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 to success.

To be done efficiently, online content requires quite a good deal of Strategic Planning that is normally achieved by having a good Content Strategy. Content Strategy, which is different from Content Marketing Strategy, deals with with strategy the high-level planning for your content producing activities and how we they will interact with your brand, who will they reach, and how they will help you achieve your business goals.

But befire we dive on the "how's to" lets mention four important aspects the we need to take in account. These are: Focus in a niche, deliver quality content, offer real value and finally establish authority.

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

Don't fall into the mistake of writing about anything that comes to mind, research and think before selecting the type of content. You will need to focus on it.

Deliver Quality content
When thinking about quality content I always think, its better to spend 8 hours researching and writing 1 high quality article than writing 3 our 4 poor ones.

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

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 yo keep in mind that the viewer is looking for you to solve his problem.

One thing is entertaining, which is totally fine if that is your audience and your thems, but if you're willing to be payed for content you will need to be in the top 1% and that means to give him something in return.

As an example, in this article we gathered experience and opinions from several digital entrepreneurs and we're are synthetizing our experiences in a large guide to help you to take some decisiosn and guide you in the process. Let me know if that went well later ;)

Establish Your authority
I often say, whether you are an expert in a field or not, if you focus you can be among the best 1%, easily. 0.1 and 0.01% is not far off also. Look at Elon Musk with his SpaceX company, didn't know nothing about rockets, started reading books and now he has the most valued and disruptive space company ever.

If you focus on providing quality and engaging content you can establish your authority in a particular field and be an influencer, 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. A good way to do this is to publish articles on sites such as Medium and LinkedIn, and build a strong social media presence. Bingo!

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 because it deals with with strategy the high-level planning for your content producing activities and how we they will interact with your brand, who will they reach, and how they will help you achieve your business goals.

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

• What you’re trying to accomplish
• Who you’re trying to reach
• What types of content you’ll publish
• How your content will support the brand
• The ways in which your content will be differentiated
• How you will promote and amplify your content
• The metrics that define success

The answer for these questins will guide you on the best way to build your content and prepare it to promote you brand, build audience, get leads and improve your sales if that's tyhe case.

Content Marketing is both labour intensive and can be quite complex as it leads with many different activities and tools thart support it. It envolves using tools tpo 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: 10 Best Content Optimization Tools for SEO - to know the pros and cons about them.

To know more about it please refer to this Content Market Guide on Terrakeet.

Monetizing content through your own blog or website gives you much more flexibility to try different aproaches but, on the other hand, it also complicate things more because you will need to market your own content and that can distract you from the content creation tasks. We'll dive on the monetiaztion part on the next chapter.