Content Marketing Made Simple

5 Killer Content Development Strategies That Get Results

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The online marketing world has shifted its attention from technical SEO trickery to solid content development. Hallelujah. Some people still don’t get it and continue to publish substandard nonsense and expect good results, a.k.a. traffic and sales.

For them, I humbly submit these 5 strategies in the hopes that my words will inspire them to turn over a new leaf and spare us all their yawn-inducing or poorly written material.

1. Hire someone who can actually, expertly write something good. In English.

I have a friend who runs a website devoted to banks and lending. He has a LOT of content on there, but it is obviously written by someone who learned English as a second language. There are no blatant grammatical or spelling errors, but some of the phraseology is just a bit “off.”

As an example, one article opens with “Business houses enjoy a wide array of loaning programs.” In the U.S., we call them businesses, and they get loans, so that sentence immediately screams “foreign!” to our sensitive ears. Kind of like when you call Tech Support and you get a thick Indian accent from someone who claims his name is “Steven”—something just doesn’t ring true there.  

The truth is my friend’s content writers are Filipinos and work for about $2 per 500-word article. At that rate, no wonder they write pad their content with useless sentences like that. Who doesn’t know that businesses have access to a bunch of loan programs, and who wants to read about it in weird English anyway? But I digress…the content development strategy that works here is to produce solid, entertaining or informative material that is expertly written. Like this awesome blog post you are reading right now.

2. Don’t be afraid to be yourself.

I hate bland, cookie-cutter content that simply aggregates ideas that other people have already written all over the web with no individuality. I guess companies do this to play it safe. Reading that stuff, however, is about as interesting as reading a dictionary. It certainly does not provoke much interest or repeat visits.

Express your viewpoint. People like things that provoke some sort of reaction and discussion, and even negative reactions can drive sales. A Wharton-Stanford study last year found that Michael Jackson and Russell Crowe enjoyed greater success when they received bad press, as did some book authors who received bad reviews. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for you, right?

Don’t offend for the sake of offending, but don’t be too politically correct in your content development either.

3. Use Yahoo Buzz and Google Keyword tools to plan your content development.

Yahoo Buzz has a great Top Overall Searches list which is useful if you can somehow fit your content around the top terms, like today’s Facebook, Katherine Heigl, Supermoon, and Tsunami. See, I just did it. Another must is to head on over to Google and explore their Google Trends, Insights for Search and Adwords Research tools to determine what terms people are searching for.

4. Avoid article spinning software.

“Spinning” refers to taking content and rephrasing it to fool a search engine into thinking it is unique. “The cat went up the hill” could be spun as “The feline ascended the elevated territory.” Even the Filipinos my friend uses write better stuff than the drivel produced by article spinning software. If you spin articles, you are wasting your time and money because:

a)    Nobody wants to read accidentally weird writing, so they will not spend more than three seconds on your website. Exceptions are Chinglish warning labels and signs.

b)    Google now punishes you for bad content in the search page results.

c)    Users can block your stinky site from appearing in their search results forever with browser extensions like the Personal Search Blocklist.

The moral of the story here is to pay for good content writers to produce 100% original work with intelligently chosen keyword phrases.

5. Make some video!

Videos should be part of any content development strategy, especially since you no longer need an enormous budget to get something shot and uploaded. In addition to my profession as a writer, I also work in Hollywood as a videographer and all-around creative type. I see more and more stars jumping on small video productions to promote their brands on sites like funnyordie.com or collegehumor.com, not to mention YouTube and Vimeo of course. Just remember to put some useful keywords in the title and description of the video!