Brainstorming content ideas unique to your small business is an acute requirement to develop your content marketing strategy that aligns with your recently uncovered target audience.
What is high quality content?
It is absolutely essential to create high quality content that engages your audience and converts them from prospects to customers. Another natural consequence of high quality content is ranking well on the search engines.
Earning back links through merit
Do not set about trying to rank on top of the Google SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages). Only a human being is going to read your content, appreciate its quality and hence the knowledge gained. A search engine bot is not going to buy your business service or product.
When people find your content useful and of high quality, they are going to link back to the article on your site. This is earned media and accrual of back links on merit. This is the type of link Google values the most. It is not quantity but quality of the back links that matter.
Stop spamming the search engines
Unlike the wild wild west days of the late 90’s and early part of 2000’s, where any piece of content that gamed the search engines through anchor text heavy content, thousands of back links built through automated software and other spammy activities, helped rank such low quality articles in Google’s top pages.
Gone are those days. Today, there are gazillion number of sites in almost all mainstream niches competing for a place at the top of Google search landscape. You have to work hard to earn your place. There are no two ways about it. Gaming the search engines is no longer possible.
Secret to top rankings
Valuable content is the key to top rankings on the search engines. If you are experienced in your area of expertise, you are going to put your heart and soul into the content you develop. The content serves as a beacon to those wanting to know more about your domain, before they can purchase your services/products.
Such insight filled content that can help your audience in solving problems in their day to day lives, is a game changer that will reap rewards to the hilt. Give freely and don’t hold anything back. Improve the lives of your audience. You will be acknowledged as the go to person in your domain of knowledge and earn your place as an authoritative resource.
Average time spent on a site, depth of content, page views of articles, bounce rate, all these can be seen in any web analytics programs. Although the general consensus is that Google does not consider these things in ranking, we may never know the behind the scenes happenings. If you have Google Analytics installed on your site which is the best option for free top grade analytics program, Google is definitely going to have your data for the metrics mentioned above.
Drawing Up Content Ideas
It is vital to have a planned approach to developing content that makes up your content marketing strategy. For this, it is MANDATORY to have a content pipeline.
At any given point of time, your content pipeline should contain, at the least, between 25 and 50 ideas. Maintain this number by consistently adding ideas so you are never short of ideas for developing great quality content.
List of Brainstorming Techniques
You can always classify content marketing ideas into priority topics versus potential future topics.
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The 5 W’s and the H method
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This is a simplistic method to generate content ideas. Pick out an idea that forms the core of your perceived article. Look at answers for the 5 W’s namely what, why, where, who and when. The H is the how aspect of it.
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Popular trending events
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This is very temporal and relates to the trending events at the time of writing your article, in the context of your niche. Look around for such events in politics, TV entertainment channels, shows on Netflix and of course, social media trending topics.
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Mind mapping
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A mind map is a diagram to organize information visually. Arranging your brainstormed thoughts with a core idea at the center, without stressing on order and structure, helps you connect various associated representations to that central concept in image form. Each of those associated ideas can branch off into more related ideas and so on.
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Content Idea Generators
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There are several content idea generation tools available for free in the market. Once you have a central idea, you are asked to enter a noun or a keyword or domain relevant to your idea. These tools generate content ideas and/or related keywords with search volume and other cost metrics. If you are starved of ideas, you know these tools can be a life saver.
Hubspot Blog Idea Generator is a best in the business tool which you can play with.
Ubersuggest is a tool which gives the keywords related to your idea with other relevant metrics
Portent’s Title Maker Tool is another useful tool worth trying.
If you are busy running your small business, there is not enough time to implement the suggested actions in this article. You can leave it to us folks here at Traffic Alignment, to do the hard work for you. Apart from brainstorming content ideas for your small business, we can also create and market quality content for your small business to prosper. Give our content marketing services a go and breathe easy!
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