The most powerful and lasting method of getting traffic for your online business is to constantly create great content.
Creating content means:
- Writing articles
- Publishing daily blog posts
- Creating tools that can, in turn, be published by your partners/affiliates
- Social network posts
- Short, valuable reports, videos, manuals you give away as part of your opt-in, sales funnel
- Press releases and other formal press or analyst content
- Free webinars, teleseminars or courses
As part of our 6 week InfoProfits Program inside InfoMarketer’sZone, we put into action these content creation tools right in the first couple of weeks to make sure you get attention, traffic and begin the flow of eager subscribers and customers who will start your online business off with a bang.Â
Content is your friend in many ways:
- Each piece of content gives you a chance to be ranked in the top 10 on the search engines meaning more people will find you in different ways
- More quality content gives you more opportunties for syndication which gives you both a wider net to catch more traffic, but also gives you solid link juice back to your website – the SERP’s love that
- You build credibility and trust among your marketplace improving their tendancy to buy from you
- You build a reputation and brand that gets you more publicity through interviews, reviews, TV and press
- Your content becomes available to your partners who then cast the net even wider among their trusted audiences
But the challenge you must be wondering about is how do you consistently find ideas to write about so that you can continuously create great content?
Here are a few suggestions:
- Read actively within your market – magazines, books, blogs, etc… and become good at paraphrasing, reviewing or having an opinion on everything you read. You want to bring the core idea or opinion to your market
- You want to be active in your area of expertise. If you are writing about parenting, then make it a habit to try something new or pull a tidbit from your own experience (or someone you know) each day and use that to structure your content
- Survey your marketplace. We have a pipeline of surveys coming in to us each day – every new subscriber, customer, blog reader, etc… sees an invitation to express their opinion, ask a question or express an idea that goes directly into both content creation as well as product creation. By working surveys and polls into your various websites and email campaigns you will ALWAYS have ideas for great content
- Keyword research – although I often do not come up with content ideas based purely on keyword research I certainly do use keyword research to guide me toward the interests of my audience and learn to pull content ideas as well as match content with keywords for better search engine impact
- Social networking – become active and learn to ask questions, be controversial and active so that you get content ideas directly from Twitter, Facebook campaigns
- Amazon comments – this is one of my secret places I look to get excellent ideas for content. Look up a top selling book in your market area and take a look through the reviews and comments, you will often find lots of ideas for additional content
- Google news – another of my favorite ways to continually watch the latest mainstream news for my topic area – I can then create content that refers directly to that news, comments on it, paraphrase the idea into my own words, expand on the story or various other techniques that come directly to mind when reviewing the latest news
As you can see, there are idea triggers all around us for generating content. Next time you are stuck for content ideas on what to write about, use one or more of these techniques to quickly get out of your writing rut and be back in the content business instantly.
