The New Year is here and I’m sure we’ve all made our New Year’s resolutions. Well here’s a resolution that you can keep to.
Resolution: Be more organized and post quality content consistently.
There’s one simple way to make this resolution stick and that is (drumroll please) an editorial calendar. Content marketing is one of the biggest trends to come out of 2013 and it’s set to keep on growing throughout 2014 according to Smart Insights.
An editorial calendar will help you to:
- Always post fresh content on time for your readers
- Create content around promotions, holidays and important milestones for your business
- Keep your content creation team organized and on track
Feeling uninspired? It can be hard to magic up 3 months of content out of thin air. But you don’t have to. There are topics for great articles everywhere you look – once you know how.
Let’s take a quick look…
#1. Client’s Success Stories
Nothing attracts clients like other happy clients. If you have a client with an inspirational story that you’ve somehow helped along the way, why not write about it? You can showcase your skills, detail how you can help others achieve their goals and even promote your client in the process. This is a win win situation for everyone.
#2. Answer Questions
Do you seem to have to answer the same questions about a particular subject over and over again? This is a great indication that a lot of people would be interested in knowing about that topic. Questions from clients and readers can give valuable insight into the kind of articles that would be useful to your audience and therefore popular.
#3. Recent Experiences
Have you been to a cool workshop, conference, training etc lately? Why not share the lessons you learned there? sharing knowledge and information is a huge part of any content marketing strategy. The more useful and interesting your content is, the more people read it and the more your voice is heard and respected within your niche.
#4. Recommend Books
If you’ve read a book that has helped you to achieve success or inspired you in some way, the chances are that your readers will want to know about it. If they already know about it then your content will most likely act as a great conversation starter. Both are brilliant for your content marketing strategy.
#5. Interesting Results
If you’ve run some kind of test on some aspect of your business, and you got results that you round surprising, why not write about it? When everybody is writing about the same topics from the same angle, a surprising case study stands out from the crowd and that’s what marketing is all about.
#6. Borrow from Somebody Else
I’m not talking about plagiarism here before anybody goes out and tries to get themselves sued. I’m talking about using and properly crediting the author of an article that you found to be informative and entertaining.
It’s not wise to use this method all the time but every so often it changes things up a little in your campaign. If you’re going to use somebody else’s work though, make sure it’s to the quality and standards that your readers are used to.
#7. Industry Trends
Find out what’s happening in your industry. What is everybody buzzing about? If you choose a topic that everybody is searching for at the moment, then you’re more likely to get more traffic to your site. The following tools will help you to find out which topics are hot at the moment and which topics look like they’ll be popular in the future. Basically, you’ll be placing your shop window in front of the busiest high streets..
- Topsy – This tool tells you about the amount of searches that have been made for certain keywords and phrases in the last couple of hours, tweets that were sent out over the last month and even see forecasted trends that relate to your own blog.
- Alltop – Alltop tells you about the top stories (most popular as the site owners like to phrase it) around the World Wide Web. You can view stories that are trending according to industry or publication.
- ContentGems – This is one is great if you need to look for a specific category of content. Whether it’s news items, advisory content or insightful content from market leaders, you can find it with ContentGems.
These tools will help to make sure that your content is fresh and relevant to your reader.
BONUS TIP: If you want a quick, easy way to implement an editorial calendar into your content marketing campaign, the WordPress Plugin is a great way to start.
What About You? Are you already a converted fan of the editorial calendar or is this music to your ears?
What’s the hardest thing you are facing when it comes to writing your content? Are you doing it yourself or someone is helping you? Maybe you can even offer some other tips for content inspiration. 😉
As always, I’d love to hear from all of you.
Blessings,
Florentina