Have you heard the statement “Content drives leads?” Well, it is certainly true and assuming you have an online presence you should be creating content that is relevant to your business, drives your objectives and attracts the ideal audience. Good content trumps all activities in my opinion because if you continue to put out content that people want you are bound to flourish. People will want to read your blog, watch your video’s and consume the other forms of content you produce. People flock to those who provide value and solutions to their problems.
What type of content can you be producing?
- Blog posts
- Video
- Audio
- Infographics
- Book reviews
- Product reviews
- How To articles
- Lists
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
- Interviews
Is your content shareable?
Having your content shared by a third party is the goal, because the more your content is spread the more eyes you have on you. It is a boost in SEO to drive people back to your sites where your content is saved. According to a recent article by Search Engine Watch they best describe why shareable content is so important;
“The more people who share a piece of content, the more people are going to eventually see it, and the more people who see it, the more visitors you’re going to have. Think of your content as a single light in a dark forest, attracting people in the open. If you can get more people to turn on identical lights, the cumulative brightness will increase, and you’ll be able to attract more people from greater distances.”
So the goaI is to create good content that people will share. I always suggest you add a call to action or a nudge to encourage people to share. Often it is that small reminder to “please share with a friend” that is enough to get people to do it. In Twitter it is as simple as including a RT (re-tweet) at the end of your post, on Facebook and Google+ use the word “share” because there is a share button under the posts. When you write a blog you can end the post by asking “If you enjoyed this post please share it.”
Tips on making content shareable
Get a feel for your audience and track the content they do share, this is the metric by which you create new content by. In addition consider these tips from Search Engine Watch on things that make content more shareable;
- A captivating title: One that stands out from other content and entices people to read more. Recent title trends include numeric lists like “The 10 Best…”, which draw people in with a promise of a concise, authoritative presentation, and teasing titles like “You’ll Never Guess What…”, which naturally pique human interest.
- A unique value: Every article should be unique and valuable in some way.
- Audience specificity: Shareable articles communicate to a specific audience, sometimes very specific (think, “middle-aged female cat owners with diabetes”). You may alienate a broader audience, but you’ll be dramatically increasing the interest of the narrow audience you retain.
- Concise material: This content can be easily read and digested in a single session. Bulleted lists, numbered entries, step-by-step articles, and sectioned pieces are all very effective.
- Accompanying images and media: Content that features an image, a series of gifs, or a video is far more likely to be shared than content that doesn’t.
Creating content consistently will not only give you content to share via your social channels it will also provide SEO benefits. One last comment on consistency -often I get push back from clients when I encourage them to produce content weekly because they say they don’t have time, but let me say the long term benefits will pay off. And visually no one is impressed when they go to a blog and see the last post was six months ago – people will jump to conclusions and they usually aren’t positive.
You will notice I shared some great content from Search Engine Watch because I found their article to be spot on and if you want to read the rest of the article, you can find it by clicking HERE.
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