing to make the editing fast and easy. Use Rev.com or Zubtitle for captions.

With that, you have 4 more pieces of content because you can use it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Total so far: 35 pieces of content

Text Posts

These are standalone status updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook that have no videos or images attached. You can make them short quotes or even statements you feel strongly about. They can also be longer form, depending on the platform. You can share the same quote on different platforms, as long as you factor in contextual differences.

Using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, we have 3 more pieces of content.

Quote Graphics

Use Canva to create graphics of your favorite quotes or those that relate to your brand. Create them in such a way that matches your brand – consider adding your website and/or logo to the image. Alternatively, you could layer it over a photo of yourself for branding purposes.

Canva is full of graphics you can use as the base, but you can also pull others from free stock photo sites such as Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash.

Each quote graphic is 4 pieces of content since you can use it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Total so far: 42 pieces of content

Stories

Promote your Instagram posts in your stories by providing more copy and context. Repurpose one on one interactions that you have with your audience that could add value to others. Screenshot your Instagram interactions, tweets, and more.

Best of all, you can use them on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat for three pieces of content.

Community Centric Posts

If you have a following already, connect them with one another with a community-centric post. This is an image or text post that invites people to participate in the comments by asking them a question that has them introduce themselves and interact with one another. This helps get engagement and add value.

You can use this on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, for 3 more pieces of content.

Commentaries

Beyond creating your content, you can add your own quotes or points of view over trending content. Beyond viral videos and memes, you can use it to discuss news in your industry. You can use this content on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Total content: 51 pieces of content

You don’t have to stop there! If you’ve got time, you can leverage podcasts to create transcripts and convert them to blog posts. You can film the podcast recording to provide video content. You can create polls on social media.

The content doesn’t have to be original every single time. The key is to make slight edits to your content to make it contextually relevant to each platform.

Categories
Outreach

The Pre-Outreach Strategy

When you ask marketers what their biggest challenges are, it’s no surprise to hear that many of them say “content promotion.” Getting links and social media shares is becoming more of a struggle for even the most popular blogs.

So, what can you do to promote your content more effectively?  That’s where a pre-outreach strategy comes into play.

Pre-outreach is great if you have established relationships with influencers, and industry experts you team up with on a regular basis to promote content.  Pre-outreach is useful to linking various fields together which can allow you to get a decent traffic boost that won’t die down, but only continues to bring additional users everyday.

Before I dig deep into the strategy, it is important to note that this approach may not be the best option for companies that don’t yet have visibility. If you are one of these companies, it makes more sense to invest resources into increasing brand visibility across your industry first. Once you have achieved a stronger brand visibility, you can come back to using a pre-outreach content promotion plan.

Check Your Network

Start your campaigns by putting together a list of people you regularly work with on content promotion. Using CRM systems or at least keeping a spreadsheet with names and contact information can make this step a bit easier. Pitchbox is a good option because it serves as an influencer outreach and link building platform.

It’s also a good idea to review your current list of social media followers and email subscribers. There’s a good chance that you’ll be able to find some people who are interested in sharing your content.

At this point, separate the contacts of the two lists. The first list should be people that you asked to show some love and endorsement for your content across their social media channels. The second list of people is who you should reach out to about linking back to the content.

In both situations, you must remember you are asking for a favor and you need to make sure it’s easy and beneficial for them to help you out. Take time to ask whether they want you to promote anything in return.

There are people out there who believe the best way to get links is to email blast people you might not even know. I don’t recommend that course of action. Recent studies show that cold outreach emails have an 8.5% open rate and through personal experience, I can confirm that number.  A better use of your time is to only ask people whether they could refer to your content if you know them and they have previously worked with you on link building.

While it is possible to use automated email outreach funnels like Mailshake, it’s always a good idea to handle your free outreach manually so that you can double-check that you are sending it to the right person and taking the time to add the appropriate amount of personalization to each email.

If you don’t have a very large network, you may want to consider launching a podcast or your own event to help you build relationships with industry leaders. If you have any close ties with companies that send out mass emails to their subscribers, it could be a gold mine for you. If you ask to be featured in their mass emails and  in return mention their posts to your email marketing campaign, you could see quite a burst of traffic.

Expanding Your Horizons to Build Links

If you want to build enough links, you will have to reach out to people outside of your network of contacts. This is a great time to use your pre-outreach to warm people up and start building relationships with them.

The key here is to provide any one you’re reaching out to with benefits and value first so they start to feel like they owe you. If you’re not familiar with your industry experts, it may become time-consuming for you. To maximize your time, do this:

Find Experts that Regularly Publish Guest Posts

To gather a list of contributors, you could start with checking sites that accept guest post opportunities. If you have access to Buzzsumo, you can run a report with the top authors tool where you can search using any keyword related to your pre-outreach content.

From there, take a look at the list of authors and find contributors that write across several blogs. Chose one or more writers to write on several blogs that are fully relevant to your search.

Create a Strong Value Proposition

The majority of us are not as popular as big names in our industry so it is crucial to create a powerful value proposition. Ways you can do this include:

  • Ask them to add their quotes if they are interested and have the time available
  • Sharing your final draft and seeing if they have a post they’d like to refer to in your piece.

Both of these options provide value to them and help you establish a mutually beneficial relationship. if you want to work with people you don’t know well, you’ll have a much better shot at getting what you want if you can provide them with value first.

Though it may seem easier to send cold mass emails, it’s better to invest your time and energy into building relationships with experts because they will absolutely pay and you may even become link building partners.

Get it Done!

That’s all there is to it. It’s a fairly simple idea but it is complex. You want to think long-term and try to find the best way to approach every person you reach out to. Remember you are asking them for a favor so you must take time to see what you can help them with in return. This not only ensures links, but a growing network of connections which we all know is the key to success in digital marketing.

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