One of the best content marketing tips you can follow is making certain your blog is considered authoritative and useful. Your readers will think of you as a trusted resource to return to and recommend to their contacts.
You must do research.
First, you need to determine what type of topic you have:
- Hard research: scientific, objective, using proven facts and showing evidence.
- Soft research: more subjective and opinion based.
- Combined soft and hard research: requires proven facts as well as the ability to sway opinion when debating others over the topic.
Once this is decided, you need to choose which resources are appropriate to use. For hard research this will mean academic journals, peer-reviewed research, news from reliable media sources, and other sources of facts. Soft research can include the use of review sites, opinion blogs, blogs and articles from amateur practitioners, and forums.
To find research online, it is helpful to use different search engines and sets of keywords to either enlarge or narrow your search results. Most people go to Google first, and it is a very large search engine with a lot of power. But don’t forget about search engines like Bing and About.com that present results differently or may even show results not immediately visible in a large engine like Google.
Some good research content marketing tips: put keywords in different orders and use Boolean operators if the search engine will allow it to bring up more qualified results. And when you find great content for your industry, bookmark it, because you will want to return to it for future posts and content of your own.
Now, to maintain trust in your blog, you need to make certain the resources you use are authoritative and trustworthy:
- Consider the author and the source.
- Check the publication date (older content may no longer be accurate).
- Watch out for content that appears authoritative but contains a lot of advertising.Be wary of individual comments in forums or at the end of other blog posts.
- Check backlinks to the page to see who else may be referring to it. If those sites with links to the page appear authoritative then the page itself is probably trustworthy. More here...
Wikipedia, itself an occasional source of misinformation, nevertheless offers content guidelines to its authors and editors to help them identify reliable sources. In many ways these guidelines harken back to all those rules you learned in high school English about citation, my next point.
It isn’t enough to simply present the information once you have found it and determined that it is reliable, authoritative, and useful. You must also give credit where credit is due. Take the time to cite your resources. Not only does this give credit where it is due, it also shows you are a savvy thought-leader who knows where to go and who to ask for the best information. The citation itself could be an excellent source of SEO and link juice as well.
More seriously, properly citing your resources will keep accusations of plagiarism at bay. This cannot be stressed enough:
Do not plagiarize.
This is the same as stealing and can label your blog as an untrustworthy source as well as one lacking moral fiber, something most people value even if they don’t come out and say so. It can also bring on legal challenges.
Some final content marketing tips from Modern Media:
Presentation is important, too. Make it easy for your readers to see where the information came from by including a link to the original study or paper, providing the date it was performed in the content of your post, and information on the methodology and sampling information. Make certain all charts are clearly and accurately labeled with both title and axis labeling.
And keep it interesting by telling a story with your research. Stories are why narrative histories survived as long as they did before the written word was available. A story, with a beginning, middle, and end, sticks with your readers much longer than lists of dry statistics.
Bring the material alive and not only will your blog be considered the go-to place for information, it will also be become known as a good read. This makes it much more likely that people will return and tell their friends about you.