The Biggest Secrets of Successful Content Creation Revealed

The content creation model helps you answer this question: how do I get more visitors? How can I sell more in my shop? How do I make it to the first page in Google? We often receive these questions from our customers. As you may already know, there is no definite answer to this eternal dilemma. The success of your website depends on many factors.

Nevertheless, we often recommend starting with content creation. This form of online marketing is the first step towards online success!

What is the definition of content creation?

The definition of content creation is: “creating and sharing relevant, valuable, and entertaining information through your own channels with the aim of potential binding customers to your business.”

Content creation can take different forms. Think of blogs, social media messages, newsletters, videos, case studies, animations, infographics, etc. What is essential for every type of content creation is:

• Relevance: is the content interesting for the visitor?
• Value: is the content useful for the visitor?
• Entertainment: does the content provide enough entertainment?

These 3 factors show that the customer is at the central point, not your product or service. Content creation is about customer loyalty: strengthening the relationship with the customer. All content that you post must have been developed for this purpose. Just write a 300 words blog post quickly is not considered to be content creation.

What content creation is not?

According to the POEM model, there are 3 types of media that you can use for your company:

1. Paid media: all media forms that the business team pays for, including advertising in Google, social media advertisements, and display banner advertising.
2. Owned media: all forms of content that the team manages by themselves, including the website, e-mail newsletters, social media channels.
3. Earned media: all the representations about the business developed for free by customers, including reviews, contributed blog posts, social media messages, and word-of-mouth advertising.

Poem model is all you need to keep in mind.

In recent years, there has been a big shift from paid media to the so-called owned media. And that is not so unusual. The advantages of the “owned media” are that they are relatively low costs and you, as a business owner, have full control over your own publications. Content creation, therefore, falls under the “owned media.”

“Paid media” and “earned media” are more promotional in nature. These are generally used to promote the products/services of the company. Content creation is all about the needs of the visitor. Answering the question they have in mind. Do you have to neglect the other two types of media completely? No, a combination of these three ensures the most effective result.

What about curated content?

Curated content is about sharing information from others, for example, blog posts. However, re-tweets also fall under curated content. Is curated content a form of content creation, in this case? Yes and no.

Curated content may seem like a good way to quickly create a lot of content. But sharing content from other sources is not the same as *creating* content. So be very careful with this since you are not the technical owner of the information. Do not copy and paste entire articles from another website on your own blog to prevent duplicate content and Google penalties. And of course, always examine whether the content offers enough value for your readers. Curated Content is often suitable for social media or your newsletters, but never forget to add something from yourself.

How does content creation work for the business?

Many entrepreneurs hope that they will immediately get more visitors and sales through content creation, but that is not how it works, sadly. Content creation creates a greater reach and, consequently, more visitors are appealing for linkbait, and strengthens the relationship with (potential) customers.

How can content creation become linkbait?

Content creation is also interesting for linkbaiting. These are specific pages within a website that are published with the sole purpose of getting many external links. These could be freebies, free tools, giveaway, or even a precious piece of information.

What do you need to know before getting started?

More and more online businesses recognize the importance of valuable content for the success of their website. However, most websites do not have a blog yet. If you decide to add a blog to your business website finally, this is what you need to know before you get started with content creation:

Concentrate only on results in the long term.

Many entrepreneurs want to sell more products, more conversions, and more of everything in the short term. Content creation is not the right tool for that. Your website will not be found better after publishing one article. Only after about a year of regular blogging will you see that the number of visitors will grow. Of course, the main advantage is that you will benefit from your efforts for a long time.

Creating (truly) good content requires a lot of time and effort.

Writing a valuable, excellent, and long blog post can easily keep you busy for half a day. This is one of the main reasons why not every website runs a blog. Do you want to create videos? This also takes more time and effort than you might expect. If an average blog post takes about half a day, creating a YouTube video will take a day and a half. Think of the message you want to convey, setting up the settings, the (repeated) shooting, and then editing, editing, editing.

Content creation shouldn’t be focused on self-promotion.

Many businesses write articles to bring even more attention to their products. But does this have any value for the customer? In most cases, it doesn’t. Content creation is not about promoting your product or service but creating useful content for your target group. Keep that in mind next time to sit to write a blog post!

Pay attention temporarily to relevant content.

For your online success, it is not necessary to post new content every day. It is a lot better to write blog posts that still have value in the long term. When you create content that is only temporarily relevant, you don’t build a long-term strategy.

How to start with content creation?

In addition to our own blog, we also often develop a content strategy for our customers. These are our best tips to get the most out of your content:

Be innovative. This is perhaps one of the most important tips! Research before you start writing what the competition says about your topic. You want to create content that is just a bit better, more complete, or the most inspiring. Visitors are not interested in reading the same thing on 20 different websites, so do everything to stand out.

Do keyword research. Optimizing your content around keywords that do not have any significant search volume is a missed opportunity. We, at lizs3.sg-host.com, also have made this mistake. Before you start writing a blog post, we really recommend that you conduct good keyword research in your niche.

Pay attention to old content. Many articles that you wrote 2 or 3 years ago can use an update: dead links, outdated information, broken images. Divide your time between writing new articles and optimizing old content.

Analyze which type of content works best. Every niche is different. (Potential) customers have different needs and problems, and you, as the content creator, have the assignment to solve them. There is no golden content formula that tells you what kind of content works best. Analyze which content is read the most and which conversions do or do not work. Google Analytics is a good tool that will tell you which pages get the most page views, attract the most traffic from search engines, and convert.

Do not ALWAYS try to convert. As we said earlier, content creation is not about promotion itself. So be selective with your conversions. Do not add more than one (potential) conversion or call to action per page and only post a conversion if it is truly relevant!

Tips for original content creation

Finally, we also want to talk about the actual content of your content. This is surely one of the biggest stumbling blocks for entrepreneurs. Coming up with good blog topics is not as easy as it seems. As content creators, we always immerse ourselves in the customer and try to think of which problems/questions we could solve. Do you have no inspiration? Use our 3 tips for unique content:

Dare to compare!

Many companies are hesitant when it comes to product comparisons, but this is a missed opportunity. How helpful would it be if you will now also be found when someone searches for your competitors’ product name? Compare your own product with similar products from your competitors. Be objective and outline the other products’ positive features, so it doesn’t look fake or sponsored. This is a great opportunity to show what is so good about your own product in a very subtle way.

Dare to reveal secrets

Many entrepreneurs are afraid to lose their edge and unique selling point if they reveal their secrets. We want to dispute this idea. Precisely by giving away secret tips, you can bind customers to your blog and show that you are the one of a kind expert in this field.

Example: There are a few restaurants that do content creation. Why not? By sharing recipes (of dishes that are also on the menu), you can get more publicity and more guests. What are you afraid of that guests will stay home and cook themselves? Share recipes that will soon disappear from the menu. An accountant and a photographer can also benefit by sharing their exclusive expertise, for example, by sharing tips for tax returns or photo editing tips. People would still prefer to trust a professional in this field because many would fail to do it themselves anyway.

The help of your customers

This can be done in different ways, but the principle remains the same. “Ordinary” people are seen as more reliable than organizations. For content creation, it offers advantages if your customers help with the creation of the content. The easiest way is to place an interview. Make sure that the questions are interesting for your target group.

You can, of course, also go a step further and show how customers use your product. For example, an interior design store can show how different customers have placed a popular cupboard in their house or let the customer record a video of how he has put the piece of furniture together. This type of content is also shared faster by the customer, which generates more publicity/visitors!

Is content creation the best way to reach your customer?

Content creation offers advantages for search engine optimization, customer loyalty, and building a brand. We think it is ideal for reaching your (potential) customer honestly and informally. We think this form of online marketing is suitable for every company in any niche. Are you unsure how to reach your customers better or want to know more about the latest content creation trends? You can always contact us, and we will be happy to help you out with content creation and content marketing!