1. Problem

In today's world it is not enough to have a digital presence on the Internet. Business, brands and organizations need to publish quality content that people seek and wat to consume.

Weather you're looking for brand visibility, registrations, email subscriptions, registrations or sales, content writing enables you to get customer's attention with engaging, focused, and relevant content.

2. Solution

Content writing is the guaranteed way in which businesses can increase their brand visibility and reputation. Writing articles, reviews, or simply posting content on social media gives visibility and brings traffic to your site or landing page.

Content writing also constitutes a proven method to decrease the cost of acquisition and increase returns on investment (ROI).

There are many ways you can use to create online content. Creating articles, videos, podcasts and even infographics can be a source of recurrent revenue if done professionally.

However, to achieve you goals, content writing and publishing needs to be efficient, and that requires quite a good deal of Strategic Planning. The Internet is full of high quality content that competes in ranking places in Google and social media sites. Knowing what to write and how to write it is the key, so you will need to make some stategic planning before starting.

2.1. Plan before you start

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There are four important aspects that you will need to consider before starting your content creation business. These are:

1. Focus on a Niche

The most important aspect before you start is to select the niche you want to start creating content for. Whether it is articles, videos, podcasts or graphics, you will need to do research to help you focus on a theme and select a clear target audience.

2. Deliver quality content

Good articles will get more engagement, people will spend more time reading it and that will help with the search rank and getting more views. A poor article just will just eclipse itself and will get you nothing. Guaranteed!

3. Offer real value to people

One key thing you need to keep in mind is that when people read your article (or view your video) they expect to get something in return. When writing an article or producing a video about education you will need to keep in mind that the viewer is looking for you to solve his problem.

4. Establish your authority

If you focus on providing quality and engaging content you can establish your authority in a particular field and be an influencer. Because, after creating quality content, its all about marketing. You can use your personal brand (your name) to spread the word about your expertise by building a consistent presence across several online platforms.

Ok, now that we got this out of the way let's talk about our next subject: Content Strategy. Content Strategy, which is different from Content Marketing Strategy, deals with strategy high-level planning for your content producing activities and how they will interact with your brand, who they will reach, and how they will help you achieve your business goals.

3. Content Strategy

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Typically to define your Content Strategy you'll need to supports the following things: answer these questions:

The answer for these questions will guide you into following the best steps to build a strong base of quality and engaging content that can promote your brand, build an audience and get leads to your sales if that's the case.

With each of the following questions you will have some decisions to take, as we datail:

3.1. What you're trying to accomplish

The content you will create will depend on the type of action you want to achieve from your users. There is several actions you can expect from this client and the type of content you write, its size and its tone should reflect your goal. For example, you can write several types of actions:

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3.2. Who you’re trying to reach

Choosing your target audience is probably the most difficult thing to do. To sell some product and even more a service you will first need to establish one Buying Personna (or more). This "Personna" is a description of a person that will most likely by from you. When you set the characteristics of that perso, ussually, the age, its occupation and behaviuor you will need to know what kind of activities he/she does so that you can start choosing what content she will likely search for.

To establish your buying Personna you will need basic information such as:

Once you define your Buying personna you will be able to choose what type of content you need to create so that it can matcgh with his/her expactations/struggles and tastes.
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3.3. What types of content you’ll publish

So basically until now you have responded to (1) what you sell and (2) whom to sell. We are now ready to choose what you will write.

There are many types of content you can create, here are some examples:

It is also very important that your content to be as up to date as possible since people will spend more time (and no skip) viewring your content and will generate more views.

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Here are some of the resources that can help you choose what type of content produce:

3.4. How your content will support the brand

This item relates to the Buying personna. If you write abouth themes thart are more related with your product and service you will likely attract people that are more pron to buying or interacting.

For example if you sell Pet products it would be important to write articles that relate to pet owners and their problems, and especcially if you sell a certain product that can solve their problem.

The more you adapt your producvt and services to the specific content you create the more clicks, leads, sales and recommendations you'll get.

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3.5. The ways in which your content will be differentiated

In the process of validating the feasability of your business idea it is very important, for many reasons, to know what are your competitors.

Wether your market is local or global, you must have an idea of who is selling and how large is the market. Eve more important is analize the competition that is already selling their products through digital channels and how they create (or not) contents to get leads and sales.

If you find out that there are some local or regional markets where you already have many online content creators that are in direct competition you will need to differentiate your online activities in order to grab a part of the market.

There are many ways to make this distance yoursef of your competitors, here are some of them:

3.6. How you will promote and amplify your content

There is many ways to promote and amplify the reach of your content. In the Content Strategy prespective (the Content Marketing will be explained later), you will need to create content that can apply to the following goals:

Here are some of the resources that can help you optimize and expand your content reach:

3.7. The metrics that define success

One of the least considered factors when planning some kind of business is how are we going to measure success. Content Marketing is no different and when we are investing in content creation we should always hava a prediction of what is our thereshold of success.

Content Marketing normally takes a certain ammount of time to generate results so what we propose is to have some kind of a prevision for 3 time ranges: shorter, medium and long term. A good example of these terms can be 3 months, 6 months and 1 year and a half.

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For each of these periods we can elaborate many kind of metrics:

On the other hand we can also make a cost estimation of what each article costs to write, publis and promote so that we can in each period have some kind of results.

Here you can se some applications that can help you track and analyze your website traffic:

4. Remember

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5. Summary

The content you will create will depend on the type of action you want to achieve from your users. There is several actions you can expect from this client and the type of content you write, its size and its tone should reflect your goal. For example, you can write several types of actions::

Content Strategy is both labor intensive and can be quite complex as it leads with many different activities and tools that support it. It involves using tools to perform Content Optimization tasks that can find the best keywords and search activity for the theme you have chosen.

The most used tool for Content Optimization is the Google Search Console, which is a free tool offered by Google to optimize content on your site. You can use Google Search Console as a way to look into how search engines understand your content. There are many other tools you can check, check out this article: Best Content Optimization Tools for SEO" COMMENT: 10 Best Content Optimization Tools for SEO% - to know the pros and cons about them.

The next step on your list is to build your Content Marketing Strategy, which operationalizes the distribution of the content you have produced.