3 Simple Steps to Great Content

I am sure you have heard it before, content is king. It doesn’t matter what your business is, you must create content in order to keep your audience interested in what you have to say. And content, my friends, is not one blog post a month.

There are many ways to create content – It doesn’t have to be an overwhelming and intimidating task. You can write a blog post, upload a video, showcase an image and begin a discussion around it – you can even share (giving proper credit, of course) other people’s content and talk about why you chose to share it.

The most important thing to remember about content is this: It must be relevant to your audience.

The problem most business owners have when it comes to content is time. If you do not take time to make time, creating content becomes difficult to manage.

This describes you if you have a sudden burst of inspiration and create five blog posts in one week and then don’t do anything else for two months. This describes you if you do not have a designated schedule for uploading specific (yes I said specific) content.

For example: Monday is my content creation day. I write my blog post on Monday, and publish it on Thursday. This is a habit for me and I have time set aside in my schedule to do this.

I also have a content strategy. It works like this:

1. I read other people’s blogs and if they write about a topic that resonates with me, I write about that topic too.
2. I have a list of big topics with a bunch of subtopics that are relevant to my business that I can draw from at any time.
3. I use FAQs on a regular basis to ask people what they would like to learn about and then write about the items they have asked about.

Between these three strategies, content is always easy for me to come up with.

Using visuals is also a great way to create interesting content. I often use screen shots, that are pasted into Powerpoint and then saved as a jpeg or pdf to show people exactly how to do something. Or, I record a video, upload to YouTube and then share on my blog by embedding the code into a blog post.

Connections are also key. Anytime I publish a new blog on my site or new video on YouTube, I make sure I share it on Facebook and Twitter. These connections help to ensure that I reach as much of my audience as possible.

Remember, you want to create content that your audience wants to read, see or hear – not content that you rushed to create just to have something out there. Your content is your calling card. It is the impression you are making on others. It needs to be great.

If you are providing good content, people will subscribe. If your content is off-topic, boring, disorganized or just generally bad – they will leave your site and not come back. The same is true if you have no new content.

I cannot tell you how often I go to a site and see that they have not published new content in months. When I see this, the impression it leaves me with is they are not active, they do not create content so I leave and I do not go back.

If you want your visitors to come back over and over again, create something for them. Give them a reason to return!

In my WordPress Intensive Module I share everything I do to create content. This is not just about how to use WordPress – Its about how to create meaningful content too.

Your success is directly tied to what you put out there. It is not hard. It truly is easy to do – you just have to understand how. What is your biggest obstacle in creating content?