Now, look at your blog. Are you wondering what you’re going to write about today? Don’t you wish you had a “fridge” full of ingredients (aka, topics) and a tasty post simmering in draft mode, scheduled for publication in the morning?

You are well aware that blogging regularly brings new prospects in and keeps your clients coming back to your website, right? Interested and engaged clients and prospects = more money in your bank account. So why aren’t you approaching your blog like the pro you are?

Guess what? You do have a slow-cooker for content, and you can plan beyond just today’s post. In fact, I’m going to show you how to plan your posts for the next year.

Here’s how:

1. Brainstorm strategic topics

Your blog’s purpose is to establish your expertise, showcase your unique voice and approach, and demonstrate your professionalism. There are several content types that will support this mission. Here’s where to find and keep track of them:

• Start tracking questions you get from your customers and your prospects. Remember, you are blogging for your clients, not for your peers. What kinds of questions do you get in your e-mail or on social media? Even if the answers to those questions seem very elementary for you, the answer likely contains valuable information for your customers. 

• Start keeping a file in a notebook, a folder on your computer, or an e-mail folder. Whenever you receive questions from your clients or prospects, save the question in this folder or document. It can be a simple spreadsheet, a word document, or a group of saved e-mails. How you track this isn’t important — what is important is that you make it a habit to save this information in the same place whenever it comes in. 

• Actively seek out what people are talking about in your field. Search social media sites, blog posts, and forums to see what people are talking about in your industry. You can use Google to find these sites, and then simply bookmark the websites you find that tend to address what people are talking about in your field. 

• Brainstorm topics that will allow you to answer questions with a solution provided in your business. Your blog’s purpose is to promote your business! This is not a time to be shy or worry that you’ll offend people by making offers or by promoting your products and services. You are providing a logical solution to questions they have, right? Don’t worry about self-promotion, you’re not going to offend people — this is why you are blogging! 

• Think about the internal things going on in your business that might interest your customers. Depending on your business, showing what’s happening behind the scenes can help your customers in their own lives or businesses. For example, this approach works well for LKR: We run an online business, and many of our clients are also seeking to build profitable businesses online. By showing them behind-the-scenes action at LKR, we are teaching them the techniques, tools, and strategies we’ve used to build a successful company online. 

The more detailed your list of topics/questions the better! You can even break a single question down into content for more than one blog post. For example, answering a question about how to build your e-mail list could be broken down into a weekly series for four straight weeks covering multiple list-building strategies.

2. Narrow down your list of topics

Go through your list and refine it into the 24 most compelling topics. Good criteria for narrowing your list? Think about whether you LOVE the topic, if it’s a subject you have gotten questions about multiple times, and whether it aligns with any upcoming product or affiliate launches you have planned. Make sure they are fantastic subjects that you are excited and motivated to write about. At 2x per month, this is one year’s worth of topics!

3. Now, enter these topics into a calendar

Google Calendar fits our needs best; it’s easy to share, change, and can be accessed from anywhere. And, most importantly, you can easily automate it and set it on repeat – very useful for those goals that you want to make a part of your routine.

However, if you prefer a different system, such as software, or a big paper wall calendar, that’s fine, too. Go with what works for you. Make writing blog posts a part of your routine. For example, add an appointment to your calendar every Monday to write your post. It doesn’t have to be at a set time; it’s enough that you set aside time for it to happen every Monday. (Though this depends on the person. Maybe it works better for you if you schedule an actual time slot for it. Try it both ways and see what works best.)

Take the time to create a calendar of topics and commit to writing regular updates at least twice per month. There is no strict rule of thumb for frequency — but this should be your minimum guideline.

4. Commit to your schedule

Once the topics are entered into the calendar, you need to commit to actually writing about the topic when you say you will. That’s why it’s so important that you love the 24 topics you selected from your brainstorm list.

If it’s on the calendar, it’s on the schedule. Your schedule closes the gap between your everyday reality (writing blog posts and customer service) and your big goals (making more money and traveling). So set the expectation that you’re going to be there regularly and show up like the professional you are.

Remember, if you stop blogging, people stop visiting. If customers come back to your site and you aren’t updating the blog regularly, they won’t likely return again.

Now, Take Action!

Just like you wouldn’t let the food you buy rot in your refrigerator, don’t let your intentions to create an editorial calendar fester.

Remember, here’s all you need to do to plan out your blog for the next year: 

• Start tracking customer questions and industry chatter.
• Brainstorm 24 great topics.
• Schedule twice-monthly blog posts using your 24 topic ideas.
• Commit to writing about these topics when you’ve said you will.
• Rinse and repeat. 

Take some time today to set up the systems that will help you publish content like a pro and draw in the website traffic, prospects, and clients that you need to fuel your business. We’ve used these same techniques to build a seven-figure online business, so we can say this with confidence: Follow this recipe and you can’t fail!

To learn more about blogging, check out our Ultimate Guide to Blogging.

Believe me. I know.  I run content marketing, and I have the blisters to prove it.

If you were to ask me and my counterparts in other companies what our top challenge is the answer would be easy: Producing enough content. The public’s demand for more, coupled with the ephemeral nature of social media distribution, is a brutal one-two punch for those in the trade. Monday’s torrent of attention can become little more than a trickle by Tuesday.

But as I learned in high school wrestling, for every move there’s a counter move. The antidote to content’s short half-life may  not be producing more, but rather keeping the window of consumption open longer for the content you do produce. Here are five practical tips for extending the life of your marketing content.

1. Stagger your distribution

Remember, you don’t only control production; you also own distribution. Because social media is constantly moving, it’s important to distribute and re-distribute to maximize the number of people exposed to your work.

Start by sharing a new piece of content on an exclusive basis with your customers, advocates, and prospects. You may even include a short form to capture a little extra profile information on those who access it. Let them enjoy the privilege of exclusivity for a few days.

Then go public. Here are some ideas:

• Post the resource to SlideShare, and use the embed code to display the content on your blog. Now you can track views, shares, favorites, and comments all in one place.
• Tweet links to the post a couple of times per day for a few days; then, once every other day for the next week or so. Vary the timing to make sure you are sharing during business hours worldwide.
• Post to Facebook and encourage your fans to comment on a specific aspect of the content.
• Layer use the asset to answer highly relevant questions on Q&A sites like Quora and Focus, as well as on targeted LinkedIn Groups. You can even tweet your answers pointing your audience back to the source questions.

2. Use your “re-imagination”

The term  reimagine is lifted out of  Content Rules, by Ann Handley and CC Chapman, and it basically means finding compelling new ways to package your existing content. There are any number of ways in which you can reimagine the content you create; but the concept itself is the content marketing equivalent of “write once read many.” For example:

• Have a bunch of blog posts that share a common theme? Why not roll ‘em all up into an eBook on that topic?
• Maybe you have an eBook that digs deep into a particular subject? You can break out key lines to use for tweets and key chapters to use as blog posts.

Whatever content you have on hand, chances are it can be broken down or recombined to create a way to message on an additional platform without having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

3. Serialize your story

In their bestseller, Switch, the brothers Heath encourage anyone seeking to drive change to identify “bright spots,” or small victories, and then replicate the successes. The same idea can be applied to your content marketing program.

Have you created a video, eBook, white paper, infographic, podcast, or webinar that worked especially well? Do it again, but with a twist  like focusing on a new vertical market or a new demographic group. Then do it once more but with a different twist. Next thing you know, you’ve created a content series. The benefit is that you don’t have to come up with a fresh idea each time; you simply have to iterate on what has already proven effective.

4. Annualize and update

Like serializing content, updating successful pieces annually is another way to get more mileage out of your production. Technology has accelerated the pace of change across most industries, so what was relevant and accurate information one year, may have lost some of its punch or even be completely outdated the next. Yearly updates provide marketers with an ideal opportunity to materially enhance content that has served their audience well in the past without having to start over from square one.

5. Use what others discard

Take a page from the “nose to tail” dining movement and use all versions — even those you might once have discarded — in your content marketing efforts. Publishing the scraps on your cutting room floor provides you with an opportunity to tell the back story behind your content successes.

For example, when my partner Jesse Thomas blogged for Forbes about the making of an infographic, he used nine rejected versions of The Content Grid v2 infographic to tell his story. Nine. It was the detritus — not the finished product — that made his story so powerful.

These are just five tips, but I am sure there are more. What am I missing? Are there additional techniques you’ve used to create more “staying power” for your content?

Planning template
Do you have so many ideas but aren’t sure what you should tackle first? Here’s a spreadsheet you can use to prioritize.

Content questionnaire
What do you need to cover at a content marketing kickoff? To make sure all of your bases are covered, check out this template from Debbie Williams that sets the foundation for an editorial strategy.

Buyer persona
This straightforward buyer persona template from Barbara Gago is a great way to help you document your buyer needs.

Content mapping template
Marketers talk about mapping content, but how do you do this?  Here are a  few templates from Barbara Gago that walk you through the process.

Editorial calendar
If there is one tool I can’t live without, it’s my editorial calendar. Here’s a template to help you get started.

Template for tracking keywords
Elise Redlin-Cook shows you how to research the right keywords to use in your content and SEO efforts and then provides a template to help you stay organized.

Web page template
You want your web pages to drive action, but how do you do that? Brody Dorland shares the template he uses to create effective web content.

Social media conversation calendar
Debbie Williams shares the social media conversation calendar she uses to develop content strategy for social media while making the process efficient and consistent.

Facebook engagement spreadsheet
In this popular posts, Nate Riggs outlines five ways to interpret the free data provided by Facebook Insights, and he shares the spreadsheet he uses to keep track of the data.

Sales communication template
As a content marketer, you’re producing useful content and trying to get the word out to your prospects, but does sales know what you are doing? Here’s an easy-to-use template from Dianna Huff for a monthly email that provides sales with details about the company’s marketing initiatives.

What other types of templates would help you do your job better? Let us know in the comments below!

Of course, there are companies out there that have great web writers internally, but most don’t. And the thought of a company turning a great website strategy (that we slaved over) into an ineffective “brochure site” gives me heartburn. But sometimes you have to pick your battles.

In cases where we give in and let the client take the content reins, we at least want to make sure they are equipped with a template that gives them a fighting chance to produce effective webpage content that drives action. Here is a template we like to use, and an explanation of what’s included.

 Download the Template

Website content template components

Pre-writing questions: Before starting any given page, you really need to wrap your heads around the primary goal of the page and to whom this page is targeted. What’s their pain? What’s in it for them? Where are they in their buying process? And what keywords or phrases would they most likely use to search for your solution? The best writers are those who can put themselves in the buyer’s shoes and write as if they are having a one-on-one conversation with that buyer.

Typical web page structure and formatting guidelines

After years of experimenting, most of us web folks have the best practices of website content nailed down, and we feel like this template covers the bases. Here are a few key elements:

• Headlines: As with most media, a great headline or page title can make or break a page. But specific to web content, it’s important to remember the SEO aspects. Integrating a major keyword/phrase into a headline and programming the page title with a relevant <h1> tag can add some nice Google juice.
• Sub-headlines: Visitors scan before they read, so creating enticing, benefits-focused sub-headlines can really boost the odds that your page will be read. I like to run a “scan test” on every page  to see if I can get the gist of page by just scanning the page title, subheads, and call to action.
• Images:  I’ve always had an interest in neuropsychology, and I couldn’t help but devour Susan Weinschenk’s book, Neuro Web Design back in 2009. Throughout the book she talks about how we subconsciously process everything we see on a website, but she summarizes that “stories and pictures are the most powerful ways to get and hold our attention and persuade us to take action.”Let’s not forget about Google. Optimizing your image’s file name and alt tag with a keyword/phrase provides the context Google needs and validates the relevance of your page.
• Bulleted and numbered lists: I love bulleted lists, and evidently you do too since you’re still reading this! Lists make content much easier to digest. Even the slightest indention and bullet will draw the reader’s eye. Oh, and Google likes these too.
• Calls to action: Despite the intelligence level of your site visitors, people don’t want to have to think when they are browsing websites. Obvious command-oriented calls to action are key in moving visitors through your website. And don’t be scared to make the call to action a BIG BUTTON. Bigger is better, but don’t make it look like a banner.

Post-writing checklist

Finally, the template includes a checklist of items and reminders you can use to ensure your page is good to go. Of these items, I think the most important one is to just get another set of eyeballs on it. If you’re writing the page, you’re now too close to it and  no longer qualified to edit it.

If you start using this template, realize that not every page on your site has to follow this exact format. Modify your content structure and formatting so that it accomplishes the goals of the page. When in doubt, test.

If we’ve missed anything that you feel needs to be included in this template, please tell me in the comments.

To learn more about what makes readers actually click through, Outbrain, a content discovery platform serving content recommendations on top publisher sites, looked through data on 150,000 article headlines or titles that were recommended across our platform. The purpose of this research was to offer content publishers and marketers insight into headline characteristics that get the desired click-through. Here are our findings.

Length matters

A title with eight words performed best. These titles received a 21% higher click-through rate than average.

Pics get clicks

Outbrain’s data analysis showed readers are attracted to content with images. Thumbnails worked better than logos and increased click-through rates by 27%.

Lists with a twist

Lists and photo galleries typically drive more page views, but they get more click-thorughs as well. Headlines that contained odd numbers had a 20% higher click-through rate than headlines with even numbers.

Going deeper

A colon or hyphen in the title — indicating a subtitle — performed 9% better than headlines without.

Questions work

Titles that ended  with a question mark had a higher click-through rate than those that ended with exclamation marks or periods. If you really feel the urge to use an exclamation mark, our studies have shown that three (!!!) received almost twice as many clicks as all other punctuation marks.

I hope these simple tweaks will help your headlines really click with your readers. After all, they worked on you didn’t it? (Odd number…eight words… sound familiar?)

What are your thoughts? Tell us what types of headlines grab your attention and why?

As marketers, we’re all slammed with a never-ending to-do list. And no matter which side of the table you’re sitting on (corporate side or content service provider), one of the biggest challenges you face with content marketing is finding the time to create good content on a consistent basis.

If you’re a professional copywriter who has the gift of spitting out gold in mere minutes, good for you. I envy you. But if you’re anything like me, writing good content means inevitably wordsmithing every sentence, which requires a good chunk of time (even with my degree in journalism).

For those of you who are not natural or skilled writers, the task of blogging, creating web content or even tweeting on a regular basis is probably varying levels of daunting. How the heck are you going to get all that done in addition to your other responsibilities? A tool that has really helped me increase both my content production and quality is an audio recorder.

Tips for the Corporate Marketer

On the corporate side of the table, you’re probably  responsible for keeping new content flowing weekly, perhaps daily. If you’re on the ball, you have an editorial calendar you follow and you have subject matter experts you can leverage for editorial help.

I remember my corporate days, sitting in an engineer’s office picking his/her brain and frantically taking notes. Then I’d go back to my computer and try my best to wordsmith something that made as much sense as the conversation I just had. I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself, “I wish I had recorded that conversation.”

What’s stopping you? Certainly not technology. Simple audio recorders are $20 on Amazon.com and your phone probably has one.
With my audio recorder in hand, here’s what I would do now:

Record every brainstorming meeting
Since you never know what great ideas might come up, put your recorder on the table and don’t forget to hit record. Don’t worry so much about taking notes. Sit back and listen. If the meeting doesn’t produce anything great, then delete the file. If it does, a quick transcription will help you recapture the good stuff.

Interview like you’re the customer
If you’re working with a subject matter expert (SME), facilitate your meeting as if you’re a customer with a specific challenge or pain point. Ask questions that help the SME address the issue in a way that benefits you, “the customer.” Then transcribe their answers into a great piece of benefits-focused content.

Keep the conversational tone
One thing that’s great about web content is that we can (and should) keep it more conversational than some other mediums. When we’re recording conversations, it’s a huge time saver to translate these conversations almost word for word so they maintain that voice and tone.

Use your drive time / commute
For busy marketers every minute counts, and the time spent commuting from place to place can be used effectively even if you need to be “hands free.” Look at your editorial calendar before you leave, pick a topic/content idea and talk through your thoughts en route. With my Android phone’s native speech-to-text function, I can start a new email to myself and bang out an article during a 20-minute drive.

Tips for Content Service Providers

Record your client calls
I’m a big fan of GoToMeeting, and hitting the record button allows me to capture both the audio and video (screen capture) from a virtual meeting. Whether you are creating content from this meeting or you’re handing it off to another writer, you’ll all benefit from capturing the client’s actual words.

Sit back and listen
When you’re recording the audio and not having to take frantic notes, you can let your brain explore a little more deeply into the individual thoughts that are flowing from the client. The meeting turns into more of a natural conversation and less like a question and answer session. Good things come from this.

Is the audio podcast worthy?
I’m no longer surprised to uncover unique, charismatic personalities within organizations. If I find myself looking forward to regular phone calls with these people and getting great stuff each time, should a podcast be considered? With the right people, a good content format, a little coaching and some inexpensive equipment, you can help your clients create their own industry radio show.

What did I miss? What other ways are you using audio tools to help you get more content done? Tell us about it.

The questionnaire

Regardless of if you are working with a client or managing your projects in-house, it’s a good idea to use a tool like the content questionnaire because it sets the foundation for the editorial content strategy, key messages, voice and positioning.  It also reveals where more agreement is needed.

Here are the questions we include in our content questionnaire (you can also download the PDF):

1. What services do your clients/prospects most want and need?
2. What are the core strengths of your organization?
3. How do people feel after they use your services?
4. What are your customers trying to accomplish by using your products/services?
5. Describe your typical customer (needs, desires, preferences, fears, pain, etc.).
6. Who is your competition? (please list at least 3-5 competitors)
7. What sets your company apart from others in your industry? Is there a unique aspect to your company that you could use as a point of differentiation?
8. Do you have an existing tagline, slogan or brand statement? If not, would you like to create one.
9. How do prospects find you?
10. What are the central keywords/trigger words that prospects might use to find you online? (I.e. what words would your target audience use to describe the key products/services/information you provide?)
11. What is your target location (international/national/regional/state/local)?

Setting the foundation

Of course, collecting the information is only the first step. The questionnaire is really valuable because it starts a conversation with a client where we identify holes and weaknesses and highlight areas where we need to dig a little deeper.

If a client returns a fairly blank questionnaire with one- and two-word answers, we know there’s more work to be done to help them clearly define who they are, what they do and who their customers are.

Believe it or not, we’ve worked with companies that could not even completely agree on their most important services. No wonder their websites didn’t reflect who they are or generate more leads.

Revealing those “a-ha” moments

After the internal review of a client’s content questionnaire, we review it with them to uncover the little details that are often left out.

We talk about what they do beyond industry jargon and buzzwords, who they’re doing it for and what makes their business different from the competition.

In many cases, the most important “a-ha” moments occur after talking through the questions and hearing answers in their own words.

For example, we worked with a plastics company that didn’t mention anywhere in its questionnaire that it was one of the first companies in the country, to recycle plastic in the 1960s. This vital information not only helped the client stand out from competitors, but helped us craft marketing content showing that the company is a pioneer in recycling, and over the years increased its recycling expertise to better serve clients and improve the environment. Without going through the content questionnaire with the client, this key detail may have gone unnoticed.

More often than not, the content questionnaire reveals that companies haven’t thought through who their content is for, how customers feel about their products and services or how clients and prospects find their company. The Q&A inspires companies to fine tune goals and helps us get to the heart of their organization. It can be a long getting-to-know-you process, but it’s thoroughly worth the effort.

We’ve learned time and time again what a valuable tool the questionnaire is as a stepping stone to creating great content. It’s such a simple concept, but one that stimulates conversations, sparks ideas and helps companies zero in on the most important things they are trying to communicate to people.

Feel free to use or build on our content questionnaire. If you try it out let us know if it helped you with content strategy and creation.  Do you have any similar tools? We’d love to hear about them too.

Now out of beta, Company Pages are far more useful to marketers than the Company Profiles feature that LinkedIn launched in March 2008.

• Company Profiles were positioned as an intelligence-gathering tool for individuals seeking information about a company.
• Company Pages are positioned as a tool for businesses to “drive growth….and leverage word-of-mouth to attract new customers.”

Don’t be put off by this positioning or even by the name. Company Pages are suitable for all types of organizations, from non-profits and governmental agencies to large corporations and small businesses.

For some of you, it’s quite possible that your company has LinkedIn Company Pages, but no one at your company is aware of them.

What are Company Pages?

I think of LinkedIn Company Pages as an organization’s home away from home.

You may have heard the adage be found wherever your customers are found. On LinkedIn, an individual has a “home” in the form of a profile, and now, a company has a “home” in the form of Company Pages.

Company Pages consist of four main tabs, three of which are public (i.e., visible to all LinkedIn members).

Overview: This public tab lists info such as:

• Basic information about your company (e.g., location, number of employees and industry)
• Information about new hires and employees, including the viewer’s degree of separation
• Twitter and blog feeds plus a “follow company” feature

Careers: This is another public tab displaying job postings. With a paid Silver or Gold account, you can add rich content such as videos. You can also customize multiple versions of your Careers page that will display relevant content for targeted audiences.

Product & Services: Under this public tab you can:

• Post descriptions of your key products and services
• Receive product and service recommendations
• Add content such as videos and promotions
• Purchase recommendation ads to showcase recommendations for products and services and seek more of them
• Get the “recommend” button to place on your website along with each of your products and services.

Analytics: This is a private tab visible only to LinkedIn members with administrator access to your Company Pages. Alternatively, if you haven’t set up administrator roles, this tab is visible to all current employees who are LinkedIn members with valid e-mail addresses under your company domain.

Two analytics let you benchmark your company against similar companies:

• Number of overall page views and page views by tab per month
• Number of unique visitors per month

You can also view the number of clicks per month on each link on your Products & Services page, as well as your company’s number of followers per month by industry, function and company.

Don’t assume you don’t have Company Pages

Think you don’t have LinkedIn Company Pages? Think again. If any of your employees are LinkedIn members with valid e-mail addresses under your company domain, you have Company Pages. These default Company Pages contain data available on LinkedIn as well as a company description using information gathered by LinkedIn partner CapitalIQ.

How to get started with Company Pages

Here are the steps to follow if you want to control what appears on these pages:

1) Log into LinkedIn, then under the “Companies” tab in the main navigation menu, select your current company from the drop-down menu. First-time visitors may be surprised!

2) Set up your administrator role. You can decide if all employees with a valid email address can access the pages or specific people only. If you designate specific people, remember to include yourself in the list, and note that you must be connected on LinkedIn to any other members you designate as administrators.

3) Set up your profile to include:

• Company name (required)
• Company size (required)
• Website (required)
• Industry (required)
• Operating status (required)
• Year founded (optional)
• Company location – up to five locations (optional)
• Logo – a standard and a square logo (optional)
• Company description (required)
• Company specialties (optional)
• Twitter ID (optional)
• RSS feed (optional)

You can also decide if you want news about your company to be displayed.

LinkedIn Company Pages are powerful

To understand the power of Company Pages, imagine the following scenario. I’m an IT executive linked to other IT executives on LinkedIn. While logged into LinkedIn, I see that one of my peers has recommended a firewall product offered by XYZ Enterprise Software. Because I value my peer’s professional opinion, I investigate by:

• Reading the recommendation and the product description on XYZ Enterprise Software’s LinkedIn Company Pages and linking to the company’s website
• Contacting my peer to learn more about her experience with the firewall product and the company
• Asking my peer to provide me with an introduction to her contact at XYZ Enterprise Software.

Visit the LinkedIn Company Pages of StrongMail Systems, Philips and (of course!) LinkedIn to see examples of organizations making good use of Company Pages.

Know what’s involved in using LinkedIn Company Pages

Learning the ins and outs of LinkedIn Company Pages will take time. I’ve researched Company Pages since their release last November, and it’s not easy to find detailed guidance. You have to sift through entry after entry in the Help Center section of the LinkedIn website.

Here are some of the most helpful tips for content marketers:

Control
Keep in mind that until you set up administrator roles for your Company Pages, any employee with a valid e-mail address linked to your company domain can modify your Company Pages. Which department should be responsible for your Company Pages? Who should be the designated administrators? When will you “lock down” your Company Pages by setting up an authorized administrator?

Content strategy
If you have a content strategy for the planning, creation, implementation and governance of your online content, then you’ll need to integrate your Company Pages into your strategy. Even if you don’t have a full-fledged content strategy, you’ll want  your Company Pages to be consistent with your other online content.

Scale
For companies with dozens, hundreds or thousands of products, creating and maintaining product descriptions on LinkedIn is difficult to manage with the current tools. Be selective about adding content under the Products & Services tab.

Freshness
The good news for content marketers is that you can use much of your existing online content in your Company Pages. To keep the content fresh and interesting, rather than just rehash your main website content, you may want to create some content specifically for your Company Pages.

Are you using LinkedIn Company Pages? If so, please share your insights.

Yesterday, I introduced the Creating Valuable Content Checklist, which I use to quantify what makes content valuable to our content consumers.  Today I’ll explain the steps in each of these benchmarks. 

Download the Creating Valuable Content Checklist™. [PDF]

Findable content

When creating your content, you must remember that unless something is emailed to users, they probably need to find it (and even then things can get lost in an inbox!). Therefore, you must make sure that you’ve done everything in your power to use the right SEO best practices to write or create findable content.

The steps below assume that you have already done keyword research on your project. Based on the goals and user research, you should choose the keywords that you think will be most effective for your content. If you need help finding the right keywords, check out this post on how to find the right keywords for your content marketing efforts.

For text on web pages

• Use only one h1 and multiple h2 tags on your web pages because  they benefit search engines ranking and they help break up text on a page. Make sure you highlight them in the copy deck (or whatever system you use to move content from creation into production) so that the person laying out the content understands how they should be encoded. Use h3 tags if necessary, but understand they won’t get you the same bang for your buck in terms of SEO results that h1 and h2 tags will.
• Customize the metadata (title tag, keywords and descriptor tag) so it describes the content on the page, according to your keyword research.
• Include links to other pages on the site to increase the content value that search engine spiders assign to your pages (spiders are the robots that crawl through your site).
• Include alt tags on your photos and other images so they appear in image searches. Describe the picture in the image (because alt tags were first designed for the visually impaired) but also use them to plug your content. For instance, if you have a picture of doctors performing surgery, the alt tag could be“The doctors at Sweet Valley Hospital in Sweet Valley, California, are experts in separating identical twins in a surgery,  known as identical separation, shown in this photo.”

For video

Post your video on YouTube and/or Facebook to increase the likelihood it will be seen. I like using YouTube because it allows you to accurately count the views. Regardless of what platform you use, you need to tag the content so it can be found:

• Include possible keywords in your title.
• Provide  a detailed, keyword-rich summary.

For audio

• Consider distributing your audio in different formats, such as mp3, wav and wiff so it’s available to different audiences.  If your potential customer doesn’t have the required format to listen to the audio file, then your whole goal of creating and distributing the content has been stymied during delivery.
• Create a detailed summary and title where the content will be downloaded. For some delivery vehicles, that’s the system it’s stored in, like iTunes. For others, it might be the page you post the file on.
• House each audio clip on a relevant content page, so the text and audio support each other in SEO efforts by demonstrating relevant content to the search engines.

Readable content

Once users find your content, do they consider it to be readable? While this only applies to written content, this is the primary way people consume info, so it’s an incredibly important category.

When considering readability, the most important thing to consider is that users scan until they find the content they need. Any great Web conversation with your user respects their time. Therefore, consider using:

• The inverted pyramid style of writing:  The most important facts should be at the top. For an example of this, see the figure produced using eyetracking software.  You can see where the user’s eyes scanned on the page:  see how that shape follows an inverted pyramid?
• Chunking: Keep paragraphs short. I follow the rule of three:  no more than three sentences in a paragraph, and no more than three paragraphs under one heading.
• Bullets and numbered lists:  When people want to consume information quickly, lists and bullets are helpful.
• Consistent language: By keeping content consistent, you avoid confusing your users.  For example, how do you refer to your business, company or institution on a page? If you keep switching back and forth from your name to the use of the term “us,” it’s going to confuse your customers. Keep it consistent. Use a style guide to help everyone get on the same page.

Understandable content

Creating content that users really understand is challenging when subjects are complex. In healthcare, where I do a tremendous amount of consulting and content creation, I am very aware of this. Many times I write on an eighth grade reading level, and even that might be too elevated for my readers.

So how can  you create understandable content, no matter what industry you are in?

• Choose the right content type. For example, if users have an “aha” moment when seeing something sketched out, use a visual medium such as a video or a slideshow instead of written text.
• Create user personas for your different user audiences, and match the level of the content’s complexity to the user’s ability to understand it.
• Always provide context. Even if you think it might sound condescending, consider explaining even the most basic concepts to your users. You never know where someone is jumping in on the conversation.  Build a contextual roadmap into your content at all times.
• Apply a standard reading level to your content for each project and stick to it. This should be based on your users’ personas and market research. There is a function in Word for testing reading levels—you may want to experiment with that scoring. Or, find a person on that reading level and test them. You may be surprised to hear what they do and don’t understand.
• Provide valuable information to the user. This could be new information or a new way of articulating an existing idea. Sometimes metaphors help people understand better.

Actionable content

Obviously, you are creating content so your users act upon it. How can you ensure this while creating content?

• Include an obvious call to action.
• Make it easy for users to comment and ask questions, both publicly and privately. For instance, enable blog comments or direct people your company’s Facebook page.  If you accept comments via your “Contact Us” page, make this page easily accessible. Ask your users to share the content by including: “Please share this content with those you think might enjoy it.”
• Provide links to relevant content or program your content management system (CMS) to provide options to other content that users have liked.
• Include a list of actionable items at the top if the content is long (remember the inverted pyramid style of writing that helps make content more readable). For example, if you are writing about diabetes care, add three bullets at the top that define diabetes and explain how you can control it.

Shareable content

One of the best ways to have your content spread is to have your readers share it because people trust their peers more than brands. How can you entice more of your users to share content?

• Consider provoking an emotional response in your readers. When I first started writing articles on content marketing, one of my editors told me, “People are more likely share controversial stuff.”
• Provide a reason to share—perhaps you actually illustrate the benefit of sharing the content within the story of the content. For example, you may to tell a story about how sharing health information with each other helped one family increase their exercise efforts.
• Ask them to share.
• Make sharing easy. (Work with your developers to research and decide on which sharing widget is best for your organization).
• Allow users to personalize the share. For instance, when I retweet things, I like to edit them, so I can add hashtags or reference another source. If I can’t, I feel frustrated.

As Gawande explained, most professions are resistant to checklists because “we believe our jobs are too complicated to reduce to a checklist.” If doctors, project managers of major construction projects and the World Health Organization were convinced by the use of checklists, then why shouldn’t we be?

Download the Creating Valuable Content Checklist™ [PDF]

Do you have experience using checklists in your content marketing? I’d love to see your examples. Or, let me know what you may change in this checklist.