You’ve heard that content is king a million times. Or one of my favourite quotes: Excellent Content isn’t the exception, it’s the price of entry. (Corbett Barr – www.thinktraffic.net). Or you’ve heard a million variations of this – you KNOW that you have to create quality content if your blog or website is to stand out from the crowd.
But before you start creating that excellent content, there are 3 steps you need to take to ensure that your excellent content really furthers the goals of your blog or website.
IF you do these steps you’ll find that you are creating the kind of content that your audience wants, in the medium that they want AND that you are positioning that content for maximum exposure.
Let’s look at the three steps in turn.
Step 1 – Give ‘Em What They Want, How They Want, Where They Want
This foundational step is one that most of us miss when we first get started. We start a blog or a website and the default position for most of us is to start creating text based content.
When I first started my bass guitar website this was my default position. (Also that website was built using a service called SBI or Site Build It. And this was their recommended business model).
So I built out the recommended thirty pages of good content and waited for Google to bring me an audience. Only no one came. And I didn’t start building an audience until I began posting instructional/high content videos to YouTube. (Some of those videos definitely qualify as tentpole videos!)
And what’s weird is that now I have an audience I’ve been able to direct that audience to some of those original articles – and they loved them! But the problem was, until they’d discovered what I was about they weren’t prepared to read those articles.
So that’s the first lesson you need to take onboard with your content creation. Don’t create the kind of content that’s easy for you to create – give your audience the kind of content THEY want to see/read/hear.
The easiest way to find out what kind of content your audience wants is via a Target Profile Interview. That way you can actually ask the following important questions:
- (i) What content would you like to see (specifically – what topics?)?
- (ii)What format do you prefer to consume that content in? (E.g. written, video or audio?)
- (iii)Where do you normally access that kind of content in your market space? (E.g. do you go to Forums or individual blogs or websites, or iTunes or YouTube?)
When you know the answers to these questions it can help guide your content creation so you are creating valuable content for your prospective audience. And it tells you where you need to place your content so your audience can find it.
If your audience likes to watch videos, you gotta include YouTube in the mix. If your audience likes podcasts, then iTunes has to go in the mix. If your audience hangs out on Facebook…you know where to go.
Being able to position the kind of content your audience wants in the location they go to will allow you to grow your audience quickly.
Caveat: If you are creating content for places like YouTube, iTunes or Facebook you ALWAYS need to remember that you don’t own your account on those places. And you can get banned at anytime. So you must make sure you always abide by the terms of service of those sites AND your content should be designed to find people on those sites, and then funnel them back to your website.
By all means engage with your target audience on other sites, always be guiding them back to a self-hosted website that you own. I can’t overstate this one.
Step 2 – The 2 Jobs Each Piece Of Content Needs To Do
The content that you create needs to do two jobs:
- (i) Establish the ‘expertise’ factor.
- (ii)Direct people to do something
The first job is simply part of the process of getting people to ‘know, like and trust you.’ (Anyone know who first coined that phrase?)
The second job is important too. If your content is on a third party website (YouTube, iTunes, Facebook etc) then you should be subtly directing people back to your website.
For example, if you listened to last week’s Copyblogger Podcast you would have heard a very subtle pitch for getting Copyblogger’s 20 Part Internet Marketing For Smart People course. In exchange for getting that free 20 lesson course – which is really good btw – you have to give Copyblogger your email address.
So when you’re at the outline/planning stage for actually creating the type and kind of content that will satisfy your Target Profile from Stage 1 then you need to make sure that if the content is going to be hosted on a 3rd party website that there’s some kind of call to action to direct people back to you.
(If the content is on YOUR website – and see below – then you should be directing people to take a specific action. Either leave a comment. Or subscribe to your mailing list. Or go check out a product page. )
Step 3 – Design Your Content For Use In Multiple Locations
This is an important step that is overlooked by many bloggers and content creators. They post an article to their own website or blog – or post a video to their YouTube channel – and stick at that.
There are many ways of getting traffic to your site – and posting content in multiple places maximizes the effect of the efforts you took to create that content.
So for example, if you wrote an article or blog post you can syndicate that to Document Sharing sites. Or you can combine it with several articles on a similar theme into an eBook and load it to Kindle (for free or for a small fee). Or you can create a version of it for a Forum post. Or you can upload it to an article directory.
Or take a video that you’ve uploaded to YouTube. There are other video aggregators you can upload it to (like Blip.tv or Metacafe or Viddler….the list goes on). You can also post the video onto your blog by using YouTube’s Embed Code. You can post a link to your Facebook page too….the possibilities are endless.
But you should have a ‘promotional’ plan in mind before you even start creating the content – and you should know where it’s going to go. And for most content it should end up in more than one location.
Summary
To create really effective content for your blog or website, you need to follow these 3 steps BEFORE you start creating:
- (i) Find out from a Target Profile interview exactly what kind of content your target audience wants, and just as importantly, where they go to see that kind of content.
- (ii) Each piece of content should establish ‘the expertise factor’ and should also direct people back to your website – and should direct people to take a specific action too.
- (iii) Each piece of content should be designed for use in multiple locations and multiple ways.
Your Shout?
Has anyone actually done the market research to find out what kind of content their audience prefers? Or if you’re a blogger did you just assume people wanted written content? Answers to these questions and any related thoughts are – as always – welcomed in the comments.
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{ 32 comments }
Hey Paul.
Excellent tips here.
There seems to be a bit too much of this “Ready, Aim, Fire” technique with too many bloggers, which is useful when it comes to taking action, but can backfire if not enough thought is put into have high-quality AND versatile content. Great post, target profile interview is a good one.
Robert
The biggest revelation for me was finding out what content my audience wanted – and where they access that content. And giving it to them.
That’s why I’m closing in on 2 million views on YouTube for my bass guitar site. Because my audience wants video – and that’s where they go to access it. (Or the other video sites).
And I drive that traffic to my website and other things which I won’t reveal
(But you can email and ask if you wanna know what I do…).
And I think it’s a dangerous assumption to decide that your audience wants text only info. In most markets you’re probably right….but taking the time to find out will put you miles ahead of the competition IMHO. Your mileage may vary of course…..but I highly recommend the Target Profile interview – watch out for a guest post here soon on that topic!
paul
Paul,
Important distinctions here. Blogging is not about you! At least not if you want it to be successful. Sure having a personality and bringing your own expereinces and everything into it are important, as is talking about what you know and are an expert at… But at the core you need to be giving people what they want and what they need.
One this I would add is the importance of making a large percentage of your content actionable. While the occasional “history of the bass guitar” or “Anatomy of the bass guitar” would be fine. Those types of article can add depth. They are not actionable. People likely come to learn how to play the damn bass guitar.
When the majority of your articles show how to DO SOMETHING rather than talking about history, mindset or (worst of all) are simply a disguised product push, then you have something going.
-Steve
Steve
Agree totally.
If you surf the blogosphere you see lots of generic advice around – and if you take a generic approach to your content you’ll end up creating content that doesn’t stand out (to your audience) and that they are not concerned about. They will vote with their feet and go elsewhere.
On the other hand if you create actionable content that does double duty – because it teaches members of your audience to actually do something. And in that teaching they start to ‘know like and trust’ you. Win-win in terms of creating a positive relationship with potential clients. And much easier to get that result than commentary articles – the further your content creation veers away from providing specific, actionable, DOABLE tasks the better it has to be to fascinate an audience.
This – btw – is one of the reasons why 99.5% of Talking Head videos suck the big one.
Paul
Fantastic, advice in the comments here too. I hate how generic the advice we get is. My self satisfying goal is to teach people actionable steps, instead of adding to the cloud of repackaged information. Some people may have said the same things, but I’m hoping every once in awhile I can throw in some of my experience as well for what worked for me.
Susan
I like actionable advice too! I try and give at least one thing that you can learn and go away and apply in every post. There are folks who drop by who leave great comments on a regular basis….for which I am truly grateful and try and return the favour!
And I love to hear people saying they are taking action – rather than just reading.
Paul
These are good tips, Paul. They present a challenge of sorts to me personally as I’m so comfortable with written content that I’ve avoided venturing into other mediums such as video. I know that it is necessary though so I will be taking the plunge sooner rather than later (or at least finding someone else who can help me with it).
Melanie
I hear ya…and I share your comfort. Most people start creating written content as a default position – it’s not necessarily the best idea though.
You should at least make the effort and ask your audience though….switching from text to video quadrupled my bass guitar traffic overnight and my list went from 15 in 6 months to nearly a 100 a few weeks later….to a 1000 a few weeks later….and on and on. If i’d stuck with written content that website would have been a bust.
At least find someone in your audience who you can interview and ASK THEM. You’ll be amazed at the info you get.
Paul
This is one of the best written articles I have seen on the subject. I am guilty of not taken these steps seriously and suffering a drop in traffic. Right now I am still working on a plan that makes sense before going forward. Rethinking the project and setting up goals.
Hey Susan
Goal setting: check.
Interviewing a target profile: check.
I know the hesitation – but it takes the trial and error out of the equation. If you can start nailing content that your target audience wants – and put it where they want it – you’ll start building an audience quickly. And if you keep doing it…it will keep growing.
Paul
Hi Paul,
It is a very nice and informative post.Thanks for sharing 3 crucial steps to create any content.These steps are really helpful for bloggers especially for those who are new in this field.
so many good points :
“always be guiding them back to a self-hosted website that you own. I can’t overstate this one.” -
“posting content in multiple places maximizes the effect of the efforts you took to create that content.” -
and (out of order) “if you wrote an article or blog post you can syndicate that to Document Sharing sites.” -
can you recommend some of those doc sharing sites? or do you have an article on the pros & cons of using a doc sharing site? things to watch for, etc? it sounds like such a good idea, but i’m “very” leary
one thing i’m on the verge of doing, is creating some video to go w/some of the poetry i’ve done; should be fun
so i’m glad you mentioned the cross working of text & video, i wasn’t sure & was just gonna try it
anyway, thanks paul, much to think about (as usual)
adan
Adan
Thanks for stopping by.
The Doc Sharing sites I’d recommend you start with are Scribd, Slideshare, Yudu, Isuuu and Kindle! (Did you know you can post ‘shorts’ to Kindle for free?)
And nope, I don’t know how effective Kindle is…..but I’ll be testing it out real soon.
Video can work really well for you too – but don’t just point the camera and record…be a bit more inventive than that!
paul
I always fond it easy to write the content in the form of answers to ‘how to’ type of questions, and my readers also liked it very much, so I continued with the same.
Saw this link on Empire Avenue – nice post
You could nearly write a separate post on each of these topics -
Hey Keiran
You could probably write an eBook on each of the topics! But there is a (guest) post coming soon on Target Profile interviews. So watch out for that!
Paul
I forgot to ask – what’s Empire Avenue?
“(ii)Direct people to do something”
That’s one that I never really did with my blog but am incorporating w/ the new site. It’s so easy to forget that you are writing content for a purpose, not just to write content.
Yeah – every piece of content has to have a call to action. Ask someone to subscribe. or go check out a sales page. or leave a comment. Or facebook like.
Whatever it is, make sure you are hitting that button at the appropriate place.
Great thoughts for sure. I’ve never explicitly asked “what do you want?” and I wonder what surprises would be waiting for me in the responses?
I’ve been reluctant to try video even though it seems to be a really effective way to communicate. For starters I would need to upgrade some equipment. And secondly since I mostly write about babies, the subjects don’t always play nice for the camera
But part of my hesitation has also been that I don’t like to watch videos. I prefer the scanability of text so I tend to pass on how-to videos because there is no good way to “skip to the good stuff.”
Am I alone in this? Maybe I’m projecting too much of my own “stuff” on to my audience…
Alexis
Some people prefer to read text. But ‘How To’ videos are a very effective tool for driving traffic. And you can find them on just about any subject – there was a news item on the BBC last year of a guy who’s wife went into labour and the Ambulance couldn’t get to him in time – so he watched a ‘How To Deliver A Baby’ video on YouTube and delivered the baby himself. (I kid you not! It was a major news story here in the UK).
And I would definitiely ask your audience whether they’d prefer video over text – seriously you could be missing out a bug chunk of traffic.
Paul
I just read this section from a ‘Lessons learned from Steve Jobs’ post:
Customers cannot tell you what they need.
“Apple market research” is an oxymoron. The Apple focus group was the right hemisphere of Steve’s brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all people said they wanted was better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machines. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.
http://www.quora.com/What-lessons-should-we-learn-from-the-life-of-Steve-Jobs#ans751986
How do you balance what your target market wants and blazing trails?
Trisha
Great question – apologies for the delay getting back to you, I’ve been thinking about it on and off all day.
There’s two ways to look at this. The first way is that they may not know what they want in precise terms – but a skillful interview may coax them as to what the result looks like. And from a given result, you can reverse engineer backwards to come up with a device/ebook/product/service that delivers that result.
The second way is to do something that I’ve effectively done – and that’s to use a ‘younger’ version of myself as a Target Profile and I did freewriting to try and get that ‘younger version’ to reveal the frustrations and problems he faced – and then I tried to design a product that dealt with that. As it was an enormous product – 35 pages of PDF instruction plus a 60 minute video plus some other bits and pieces for 30 Modules delivered on a weekly basis I then ‘pre-sold’ it to my audience to check that there would be a demand before I created it.
Of course if you’re a true ‘revolutionary genius’ then you may just come up with something and have to build it. I’m not in that bracket and I’m guessing 99% plus of the population isn’t either – and therefore interviewing either a target profile or a younger version of yourself to ascertain where to move forward is nothing but a good thing.
That make sense?
Paul
Ah, yes, I can relate to the ‘younger version of me’.
I think target profile interviews are fantastic for finding out the problems you can solve, I’m just not 100% sure that they should be telling you the exact format every single time. It’s definitely useful information – but perhaps not ‘words to live by’.
For instance, when Steve envisioned the iPod, all the ‘normal people’ were probably just wishing cassettes could be made with more tape in them.
I’m just thinking out loud that there needs to be a place for a splash of creativity, not just handing out what people are completely familiar with. But then, perhaps it’s also much more risky… Newton, anyone?
I’v always assume that people might want what I write. I guess, that’s why comments section in my personal blog is very helpful to know what the people opinions are.
Hi Paul,
I am new to your site. Thanks for this sound tips for content creation.
I am a newbie to blogging. Just started 2.5 months. Trying to learn as much as possible and being consistent. On finding out what the audience wants, what do you advocate for a newbie like me to do when I do not really have much following in the first place? Also how can we overcome technical content creation problems? Right now, articles are the medium, but videos, podcasts and all needs time and new skills. Where should our priorities be?
Thanks for this opportunity to ask some questions. Hope you wont mind?
Cheers
Hi Jimmy
Thanks for stopping by. (I never mind questions btw – it’s by answering questions that I learn and grow myself….bring them on!)
To answer your first question – if you don’t have much of an audience yourself, then see if you can find a Forum where your target audience go to for asking questions, community, etc. And start posting in there – always remembering to post helpful and informative comments. You’ll start to build relationships with people – that’s when you can start asking questions of them, and work towards finding a target profile. (Plus if you put a non-spammy signature to your posts you’ll generate some through traffic to your blog from the Forum).
In terms of overcoming technical problems – e.g. how to do video, or how to do podcast – there are two ways. either do it by trial and error and using free resources on the Internet. Or to shorten your learning curve find someone offering a product teaching what you need to know, buy the product and implement it. For video you should check out Steven Washer at BrainyVideo.com. For podcasts, there’s a guy I’ve seen Pat Flynn (Smart Passive Income) recommend called Cliff Ravenscroft (or Ravenscraft) – his internet handle is The Podcast Answer Man.
The quickest way to learn and implement is a good course – but you have to weigh up the trade off of time against money. If you have loads of free time and not much spare money then trial and error and free resources is the way to go. But if you have money budgeted for education and time is precious, then purchasing a good course would be the way forward (IMO).
HTH.
Paul
John,
Thanks, I appreciate the detailed replied to my questions. Forums is something I have not tried yet because they always have some form of sign ups and all which makes it pretty inconvenient unlike commenting.
Ok I will get down to doing some videos and explore some of the paid services you suggested. I have heard of camtasia. What is the best use of this?
BTW John, I like to invite you to leave your opinion on a debate I started in my latest post regarding personal development in schools.
Cheers
I definitely agree with these things, but this is just one way to look at it. On a blog I’ve recently slowed down on, and nearly decommissioned (I may pick back up and start writing on it again), I gained a significant amount of traffic, awareness and everyday visitors without definitively going about..anything.
But, for the purposes of the point you’re trying to make, it all makes sense. The thing that I’ve found out is that if you’re touching people emotionally, you’re creating something new, and I MEAN NEW.. not something 30,000 other bloggers that blog on similar topics have blogged about a billion times, and you give off the vibe that you’re not trying to just funnel people into your sales system all of the time, you’ll be just fine.
Heya Ryan
There are always different ways to look at things, and different ways to strategize. My focus tends to be on building an online business and using your blog or website to attract potential clients by the type of content that you provide. The best way of achieving that (that I know) is to offer really useful, quality content. And the best way (again, that I know) of making sure that your providing content that your target audience wants and will find useful is to actually ask them!
Paul
Hi, Paul!
Doing a research to see what kind of content does the audience prefer is a great and logical idea. In fact, all of the tips you shared here are relevant for taking in consideration. Still, if a person is not organized enough, even the best post with the best tips ever won’t be of help to such person, so that he/she could understand the importance of creating content on a blog.
My blog is a bit different and not involved much with content of this kind, but I will soon start another one and I will hence use your advices over there.
Hey Paul,
Okay, I openly admit to not having anything like this in place when I first started my blog. No direction, no idea, I did that…ready, aim, fire!!! I was new, I listened to the wrong people and I screwed up a LOT!!! But we all learn from experience and you are one of those I continue to learn from.
Thank you for sharing this Paul. There are so many areas I still have a lot of improving to do yet I’ll never be perfect. I write for what I experience here online hoping that others will be able to relate, I write about topics I’ve seen people struggle with so I think they can help or I write about a topic that a few people have emailed me asking me questions because I’m sure they aren’t the only ones who are lost.
As always, I’ll take note of what you share because you are the writing master my friend! People need to listen to you if they want to have success writing their content. Great post Paul.
~Adrienne
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