Hello and Happy New Year!
I hope you’ve got that New Year optimism feel. It’s the time of year when we tend to feel more confident about achieving our goals and ambitions.
If you have your own blog or website I thought I’d give you some tips on the sort of things you should be doing this year to create better content for your audience and customers.
1. Conduct an audit of your current content.
I know for some people auditing immediately brings out a yawn. Auditing may sound boring but it’s so important when it comes to creating great content.
Conducting an audit lets you know exactly what content you have. Use an excel spreadsheet to record this information. This is what’s known as a content inventory.
You can then decide whether your content is useful, relevant and up to date. Ask yourself whether it still meets your business goals for which we recommend this guide on how to get pay stubs for your employees. If it doesn’t, look at making some updates along with looking again at the type of content you should be creating to meet your goals.
2. Don’t let old content die.
It’s easy for great content to get buried and lost under the weight of new content you produce. As part of your audit you need to ask whether people can still find your content.
You can stop this from happening by reminding your readers of great content you’ve written in the past.
When you create new content whether it’s a blog post or article; you can remind readers of similar topics of interest you’ve written before. Include a list with a link that will take your readers to these older posts.
Don’t forget SEO – you can look back at old content and make small changes in terms of keywords and outbound links you use.
3. Complete your LinkedIn profile
I’m tired of seeing poor quality linkedIn profiles.
LinkedIn is the largest professional social network that’s around at the moment. If you’re going to use LinkedIn make sure you make the most out of it.
A lot of people don’t bother to complete their profile fully, and if they do their profile just comes across like a boring online CV. Your LinkedIn profile can be so much more than this.
When you complete your profile make sure people can see your expertise, talents, background, and interests. Tell people what it is you can do to help them and remember to include a Call to Action if you can. If you want people to contact you – tell them.
Include links to your twitter profile, blog and website. I include a link on my linkedIn profile to my blog and this website. It means that my profile isn’t static and is always being updated with my blog posts and articles.
4. Get involved with LinkedIn Groups
Find some LinkedIn Groups to join that relate to your industry and expertise. The purpose of LinkedIn Groups is to allow people with similar interests to come together, share and discuss news topics of interest to them.
When you join a LinkedIn group, you become part of an online community, this allows you to build your profile and influence as well as keep updated with industry news. All of this will help you generate content ideas.
5. Sort out an editorial calender.
An editorial calender is like a diary which tells you when you should be creating new content.
An editorial calender will tell you what content to create, topics to cover, the audience you should be targeting.
Google calendar is a good tool to use. You can fill in the dates on your calendar with specific publishing tasks; whether its a new blog, article, Ebook, video or podcast.
Don’t forget to make a note of important dates or external events related to your business. This will give you lots of good ideas for content to create.
6. Focus on local
A significant amount of searches made on Google and Bing are for local services and products. When you create content you should take into account the audience in your local area. What are their needs and interests? How are you meeting this?
Search is becoming more and more targeted and local search is an example of this. Include keywords like your location in the content you create along with other local references.
Don’t ignore your local audience.
7. Use Infographics
I love a good Infographic.
Regular readers to this website will know that I use infographics all the time.
In 2013 image based content will continue to grow: Infographics are a great way of presenting data, charts and stats in a visually appealing way.
As much as I love the power of the written word, there are times when an infographic can make data or stats more interesting, bringing them to life in a way that words can’t do.