Getting started in optimizing your business content is not without its roadblocks, many of them internal blocks. Breaking through these blocks will require an honest self-evaluation of where you are right now in regards to your content.
Are you stuck in a context comfort zone?
You’re a programmer at heart, and all you know is websites. Or live teaching is a snap for you, but you freeze at the thought of putting words on paper. It’s inevitable that we would want to stick with the context that we know inside-out, but content optimization won’t happen if you don’t diversify your contexts. Albert Einstein once said doing the same thing, while expecting different results, is a definition of insanity. It’s just not going to happen.
Consider your market. If all you do is books, those who don’t like to read as their primary learning modality in your market are shut out from benefiting from the information you have to offer. If you only blog, those who aren’t primarily kinesthetic in their learning style will never get your message. For their sake (and your own), try new and different context formats.
To un-stick yourself from your comfort zone, remember that each new reworking of your content into a new context is likely to bring new insights and improvements you might not have considered before. Your content will be stronger than ever, and gain a wider market, which will bring more profit your way. It’s well worth the struggle to move beyond your comfort zone. Never invent – always improve.
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When your business is information marketing, your product is content – lots and lots of content. Trying to slide by without lots of quality content is like trying to run your car without maintaining it – you’ll run for awhile, but eventually you’re facing disaster. How do you gather content for your business?
Here are some ideas that we recommend:
Do it yourself
If you don’t happen to be made of money, you can try writing your own content. This is a hard option for some, and one that can derail many a beginning entrepreneur with the sheer volume of the project, depending on the project.
Outsourcing to the rescue
You can hire others to write personalized content for you – namely a ghostwriter. Don’t try to do everything yourself, when it’s not your strength. Know in advance that this is a more expensive option…one that can cost you hundreds of dollars for a not-terribly-impressive amount of work. Hey, writers have to make a living too.
Take your time to find someone who you can successfully work with, and who will produce great content for you. You can have your ghostwriter create content from general topics. If you want more specific work, it helps to provide notes and research, whenever possible.
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When your business is information marketing, your product is content – lots and lots of content. Trying to slide by without lots of quality content is like trying to run your car without maintaining it – you’ll run for awhile, but eventually you’re facing disaster.
How do you gather content for your business?
Here are some ideas that we recommend:
Do it yourself
If you don’t happen to be made of money, you can try writing your own content. This is a hard option for some, and one that can derail many a beginning entrepreneur with the sheer volume of content required.
Outsourcing to the rescue
You can hire others to write personalized content for you – namely a ghostwriter. Don’t try to do everything yourself, when it’s not your strength. Know in advance that this is a more expensive option…one that can cost you hundreds of dollars for a not-terribly-impressive amount of work. Hey, writers have to make a living too.
Take your time to find someone who you can successfully work with, and who will produce great content for you. You can have your ghostwriter create content from general topics. If you want more specific work, it helps to provide notes and research, whenever possible.
Article directories
Another way of finding content for your site is to go to article directories. There are many to choose from on the Internet, and many of them allow you to use their articles for free or for a small charge. Sites such as Ezine Articles and Article Dashboard can provide content for you. The downside to promoting duplicate content on your website could be lowered page rank in the prominent search engines. Make sure to monitor your results when using content from these sites.
Private label content
Private label content is another option. You find a membership site where private label content is offered. Get what you need and apply it to your website – no writing required. That’s not to say that there’s no reading required, however. Before you purchase pre-made content, always read it first to make sure it’s the right quality level of writing that you require, as well as appropriate to the content you’re trying to market.
You may also want to do a search of the Internet to see how many other areas have the same content you’re considering. If your content isn’t unique, you’re going to have a difficult time drumming up reader interest and having them want to return.
Reconsider the written word for the spoken word
Written words are showing no signs of dying out anytime in the near future, but we have other ways of providing content as well. If you’re developing severe writer’s block when it comes to writing your own content, have you tried speaking it instead? Record yourself speaking what you want to write about, and then simply transcribe your own ideas, in your own voice, or hire someone else to do it for you. What could be more original?
Create a process that is ongoing
Information marketing thrives on newness. Whatever way you get content for your business – whether it’s created by you or by someone else – plan on a regular schedule of updates, to keep your business evergreen.
About the Authors
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It’s easy enough to understand the need for content optimization, but how to do it? There are so many choices of context that it’s very easy to become overwhelmed, and either end up doing too much and spreading yourself thin, or never getting started in the first place.
There are some organization questions you can ask yourself when getting started in the process of content optimization. These questions can focus your efforts and help you make the most of your time and investment in content optimization.
Here are what we call the six easy questions to content optimization:
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Research is so much easier now than it was before the Internet came along. Much of your information content research can be done on the Web. However, the Internet is so deep and wide that it’s easy to get lost in webpage after webpage, looking for the information you need.
The following are some research tips for those who are looking to create useful content:
Define your content sharply…
If your research topic is broad, your job is a lot harder than it is when you're more specific. Doing research on “apples” will take months and years, while research on “diseases that specifically affect Granny Smith apples” is much more focused, and the research is not nearly as daunting.
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You’ve got your content presented, ready for people to benefit from it, and you’re marketing diligently. So… how do you know your content is being effective? That is the golden question, and one that’s very difficult to answer, simply because information marketing hits so many different places. Unless you ask your customers directly (which isn’t always practical), it’s hard to know how many times they were exposed to your content and from what directions. Your customers may not even know themselves.
So how can you tell if any one kind of content you’re presenting is as effective as it could be?
The following tips may help:
Make a simple marketing chart
Your information content is meant to steer the market to buy what you’re providing. If you’ve communicated effectively, then purchases will happen. A simple chart with three columns can give you the general idea of whether or not you’re going in the right direction.
Create a three-columned chart. In the first column, list the month and year of your business activities. In the second column, list any and all marketing activities you did. In the third column, list your sales figures.
It’s best to begin with specific content in place, and track results for at least six months before you draw any conclusions and make any changes. This is business research. If you were working on a science experiment, you know that changing the control part of the experiment will keep you from understanding the results. Too many changes will muddy your marketing results. If the sales figures increase or decrease as a result of changes, you won’t know why they happened if too many factors changed too quickly.
While seasonal changes and other economic factors are too complicated to achieve really specific results, this process can help you to get a ballpark idea of the impact of your content in the marketplace.
Feedback from customers
Other factors to consider are your bounce rate (“bounce” meaning how many people click on your site and then immediately click away, instead of interacting with your content). A high bounce rate could indicate that either the content of your site needs improving, or the layout needs to be manipulated to optimize the impact of your existing content. A low bounce rate could mean a higher customer interaction with your content, and could potentially lead to greater sales figures.
The great thing about doing business online is that feedback can be set up to be immediate. If your customers don’t like something, the anonymity that the computer provides will provide you with lots and lots of recent, raw feedback.
If you want to know where content can be improved, looking for patterns in the feedback your content receives can be very eye-opening and, if acted upon, can lead to greater customer satisfaction, which leads to greater sales. It can also create new, specific ideas that can lead to the creation of great new content, which is what your market is hungry for.
Ultimately, remember that the main feedback you’re looking for is the monetary kind. Who’s buying? When? Why? Would they buy again? How could you entice them to buy again?
About the Authors
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Making the decision to optimize your business content involves other decisions as well. The one major decision to make involves how specifically to make that change. How that is done partially depends on what form your content currently takes.
We have simplified content optimization into four distinct types. Here are what we call the four R’s of Content Optimization:
Re-use – using the same content in different places
Just because content is already in one context doesn’t mean it can’t move to another. Let’s suppose for this illustration that we’re dealing with a person who’s written an article on weight loss, and wants to optimize their content. The easiest change to make might be to simply take the same information and put it in different places. The information from the article could be updated slightly and moved over (or re-purposed) into a blog, or an ezine article. If the article was posted online, the same article could be posted to different directories, which would then get referenced on different blog posts.
Re-purpose – moving the same content to a different context
Suppose that this same author wanted to expand on the weight loss article that had been written, and transfer this information to a completely different context. A teleseminar on weight loss might be considered, which would incorporate more audio, bringing in a completely different audience. An interactive video could incorporate the written word and audio recordings, and perhaps also a fill-in-the-blank worksheet, which would incorporate visual, audio and kinesthetic stimulation for a more well-rounded learning experience for the market.
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Duplicate content abounds online and offline and presents a challenge to the information marketer. If the same perspective and even the same words are being presented over and over again when someone in your market does a search for information, then what distinguishes you from the hundreds of others websites saying the same thing? Why should they return to you for more information?
The following questions can help you in avoiding too much duplicate content:
Can I add something different to the conversation?
You always have your own expertise and perspective to add that is unique. What questions have you noticed that aren’t being addressed about your topic? What questions aren’t being sufficiently answered?
Does my content answer questions or provide information my market needs?
The way to success in any business is still the same, whether on or off the computer… see a need, and fill that need. When your business is information marketing, what information does the market require to fill a need? Do you have that information, and can you provide it in a way the market can understand and assimilate it?
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Content creation is an unending job. It can be difficult to create fresh content on the internet, which has become a barrage of websites and articles. With so much information out there, it can become difficult to find a unique approach that will enlighten and intrigue your audience.
What Will Hook Your Audience?
If you can find that rare perspective that hasn’t been explored beyond the boundaries of usefulness, you will be able to captivate your audience and accomplish the goals you are working toward. This can be a daunting and unnerving task. It requires one to look for information outside of the box.
Where Is Outside the Box?
• Blogs - Along with putting blogs on your website, you can also research for content on other people’s blogs. By visiting a number of blogs related to the topic you are writing about, you can find people’s opinions, references to other sites containing information that may interest you, as well as many interesting facts. You may be able to post to a blog and ask for opinions about a particular subject and obtain your own survey results from that.
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Creating content is a necessity in the Internet world. The cost of the tools may have dropped considerably, but the value of your time continually increases. Creating content can be as easy as editing text with the help of modern text editors; however that depends upon your standard of quality.
There are programs out there that claim to create high quality articles out of thin air for you. However, it doesn’t take much article reading to find that there are plenty of articles out there that have poor grammar and don’t really seem to make sense. Much of this comes from software that doesn’t have the human ability to blend the information that has been accumulated into a logical, flowing, and interesting series of words, sentences, and paragraphs.
Creating content is easy, and can be done by a computer program. Creating intelligent, reusable and quality content is not quite so easy and requires human participation. Creating content can be the fun part of designing your website. This is where you get to add everything you want to share with the world on your site.
Suggestions on how to gather your content information…
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