Vertical search – what does it mean?

Can small businesses find ways to create great content faster than usual? Yes, they can.

How?

The majority of content marketing ideas will come to you based on discussions, inspiration or ideas that you and/or your team generate during your work.

How Small Businesses Create Content?

Here, I’ll show a very effective way for small and medium businesses owners to overcome the content creation hurdle.

Read on and you’ll see how the idea to write this article came to me.

You’ve probably noticed that the web is populated with good websites, blogs full of tips, ideas and other resources. Take some inspiration from other people’s blogs. Analyse, try adding new angles and build from there.

Another example: any conversation with a colleague or client could end-up with a particular subject content line, rather like this article did.

I thought I’d help you accelerate the content creation process by putting this together in one place and save you time.

Why Brainstorm Content Can Give You (Ideas)Wings?

Brainstorming will help you produce faster and genuine content ideas, as it stimulates your creative (brain) thinking in a very short period of time.

This will also help you increase productivity (article volume), generate theme groups for your audience, organise subjects, headings, sub-headings, develop and further discuss your multiple selection for the next posts.

But it also has the massive advantage to help you identify new topics including types of keyword phrases that you normally would not think of and/or consider.

Another very important aspect to think about before planning a brainstorm, is to involve external people or colleagues who are not working on that particular project. They’ll bring a really fresh perspective to the table, you’ll see.

Why content marketing audit/Assessment?

Go and establish your business benchmarking. You should start by checking which content is performing better.

Your content marketing assessment will allow you to get: a realistic view/picture of where you stand in your current content marketing strategy.

The content areas of evaluation should include:

• Content marketing knowledge
• Identify your main objectives
• Existing or best internal performig assets
• Competitive insight
• Resources available
• Plan & Channel distribution
• Internal process of documentation
• Control and measurement

As I’ve already touched upon, the reasons why every business owner should give brainstorming content material a go are endless.

Those who plan ahead will fill-up their editorial calendar more often and are more likely to take control of how, why and when to communicate with their customers. Also, everybody knows time can be your worst enemy, making very difficult to concentrate and write fast new content everyday.

So, keep these pointers in mind:

• Create brainstorming sessions as often as you can
• Define primary content creation phases

• Map out/Collect materials or ideas beforehand in a notebook

• Email colleagues, marketing, sales team your topic a week in advance, so they come prepared and relaxed for the brainstorming session – remember, not just people working on the project!

Six steps to create content faster

What are you going to write next? Whether it’s an article, sales campaign, event or new product coming up, here is how you can create content faster in just six steps:

1. Engage your brain: with issues or subjects that need quick resolutions. Remember and ask “Who is your reader?” then go create or check your customer persona doc, this must describe the various behavioral points/features of your users.

2. Choose attractive headlines: These are the bee’s nectar, a headline is so important as it delivers the tone and is the first thing that the human eye reads. This must be apowerful single line to help users understand the purpose, value of what you’re trying to achieve.

3. Create prime keyphrases: offer a unique value proposition, summarise it. Example: My App/service allows you to book this and this. Very important for the fluidity and continuity of your content material.

4. Content structure: Start with the problem in mind –  Create a first basket of main title ideas and why not do the same for sub-titles and keywords. Then group it and sum-up pages explaining the topic and/or sub-topic in detail.

5. Format type: Whilst brainstorming you must select which format you’re looking to get for your content, so write it down. Also think what type of devices you want to show content.

6. Be specific: Why do you want to create a video? What is the final purpose? Who will do it… You must be realistic about your choice and processes.  Is it because it offers a great visual value/impact, more than a podcast? When you’re ready to end your brainstorming session, ready it all and select the best option for your project.

Why am I giving away my personal content strategy tactics?

Recently, one of my clients asked if I had any ideas on how he could manage to create content more often. I said, yes I’ve got some. Then it occurred to me that I could also turn this into a useful article post.

Here I am, sharing tools, (not the Brian Adam’s song) ideas that work, and to be honest who doesn’t like cool tips or new ideas. I believe, we all can benefit from sharing good post and re-sharing it with friends and family. You can also use this technique and improve yours. Do you get the idea? I’ll explain this at a later date on another related topic.

One of my preferred sayings teaches us to be open minded – it says: ” how can you get something from someone if your hand is closed “.See the picture? What goes around comes around. Now, go try this tactic right away.

Click the image below to see the major challenges businesses are facing when it comes to create content. I’d add “creating content for your audience” to this list as it is the hardest one. We could say its already in “Producing a variety of Content”.

Image from : CMI -Content Marketing Institute

[Update for 2020 and beyond]

Most of us have noticed that the main priorities have shifted. We are better off updating existing content rather than producing new [quantity]. However, we will need to create content that is relevant and serves users.  This can be translated onto E.A.T. – this stands for: Expertise, Authority and Trustworthy.

Hint: Read Google quality guidelines

A good rule of thumb is to explain, keep it simple and update it when it comes to deliver better content. But always ask yourself: “Does this help my readers/users?

These techniques are great if you’re a one man band or a very small team.

Lets’ start with these free tools. Yes, I mention free.

Content challenges and options – two options to choose from:

First option: create an account with Trello here. Its a free web-based project management tool that allows you to manage everything you want. From blog writing, small projects to team management… Its a great app, extremely easy to use. See Access Trello – It’s free.

Keep reading.

Second option: subscribe to our e-newsletter and I’ll email you my own content board and/or Quadrant-Channels-Keywords spreadsheet to quickly help you visualise what you’re writing. This will include keywords worksheet and – social media calender along with many other freebies .

Swiftly moving on..

I recently discovered this awesome piece of technology called Buzzsumo – I was so amazed that my first thought was, what kind of word can I check for existent titles or top content articles? Wow, I said, I was amazed as this saved me few hours of surfing the web. And not only that, it also offers you a bonus – it shows you the most shared content for any topic, plus you can download it .. and also check by location all that .. for free. Isn’t that great? Yes, I couldn’t believe myself.

So, access buzzsumo. Easy and quick to register – then get your list out (brainstorming) and be ready to get a fast a different approach.

This will streamline your work faster, allowing you to quickly find content that is working for your competitors and/or social media influencers. Did you notice I am writing in the present tense?

Here is why:

• You can now quickly search for keyphrases and identify content that’s been read and shared around your particular topic.

• You can see what your followers and influencers are sharing.

• You can find other business people’s topics that will provide infographics/data to include within your article content.

• You can easily delete irrelevant topics from the list, when you download it in .csv list; or simply by making a new or better one.

When you know which subject you want to write about, this tool will deliver great results in no time. After just a few minutes you’ll have spare material and lots to think about, I promise you.

Also in one click of a button you can filter format type – You can choose to extract all the relevant videos only, or get a particular infographic, interviews, guest posts. This is very useful when you run out of time and want to find a relevant url to add at the end of your article (use their advance search operators).

Job done.

Surprised?

Which one to choose from – influencers or brand followers?

Influencers: are individuals or brands that have huge amount of followers or social media presence. You may ask them if they’re willing to promote your brand or service to their large audience.

Brand followers: are satisfied customers or prospects that will follow you all the way.
You better off giving something to a brand or advocate follower as this might get your name circulating on social media for a couple of weeks and benefit is great.

How to create content.. faster – the extra bonus [formula]

Step 1: Understand what your audience’s needs are

Step 2: Start with a relevant subject/topic

Step 3: Write a captivating intro

Step 4: Follow a sequence and organise your content

Step 5: Write often and cut back irrelevant stuff

Step 6: Find a fun, educational or trending title

Step 7: Proofread your content/post

Step 8: Check: formating, bullet-points, call-to-action etc

Step 9: Ask a competent person to re-proofread

Step 10: Publish and share it

This will lead us to the keyword optimisation process, those are the terms you logged during your brainstorming session. Grab those and copy them into your keyword list or software. Remember to formulate keyphrases that could lead people to your page.

Many argue the fact that free tools such as Ubersuggest do not provide enough quality content – I dispute that, specially if you’re short of cash. Seriously give it a try, it has improved lots – now a cutting-edge tool whilst delivering fast results.

It is among the most useful in my opinion. It takes the same terms suggested by Google Suggest and displays it in an alphabetical order giving you a considerable amount of keywords and phrases ideas that you can copy and paste. But does it better.

By the way feel free to use these same phrases to build other topics, as they’ll be highly searched for.

If your main focus is to create content for mobile devices, here is the tool that will help you do the job and research your competitors best keywords – called Appmind. Don’t be shy, read and capture their descriptions, titles for more keyword ideas. Very helpful and a time saver too.

Conclusion:

The outcome of this exercise is quite simple really – if you follow these steps I guarantee that you’ll quickly find new keywords and will improve your content and/or topics. By following the above you’ll help yourself find new or related blogs, keywords, compare themes/topics, improve and/or create better content than your competitor. Not excluding the time you’ll save.

As we all know.. time is money, right.

I really hope this post will bring you some light, so go now and try it all.

Remember to build upon your list of suggestions, optimise and start creating smart great content. Now that you have the tools, the framework, you just need to find some time and organise yourself.

Tip and Action time: To improve content pages you need to analyse your data. Here is a great post explaining how to setup Google analytics: beginner’s guide to Google analytics.

Lets get started.

Ahh, yes, I’d appreciate if you could email us your new ideas, comments but and share it.

P.S: Post’s comments are now closed.

If you’re writing content yourself – you might want to grab our Editor Checklist sample to guide you through.

Good luck!

Updated on 30.05.2020