If you’re like most website owners, you probably don’t think much about content; outside of internet marketers, few do. For most of history, there was a few little really mass-disseminated amateur content such as writing, photos, and videos – pro’s made the stuff, period. If you read something, a writer wrote it; if you saw something, a director directed it, and a filmmaker or photographer produced it – nothing was random, and ideas traveled slowly. The internet changed all that and, in particular, search engines. Search engines function on relevance; they scan each and every website and index information about them and their contents. Search then uses this information it has gathered to generate an index of results going to each piece of content.
The volume of content, its quality, its frequency, and its type all weigh in here; the net effect is that content has an impact upon what search phrases a website ranks for and how relevant that site’s results are viewed, meaning those results may show up higher in search. There is also an indirect impact on domain authority. Sites with tremendous amounts of high-quality content hosted in a clean, accessible manner that’s readable and mobile friendly – ticking all boxes of best practices – have more relevance, links, and search notices. What all this means is that websites that produce content and post it on an ongoing basis have a major advantage over stale, old websites – it’s that simple. The advantage they enjoy is also cumulative and can be described as having the qualities of a barrier or an edifice against competitor ingress – if you have a ton of high-quality content and the site’s ranking, it’s going to be hard to produce an equal or higher amount of compete with you, isn’t it?.
Content Strategy
A content strategy is a standing order for the production of content; it’s a kind of monthly content production quota. The advantage a content strategy has over just randomly producing as much content as possible and hoping it works is that a content strategy allows for efficient, intelligent production of that content to maximize the volume as much as possible and avoid time wasted on producing pieces that have little impact. What do they look like? A content strategy is a pretty simple thing to produce – or at least, it is when you don’t add too much complexity to them. A typical content strategy would look like the following: 10x – 30 -to 1-minute (short) videos (YT, TikTok, etc.) 5x 1 minute-to-3 minute (medium) videos (YT, TikTok, etc.) 2x 3-to-5 minute (long) videos (YT, TikTok, etc.) 30x 500-word blog posts 7 x 1000-word blog posts 3x 2500+ word blog posts 17 social media syndication posts (for videos) 40x social media syndication posts (for blog posts) And that’s it…done! No, seriously, that really is it, though we could add in a ton of complexity, and we left out all the apps and tools you may want to use – that’s really all there is to a plan.
Brainstorming
The first real step is to sit down and begin the process of brainstorming a list of topics and ideas so that you always have a bucket list to draw from to either write yourself or hand over to contracted writing personnel. Before putting your pen to paper and plotting ideas, it’s important to note what kind of content you’re going to produce or have produced. Though many novel and highly creative forms of content exist, most of the time, when discussing content planning, the goal is to improve search rankings; therefore, the emphasis is on content with a high impact on search engines – writing and video. Not that we know what we’re brainstorming to create, but what tools exist that can help us do this efficiently? There are numerous tools that can be helpful in generating ideas for content to produce, including idea generators:
https://www.neuraltext.com/ai/content-ideas-generator
https://www.hubspot.com/resources/tool/content-creation
https://storylab.ai/content-idea-generator/
Idea generators are not new, but if you aren’t a content creator producing a high volume of content, they may sound silly – trust us, when you have to come up with ideas, you’ll thank us for sharing. Once you figure out how to generate ideas you want content produced for, the next question is one of organization. We strongly encourage everyone doing any form of marketing to be creative while staying organized and efficient. To stay efficient, you have to be able to easily access and share the ideas and descriptions for your ideas. A very simple format you may use would look something like this: Title: Blog Post – Ten things you should know when buying real estate Description: A blog post about the top ten challenges faced by first-time home buyers. This kind of format is great, but if it’s put down in a simple list, it might be inaccessible, and in a list, it’s going to be difficult to sort and deal with. Google Sheets is a very simple solution to implement to stay organized with the content planning. You simply create a sheet with it, put titles in one volume, put the description in the other, and there you go – a scalable way to brainstorm that will be easy to share with sub-contractors later on. But do you really need to hire someone?
Self-Produced Content
Many people cringe at the idea of their face being up on YouTube or their writing being criticized by a cold, impersonal internet – but it just isn’t true. Writing is another matter entirely – but more about that in a moment. Despite all the angst and ire on the internet, the data couldn’t be more clear – consumers gravitate to businesses that make efforts to engage with them. Google did research and found over half of all the traffic online at any given time is video – and that this trend is now moving down to the local level. Customers shopping for any number of businesses will choose the one that communicates the clearest with them – and this includes the kind of communication about environments and expectations one can only get from a video. This makes a very compelling case for a reward waiting for those website owners that take the time to use their websites to the fullest by producing content for them.
Written Content (Blogging)
Just to be clear, what we are NOT talking about here, we are NOT talking about spintax, ai based writing, low-quality writing, or anything of the kind – we’re talking about high-quality written content only, the kind of stuff people actually read. At the core of what a content strategy is, it’s a plan to move the needle on search by producing more of what the search engine wants to see – highly relevant content. So, when we talk about writing, we are talking about producing the kind of written content search loves – tutorials and explainer videos – to build the authority of your site.
Creative Process
The fusion of great writing with video production, the embedding of videos into content pieces about the same topic, is a great way to go about production. The reason this is efficient is that all content production requires research. If you produce videos at the same time you produce written content, it’s going to be easier to recycle that research and use it in both, cutting your research time in half per piece of content. You can get away with shorter videos and less writing if the two are combined. Syndication will appear better on social media because it won’t merely be a link but a link with a video to click, which in turn acts as a lure to the writing – and vice versa.
Conclusion – Stay Low Tech
When it comes to content strategies, we’re fans of a simple, fundamentals-based approach. There are many software solutions out there purporting to help automate one or more parts of content creation and distribution – be careful with them; these and other systems and services that purport to make life easy with content creation and distribution can wind up actually sapping time and energy and slowing you down immensely. The trouble is content creation takes its own effort and energy; if the plan is kept simple, we conserve our attention to spend where it matters – crafting good content. At the end of the day, content creation takes effort and intelligence; it needs to be tasteful because the main job it has is to communicate your ideas.