But don’t let my scorn fool you, because obviously I’ve watched it. During Taylor Swift’s “73 Questions,” the interviewer asked her, “What does creativity mean to you?” She answered, “Creativity is getting inspiration and having that lightning bolt moment and then having the hard work ethic to sit down at the desk and write it down.”

Ah, the work ethic. The forgotten flip side of inspiration. All writers are struck with a flash of insight at some point. But that lightning bolt fades fast – and when it does, it means sitting down to a blank space and translating ideas into words people actually want to read.

Writing is a practice. And like any practice, it has shortcuts, tips and best practices that can make your writing crisp and your creative process sharp. Let’s look at five tips that can avoid any bad blood between you and your writing:

1. Read your content out loud: I cannot stress this enough. Reading your words out loud lets you listen to their rhythm and flow. You’ll be able to hear, not see, where grammatical notations should fall. And your brain will use an entirely different region to determine if your content makes sense.
2. Use the Rule of 24: Marinating does the same thing to content as it does to meat; it tenderizes it to bring out the full flavor. So write something. Fiddle with it. Then put it away for at least 24 hours and look at it again. Words you may have thought were brilliant may get axed, and you can shake, shake, shake them off. Other constructions you didn’t like as much will appear fixable. You will bring a fresh set of eyes that always results in an improved piece.
3. Use the end as the beginning: We waste way too much time getting to the lede. Stop! People don’t have time, patience or inclination to listen to you go on and on about Taylor Swift. So write your piece. Let it sit for 24 hours. I promise you’ll find that the best stuff you wrote is at the end. So delete your intro, slide in that ending, and you’re golden. Promise.
4. Use proper nouns and concrete phrases: People can’t picture a “rational method” and “abstract amount.” But when you say “white house” or “red door,” an image just popped into your mind. So avoid abstract ideas and concretize them for people. Marinating content like steak – see? It’s a concrete idea that you can hold onto.
5. Layer in voice on the second draft: Ann Handley taught me this, and I’m annoyed I didn’t know this technique till this year: It’s too big a job to convey information while also trying to sound like ourselves, or our brand. So write what you’re trying to say first. Leave it for a while. When you come back to the second draft, then you can layer in all those inside jokes (like song titles) and brand voice differentiators that make the content sing.

Lightning bolt or no, writing words that people want to read is hard. But don’t make it harder. Use these 5 tips to become a fearless writer, and I guarantee you it’ll be easier to sit down and construct a piece of content that enchants your audience. Your reputation depends on it.

Aside from writing,  there are many other things you can do to boost your content marketing career. For more on this check out our Ultimate Guide to a Content Career in the link below.

To get to the bottom of these questions, it’s important to do some effective keyword research. This is because, at its core, keywords reflect the voices of your audience. Each search query is like a vote that shouts “I want more content about this!”.

So how do we do keyword research? How do we identify the search terms that people are Googling and create marketing content designed to answer these exact queries?

This process begins with understanding how people search online. In order to master the art of finding the perfect keywords to target, let’s take a look at the latest trends in Google’s search algorithms.

The Rise of Semantic Search

The Rock: Hey Siri, what’s the temperature like in Rome today?

Siri: The high temperature in Rome for today will be 80 degrees and the low will be 59 degrees.

Search is constantly evolving.

In an effort to provide more accurate search results, Google has gravitated towards what is known as semantic search. This is the ability to put searches into context in order to measure intent and meaning. Similar algorithmic innovations have led to Apple’s Siri.

The use of semantic search has completely changed the way we perform modern search queries today. A decade ago, people stuck with what was short and simple. If they wanted to find the best pizza places in New York City, they would type in “Pizza New York.” However, with Google’s Hummingbird update and the algorithmic improvements to semantic searches, people now are more inclined to type in “Where is the best pizza place in New York City.”

This trend has led to a surge in popularity for long-tail keywords.

As you can see from this Moz diagram, roughly 70 percent of search queries are now long-tail keywords.

Build Your Preliminary Keyword List

Let’s get started with all the various ways of finding keywords related to your niche so that no stone is left unturned.

1. Brainstorm broad content marketing ideas

The first step is to cast your net as wide as reasonably possible. We’ll use our ideas now to come up with a far more detailed and accurate list of keywords later.

For now, brainstorm all the different content marketing ideas that relate to your business niche and write them down. My company, ResumeGo, offers resume writing services, so these would be some of the keywords that immediately pop into my head:

• Write resume
• Write cover letter
• Resume writing
• Best resume writing service
• CV writing service
• Buy resume
• Buy cover letter
• Professional resume writers

I only listed a few examples to give you some ideas, but of course your list should be longer.

2. Use Google’s recommendations

You can also perform a search and see similar searches recommended by Google. You can find these recommendations at the bottom of the first search page on Google under “Searches Related to ___”.

Those are some more potential keywords to consider.

3. Consider your Competitors

Often times the work has already been done for you! There are many tools that can help spy on your competitors’ keywords, such as Moz, SimilarWeb, and SpyFu.

One caveat to this approach is that the keywords you are finding are the ones that your competitors are using to SEO their company’s main sales page, as opposed to their marketing content. While there should be a lot of overlap between the two, content marketing keywords are generally more specific and long-tailed.

A different approach that remedies this problem is to copy keywords straight from your competitors’ marketing content. So how do we do this?

The first way is to check your competitors’ social media accounts. Once they have new content up, they will be sure to mention it. That’s your chance to see the content marketing they’ve been working on and decide whether or not their keywords are worth copying.

Another method is to track your competitors’ links. Content marketing is often done in unison with link building. Your competitors most likely create content on blogging sites. Within the articles they submit, there are external backlinks that point back to their own websites. Those links can be followed like a trail of breadcrumbs to track what they’ve been up to. Moz and Majestic are tools that are great for doing this. Here’s a look at what Moz found when I looked up Easel.ly, an infographics company.

From looking at just the top results, these are some keywords I’d potentially add if I were in the same industry:

• Free tools infographics
• Royalty-free images
• Free graphic design software
• Tools social media content
• Infographic creator tools

Do this same competitor analysis for each of your top competitors and you’ll be sure to have a complete list of the topics they’ve covered.

4. Get customer feedback

Don’t forget, content marketing should be customer-centric. One of the best ways to know what content you should create is to find out from your customers. There are a number of ways to go about asking, whether it’s through customer surveys, social media, or just giving them a phone call. Listen to what they have to say, and jot down some unique ideas or suggestions that you might have missed yourself. Sometimes their responses can really surprise you!

Use your list to find keywords that you really want to target

Now that you have a list of potential keywords, it’s time to use keyword tools that will flesh out your content marketing ideas and allow you to create your final list of keywords.

While there are many keyword tools available on the web, it’s important to realize that every single one of these tools is really just pulling data from Google’s Keyword Planner. Only Google itself really knows the most popular search queries typed into its search engine. No outsiders have access to this information.

Instead, these other tools make inferences and estimates based off many factors and sources – one of which is Google’s own Keyword Planner. So, let’s go straight to the source of all the keywords data by using the Keyword Planner to create our ultimate keyword list!

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a Google AdWords account and start a campaign. Only after creating your campaign will Google grant you full access to their keyword planner. Here’s what I mean:

Average monthly searches you’ll see before creating your campaign.

Average monthly searches you’ll see after creating your campaign.

Creating a campaign allows you to see a more specific estimate of the average monthly search volume. Showing a range of 100,000 – 1,000,000 searches is nowhere near as helpful as knowing that there are 368,000 searches.

Once your account is set up, access Google’s Keyword Planner and enter in the keywords you gathered earlier.

Feel free to change the default settings to gear your search towards your target audience. In many cases, you’ll want to specify the location as the United States and set the language to English.

Once you hit “Get ideas,” you’ll be able to see a long list of keywords under the “Keyword ideas” section. This will give you a strong foundation for all the major short-tail keywords to add to your list.

However, what’s arguably even more important is the “Ad group ideas” tab. This is where you can really break down your broad keywords to find the exact long-tail keywords that make up the majority of searches. Simply click on each Ad group to get a more detailed keyword list.

By repeating this process with all the content marketing ideas you were able to generate from before, you’ll be able to build a comprehensive list of all the keywords that your content marketing can potentially target.

Picking the very best keywords to target

You’re almost there. You’ve got your completed list of keywords. Now it’s time to pick the ones you actually want to target with your content marketing.  Be careful though, because there are a lot of different elements that go into deciding which keywords are right for you, and you should be wary of common keyword planning mistakes.

Here are some factors you should consider:

1. Search Volume: This is the average number of times the keyword is searched every month.

Things to be aware of:

• Contextualize the volume numbers you see. There are exact matches, phrase matches, and broad matches. Check out Google’s support guide on these match types.
• Remember that these are per-month numbers.
• Take into account the volume trend. Is the overall trend going up or down?
• Consider negative keywords – they can sometimes make the volume numbers you actually care about look higher than they really are.
• Higher volumes usually means more competition, so it’ll usually be harder to rank for the most popular keywords.
• Google’s Keyword Planner, Moz, SEMrush, etc… all display different results partly due to the variables mentioned above, and partly due to other details of how they measure search volume

2. Keyword Difficulty (KD): This is the level of difficulty of ranking for the keyword.

Things to be aware of:

• This data is not shown on Google’s Keyword Planner. Don’t mistake the “Competition” column for KD.
• Higher difficulty usually means more potential value.
• Numbers aren’t very accurate on many keyword tools, so do your own research. I recommend using Moz’s toolbar.
• Use Moz to check the Page Authorities for the results on the first page. The higher the Page Authorities, the harder it will be to rank for the keyword.

3. Cost-per-click (CPC): True to its name, this shows how much advertisers are willing to pay for users to click on an advertisement shown for that particular keyword.

Things to be aware of:

• CPC stats can be very misleading when it comes to valuing your content marketing keywords because your audience won’t be coming from Google ads.
• Higher CPCs generally means that the keyword is more valuable on a per-search basis.
• If two keywords have the same volume, but different CPCs, the one that has the higher CPC is usually more valuable. However, it will most likely be harder to rank for as well.

4. Content Relevance: Not all content is created equal. The content you create needs to resonate with your specific audience and generate interest in what your company is about. What do I mean?

Let’s imagine that you’re a content marketing agency. There are two keyword phrases you can target:

“how to hire a content marketing agency”

or

“how to create marketing content for free”

Although I’m sure these two keyword phrases don’t actually share the following similarities, let’s pretend for a moment that the two phrases share identical search volume, keyword difficulty, and cost-per-click numbers.

With that being true, these two keyword phrases are not equally valuable to you. The first keyword phrase is going to generate you more leads because the users searching for that phrase are going to be more inclined to hire your agency. That’s why they searched the keyword to begin with.

On the other hand, people searching for the second keyword phrase are specifically looking for free content and will most likely not be in a spending mood.

5. Estimated Costs: Creating content to adequately target specific keywords will require varying amounts of time, money, and effort. In some situations, you might find that targeting a certain keyword also allows you to SEO your landing page at the same time. So be on the lookout for shortcuts that might make ranking for a keyword more cost-efficient than it would otherwise be. That’s how you can find real money-makers!

In Conclusion

Your content marketing strategy can surpass all expectations or fail epically depending on the keywords you choose to target. The key is to take your time and be thorough in your research.

Luckily, all the keyword tools and data you need are right there at your fingertips. Use them wisely and you can create a keyword-driven marketing strategy that will get your content onto the front page of search engine results and inspire your audience to take action.

• A piece of content’s quality is determined by the creator, or
• Quality content is content with a great headline, several images, easy-to-read, actionable, and other other specific attributes.

Once upon a time, we tried to define what makes content great at WordStream, my former company. We fell into the same trap as above, trying to define quality content based on attributes. We said great content is:

• Findable
• Shareable
• Usable
• Readable
• Memorable
• Quotable
• Actionable
• Reportable

All of these are important. But even if your content has all eight of those attributes, it still is most likely to go nowhere.

The definition of quality content should be based on outcomes, not biased views of your own work. Here’s one way to think about quality content that might put things in perspective.

What is “Quality Content”?

In the based-on-a-true-story movie Moneyball, baseball team manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, finds himself in a frustrating meeting where his scouts are talking about potential free agents to add to the team lineup. The scouts evaluate players based on their athleticism, size, and speed. They also speak glowingly about one player because he’s clean cut, has a good face, and a good jaw. Beane asks his scouts an important question: “Can he hit?“

Many marketers look at content the same way the scouts were looking at the players. We’ve been trying to define content quality as a series of technical and aesthetic attributes: how our content is structured and formatted. How many times have you heard that long form is better than short form or vice versa?

Individuals, businesses, and brands are producing a ridiculously enormous amount of content every minute. But few are actually successful. If your content doesn’t succeed, does it matter if it included lots of pretty images, had perfect spelling and grammar, or used x number of words?

No.

Great baseball players come in all shapes and sizes. The same is true of quality content.
Quality content is successful content. Quality content achieves a goal. I.e., it drives traffic, Google search rankings, engagement, and/or conversions.

Performance is what matters for any content marketing strategy. Here’s how to create home run content for your marketing team.

Increase Your Chances of Picking the Right Topic

Anyone with a creative bone in their body will argue that content marketing strategy isn’t just about numbers. Creativity is art, after all.

The argument goes something along the lines of: “If content creation were just a science, then anybody could simply create quality content. Experience matters! Intuition matters! There are just certain intangibles that only creative content people can understand.”

Time to drop a truth bomb: No content marketer has a crystal ball. Nobody can look at a piece of content and predict its future any more accurately than I can.

You can’t say with 100 percent certainty, even if it is based on past experience, that a piece of content will succeed in the future. I’m always surprised when an article I worked really hard on goes nowhere and an article I didn’t spend much time on becomes a huge success.

You Can’t Find Unicorns Without Producing Lots of Donkeys

You can’t predict success. Another common misconception is that you can somehow convert increased effort or time on one piece of content into increased units of quality.

You have to produce and audition lots of ideas to find your next quality idea. Then you have to fully explore that topic once it has revealed itself. Here’s how to do that. Consider these factors when determining what content topics to invest your time in:

• Past unicorn content: What topics have performed well in the past?
• Topics your audience cares about: What’s your audience talking about on social?
• Topics you want to rank for: What keywords are you currently targeting?

Once you decide on a topic, create the content. Measure the results to determine if your content was a quality piece and react accordingly. Take the following steps to get closer to creating more unicorn content.

1. Produce and Audition Lots of Content: Content is a lot about throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks. Consider past performance of similar topics in conjunction with the goals you have for this piece of content.
2. Measure User Engagement Rates: After publishing, measure engagement rates for your content. Use time and rate benchmarks to determine if it’s working.
3. Kill the Donkeys: If a piece of content isn’t performing, abandon ship. No use in continuing to promote something no one cares about.
4. Find the Unicorns and Sound the Unicorn Alert! If content is performing well, start promoting and maximizing your return—more on that later.

How do You Know if It’s Quality Content?

Everyone wants to create successful content. But what actually makes content successful?

User engagement rates.

Think about the systems that drive exposure and clicks to your content. Social media news feeds, search and social ads, and organic search listings. These systems all increasingly employ new machine learning based algorithms that reward higher engagement rates (such as click through rates and dwell time) with far greater exposure.

Perform an audit of your existing content based on engagement rates such as dwell time, conversion rates, click through rates, or traffic. (Read Curata’s comprehensive content audit guide for how to do this.) Look for the outliers—the content that does not just a little bit better, but three to five times better. Those are your unicorn content campaigns with unusually high user engagement. They are the types of content most likely to earn the approval of our algorithmic overlords.

Your Unicorn content (content with unusually high user engagement rates) tends to:

1. Rank well in Google Search
2. Convert significantly better than donkey content
3. Drives tons of organic social media engagement
4. Does fantastically well in paid search
5. Does fantastically well in paid social media ads

Again, the relationship here isn’t coincidental. It’s because the Facebook Newsfeed algorithm, Relevancy Score in Facebook Ads, Quality Score in Google AdWords, and RankBrain for Organic Search, all use machine learning algorithms. They dramatically reward content boasting high user engagement with tremendous visibility and clicks within their platform.

You Found Quality Content: Now What?

Promoting a donkey won’t turn it into a unicorn. You’ll only waste time and money. Instead, focus all your efforts on promoting your powerful and valuable unicorns. When you find your unicorns, promote them on every channel to amplify their impact by 100 times or even 1,000 times and drive even more traffic, engagement, and leads.

Once you’ve found content that fits into all these categories, it’s time to start implementing a promotion strategy. The following tactics will help you leverage maximum value from your unicorn content:

• Repurpose it into other types of content: webinar, infographic, etc.
• Schedule it for a refresh
• Pitch similar content with backlinks to other websites
• Put some paid social behind it
• Ask for influencer quotes to add in
• Make it into an eBook

Content Marketing is About Output, not Input!

Content marketing strategy is an unfair game. If you want to win you need to stop relying on your gut. Your gut is really just your opinion and, by nature, biased. To really succeed, you need to look at unbiased statistics.

Stop looking at content attributes. Start looking at data to find your truly high-quality content. Start optimizing for engagement and you’ll find huge content wins.

When you find that super rare unicorn content, capitalize on it! Leverage the heck out of it on every channel to maximize your marketing ROI. And to create your own documented content marketing strategy, download Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid: A Framework to Develop & Execute Your Content Marketing Strategy eBook.

Enter Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid, a strategic framework enabling you to execute a content campaign, assuring optimal content consumption, reuse, and reach.

This hands-on guide teaches you what the Content Marketing Pyramid is, why it works, and how you can implement it within your organization.

Why Use the Content Marketing Pyramid?

In addition to providing a documented content strategy, the Content Marketing Pyramid:

• Improves your focus with an organized strategy that establishes clear goals and priorities
• Increases your production capacity by making more efficient use of valuable resources
• Creates a predictable stream of successful content to engage your buyers and drive pipeline activity for marketing and sales

DOUG KESSLER
Co-Founder and Creative Director, Velocity Partners  @dougkessler
“What happens when you create content without strategy? Usually, nothing. Content without strategy is like playing the lottery: who knows, you might win. Probably not. Ready, Fire, Aim!”

According to the 2017 CMI/MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Benchmark report, 60 percent of those with a documented strategy rate themselves highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness. This compares with 32 percent of those who have a verbal strategy. The Content Marketing Pyramid alleviates many headaches from ineffective content marketing. But if you operate without a smart framework it leaves you susceptible to the following consequences:

Chaos

You may be dealing with departments that operate in silos, a content strategy with no documented objectives, and a lack of communication between content creators.

How the Content Marketing Pyramid Can Help: This framework documents, centralizes, and coordinates all your content marketing efforts.

A Fractured Customer Experience

Readers experience inconsistent messaging and disconnected touch points. This leads to a lack of brand loyalty and dissatisfaction.

How the Content Marketing Pyramid Can Help: The Content Marketing Pyramid lends itself to cohesive messaging and centralized information.

NEIL PATEL
Co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics @neilpatel
“When you create content without a strategy you’ll find that you have tons of articles with little to no traffic. Roughly half of your time should be spent on strategy and marketing.” neilpatel.com

Waste

Because of the chaos and lack of communication, you’re constantly reinventing the wheel. When there’s little documentation, it’s easy to recreate similar pieces of content, instead of simply reusing or repurposing existing content.

How the Content Marketing Pyramid Can Help: This framework eliminates waste by streamlining the internal development process and ensuring every piece of content performs multiple roles across a variety of formats and channels.

Even if you aren’t experiencing any of the aforementioned consequences, content marketing is only about to get more competitive—and challenging. Take these stats for example:

• 70 percent of B2B marketers expect to create more content in 2017 versus last year, and 39 percent plan to increase their content marketing spend over the next 12 months. [CMI/MarketingProfs]
• In 2016, 42 percent of companies had an executive in their organization who was directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy [Curata 2016 Content Marketing Tactics and Technology Study]

Since most marketers don’t have an unlimited budget, the best way to compete is to find ways to extend the budget and resources we already have. By implementing a strategic plan, you can create more effective content, enabling you to do more with less.

Start With Overall Content Strategy

Before we get down to the granular level of a content marketing pyramid—which is used to plan and execute a single content campaign—let’s zoom out a bit. Campaigns are byproducts of a larger strategy. We recommend developing your strategy on an annual basis and updating it quarterly to readjust for any changes in the marketplace or to your business.

DHARMESH SHAH
Entrepreneur, Author, HubSpot Founder and CTO @dharmesh
“A great strategy identifies who the content is being created for, why they’ll find it useful, how it will spread and what the goals are.”

It is important to remember your strategy is not driven by content: It’s driven by what you want to achieve with your content. The most successful teams ensure their content strategy aligns with their organization’s goals, and their CMO’s and related team’s goals. Here’s a helpful framework to form your strategy:

Corporate Objectives

Start with the top-level company goals your company’s leadership team defines. These serve as the basis of your marketing organization’s strategic direction.

Examples of top-level corporate objectives include:

• Increase share of mobile market
• Break into new geographic or demographic market
• Displace a competitor
• Establish [company] as a leader in [topic]

Marketing Themes

With the corporate objectives in place, set specific marketing themes to support them. Usually there are two to four global themes set by marketing leadership, each one focusing on key concepts, messages, and areas of corporate objectives.

For instance, if a corporate objective is to increase your company’s share of the mobile market, examples of marketing themes include:

• Empowering the mobile workforce
• Innovations in mobile
• Defining the mobile value proposition for businesses

Once you’ve established the themes, you can begin creating a content strategy through Content Marketing Pyramids. The next section is a deep dive into the anatomy and importance of these pyramids.

MARCUS SHERIDAN
Professional Speaker, Author, Founder of The Sales Lion  @TheSalesLion
“When it comes to content strategy, one of the biggest keys is that everyone in the organization, and not just the marketing department, can actually understand the darn thing. Too often in this space we use “marketing speak”—and the reality is marketing speak kills buy-in. It disinterests the Sales Team. It’s uninspiring to the organization as a whole. Words matter, and in this case, they need to be words everyone can get their arms around.”

What is the Content Marketing Pyramid?

Curata defines the Content Marketing Pyramid as:

The development of content and related assets intended to reinforces common messages/themes through multiple content formats, distribution methods and promotion channels across owned, earned, and paid media.

Each pyramid relies on Core Content. This is the heaviest, most valuable asset, consisting of thought leadership, primary research, and/or secondary research. The Core Content begats corresponding Derivative Assets and Promotional Micro-Content.

These highly intentional and focused content marketing activities and interactions help you move the needle on the big goals, from awareness building to lead generation to sales enablement.

The Content Marketing Pyramid: A Structural Overview

The Content Marketing Pyramid consists of five levels of content, organized into three main parts:

Level 1: Core Content

Core content is substantive, original content that involves research and/or deep insight. Use this primary research and thought leadership to create additional assets. These can include print books, eBooks, and guides that provide an in-depth exploration of the source material.

Such assets are the source material for the remaining assets in the Pyramid and are typically gated. All remaining assets in the Pyramid should drive your audience to this core asset and capture a lead.

CHRIS BROGAN
Best Selling Author, Journalist, Marketing Consultant; CEO, Owner Media Group @chrisbrogan
“People are suddenly drowning in “content.” What people need is helpful information that grows their business or life in some way. Great content serves the buyer and gently reminds them that you’re there to help.”

Level 2, 3 and 4: Derivative Assets

Assets derived from Core Content make up the middle of the pyramid. They take chunks of information from the Core Content to create more focused and precise pieces. They are more accessible and produced in a variety of formats, such as:

• Long form blog posts, presentations, infographics and SlideShares (Level 2 and Level 3)
  This content is usually not gated. Content from these levels should engage your audience and lead them to the gated, Level 1 content.

• Blog posts and contributed content (Level 4)
  Produce Level 4 content more frequently and routinely than Level 2 and 3 content. It should become a part of the weekly, if not daily, content production process. This content provides a different kind of anchor for your content strategy. It is the “bread and butter” of your content marketing. Blog posts are most common, but don’t ignore contributed content or bylines, a.k.a. guest posting on other blogs. Contributed content is key to spreading your message beyond the parameters of your owned media properties, improving your SEO ranking via backlinks, and to drive new readers back to your Core Content to generate leads.

DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT
Marketing and Sales Strategist, Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker  @dmscott
“Don’t create content about your own products and services. Nobody cares about your products and services (except you). What people do care about are themselves and how you can solve their problems. People also like to be entertained and to share in something remarkable. In order to have people talk about you and your ideas, you must resist the urge to hype your products and services. Instead, create something interesting that will be talked about online. When you get people talking on the Web, people will line up to learn more and to buy what you have to offer.”

Level 5: Promotional Micro-Content

Finally, at the base of the Content Marketing Pyramid is promotional and conversational micro-content. Level 5 content helps build awareness for, increase consumption of, and facilitate conversation about all your other content. Level 5 includes social media posts and curated content. For more information on curating content, take a look at Curata’s Ultimate Guide to Content Curation.

Here’s a table further clarifying the differences and similarities between each level of the pyramid:

9 Benefits of the Content Marketing Pyramid

Not convinced yet by the Content Marketing Pyramid? Here are NINE benefits that will optimize the impact of your content marketing efforts, from awareness building to demand generation to sales enablement.

TODD WHEATLAND
Author, Speaker; Head of Strategy @ King Content  @ToddWheatland
“Creating content without a strategy is like building a house without a blueprint. The living room might be amazing, but it’s awkward when you forget to put in bathrooms.”

1. Unified Content Objectives.

One of the main purposes of the Content Marketing Pyramid is to align all content around corporate objectives and marketing themes. This framework helps share the strategy across all departments so everyone works towards the same goals and uses the same playbook for content creation.

2. Message Repetition

Marketing themes are most effective when they show the buyer a consistent message via multiple touch points. The Content Marketing Pyramid facilitates intentional repetition of key marketing messages across multiple channels.

3. Content Saturation

The most effective content marketing programs extend far beyond owned properties by distributing to earned and paid media channels. This framework allows you to repurpose existing content to fit these specific channels.

4. Format Diversity

While some people in your target audience may prefer learning by reading an in-depth blog post, others may be able to absorb content better via an interactive webinar or a podcast they can listen to on-the-go. The Pyramid encourages you to create multiple different content formats.

RAND FISHKIN
Author, Blogger, Founder of Moz and Inbound.org  @randfish
“When you have deep empathy for your audience (and their influencers), you can do a great job determining the list of tactics and channels. You’ll also have smart answers to the key question content creators must ask themselves to be successful: “Who will help amplify this? And why?”

5. Flexible Content Creation: Top to Bottom or Bottom to Top

Although the levels are the same across all Content Pyramids, which level you start from can vary depending on the specific circumstance. For example, you might begin your Pyramid with the development of a cornerstone research study (Level 1 Core Content) that you break down and repurpose into Derivative Assets and Promotional Micro-Content. Alternatively, some particularly insightful comments on a blog post or conversation on social media may inspire you to build up from the bottom of the Pyramid.

One of Curata’s most successful pyramids began as a long-form blog post and then expanded to cover all levels of the pyramid (The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics and Metrics). Of course, there are pros and cons to both the top-down and bottom-up methods:

6. On-the Fly Content Maneuvers

This framework allows you to take full advantage of unexpected content opportunities, such as newsjacking, event-related content, and jumping into spontaneous industry conversations. Such random acts can inspire entirely new Pyramids. You can also insert them into existing Pyramids.

7. Balanced Content Mix

The Content Marketing Pyramid also makes it easy to adhere to best practices for balancing all the different types of content. Using this framework, you can efficiently plan the right ratio of:

• Created vs. curated content (65 percent created and 25 percent curated, according to Curata’s study)
• High effort vs. low effort
• Owned vs. earned vs. paid media

8. Operational Efficiency

Use this framework to streamline and empower your internal operations by:

• Aligning all your content marketing activities with clear corporate objectives
• Providing both a long-term road map and a short-term operational plan for content development and distribution
• Unifying all your efforts and teams around a central content strategy and process
• Reducing lags and inefficiencies in your workflow
• Requiring the identification of clear and measurable goals and objectives
• Giving you a way to assign value to and measure the performance of each piece of content within a campaign

9. The Ultimate Reward of the Pyramid: Pipeline Impact

When you build out your content campaigns according to this framework, you create an upside down funnel that draws people in and drive them up from Level 5 to Level 1. At Level 1 you ask for their contact information for them to gain access to key pieces of Core Content. This generates new leads and new opportunities for your sales pipeline.

RYAN SKINNER
Content Marketing Blogger, Senior Analyst @ Forrester @rskin11
“Content strategy isn’t about each piece of content, but rather the sum of it. For small organizations or those with very charismatic and communicative leaders, a strategy may not even be necessary. But for larger organizations with a lot of forces pulling in different directions, a content strategy brings a higher degree of cohesion, quality, and value to the sum of the output. A great content strategy must make clear choices—this, not that. If you work for a product that’s an impulse buy, you may choose not to put too much effort into your search strategy (because no one searches for it). You will need to limit the number of formats you expect to support to a sane number. These are just examples. ‘More is more’ is not the stuff of a great strategy.”

Getting Started with the Content Marketing Pyramid

Step 1: Appoint a Leader

Pyramids require many people to be involved, but it’s crucial that a single individual is responsible for developing overall strategy. Curata’s Content Marketing Tactics and Technology study says that only 42 percent of companies have a content marketing executive who would likely be a candidate for taking on this critical role. 

Step 2: Build Support for the Pyramid Across Your Organization

Once you’ve established a lead, you can solicit support and feedback from the key departments in your organization. This could include the CMO, product marketing team, digital marketing group, social media team and overall marketing operations leadership.

Step 3: Establish Your Content Marketing Pyramid Workflow

The Content Marketing Pyramid workflow is a four-part cycle including: Strategy, Production, Distribution and Analytics. Below is a high-level overview of each step. These steps can be completed across multiple applications or through a single content marketing platform such as Curata CMP.

LEE ODDEN
Author, Speaker and Consultant; CEO, Top Rank Marketing @leeodden
“According to CMI and MarketingProfs, 68 percent of B2B marketers do not have a documented content marketing strategy. I would speculate that even fewer are using data to inform their strategy. Data about customers, the market, the company, the competition, search, social, Web analytics, best and worst performing content, SEO and CRO all offer opportunities to inform a more effective content marketing strategy. And don’t get me started about all the data and insights available through predictive marketing platforms like Everstring (a client of ours) and 6sense. Lots of people like to gamble. But when it comes to content marketing, guessing rarely leads to great things except unexpected surprises. That’s why the one thing I would use to increase our odds of content marketing greatness isn’t luck. It’s data.”

Pyramid Measurement

Operational Metrics: Introducing Pyramid Points

One of the main goals of the Content Marketing Pyramid is to optimize how you reuse and repurpose your content. Why? To maximize the pipeline impact of your content.

However, determining when and if you’ve created enough derivative content within a pyramid can be difficult. You may be wondering if there’s more you can get out of a specific eBook. To solve this problem, Curata developed the concept of ‘Pyramid Points’ to track and optimize the execution of your pyramids.

Pyramid points are a set number of points that roughly represent the effort needed to complete each content asset. Using pyramid points ensures you extract the utmost use from each pyramid, and helps you keep track of the progress or status of each pyramid. Here is how we weight each of our assets:

A typical content marketing pyramid may run for three to six months. If you start one pyramid a quarter, you may have up to four pyramids running at once. Use the pyramid points above to help you track how well you’ve repurposed a pyramid’s original content.

This helps you decide which pyramids to allocate resources towards. Here is a template and example of how to measure pyramid points and determine the overall progress of your pyramid. (This pyramid is 73 percent complete. You could invest more resources in completing this pyramid.)

Performance Metrics: Pyramids in Action

Pyramid points aid in the execution of operational metrics. The real excitement begins when you can determine how well your overall pyramid performed.

Based on a framework from The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics and Metrics, you should evaluate your pyramid across three dimensions:

• Top of the Funnel (e.g. social media, page views, retention)
• Middle of the Funnel (e.g. leads generated and touched)
• Bottom of the Funnel (e.g. sales opportunities generated and touched; revenue influenced)

Analyzing the performance of different pyramids can help answer the following types of questions:

• What impact has a pyramid made on your company’s revenue pipeline? Website traffic? Social media efforts?
• Which types of pyramids (and related content) perform well at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel?
• Why is a particular pyramid underperforming (or outperforming) other pyramids?

IAN CLEARY
Tech Blogger, Speaker, Founder of RazorSocial @IanCleary
“What is the one thing that makes for a great content strategy? Your promotion strategy. There is an ever increasing amount of content out there so without a good promotion strategy your content will not be distributed nearly as effectively. It’s not always the best piece of content that gets the best reach.”

Where to Go From Here

Content marketing is a long-term play with the potential to deliver a substantial return on your investment if you can build a smart content strategy and execute against it efficiently. Start by forming your corporate objectives and marketing themes, then take a first stab at planning and executing a Content Marketing Pyramid. We believe it can help take your content marketing practice to the next level, with a sense of confidence and ease you never thought possible.

For an even more in-depth set of instructions, be sure to download the complete 70+ page eBook on content strategy, The Content Marketing Pyramid.

This post was co-written by Curata’s former CMO, Michael Gerard.

Too many times content marketers get asked by another employee if they have some random type of content on some random topic.

And too many times content marketers respond, ‘I’m pretty sure we do, but I’m not quite sure where it is. Let me take two hours out of my day to try to find it for you.’ Except not the last part.

Not that is, until they decide to revamp their content marketing taxonomy.

What Is a Content Marketing Taxonomy?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines taxonomy as “a scheme of classification.” In content marketing, that means:

Content marketing taxonomy is a scheme of classification made up of titling, folder organizing, tagging, and any other way of organizing content that aides in your content marketing’s findability, content marketing strategy, and content marketing distribution.

Why Is a Content Marketing Taxonomy Important?

Having an effective content marketing taxonomy isn’t just about the ‘findability’ of your content. It helps put your content strategy and goals into perspective, allowing you to ascertain content priorities based on what’s in an item’s name. It also simplifies content audits—which should be performed at least once a year.  

Of B2C and B2B marketers, 56 percent and 64 percent respectively admit they don’t have a documented content marketing strategy. A content marketing taxonomy aids content strategizing by organizing content in an easy-to-understand way for marketers to analyze data and gaps.

A clear and concise content marketing taxonomy improves the readability of your editorial calendar. It allows all parties to know what kind of content you’re creating at a glance.

Natalya Minkovsky, editor for the Content Marketing Institute’s Chief Content Officer magazine, says that:

Taxonomy is about so much more than categorizing content. When crafting a content strategy, we consider the people, processes, and technologies that support the content throughout its lifecycle. The same goes for creating taxonomy. As content strategists, we have to think about taxonomy from the perspective of what terms and structure will help the content perform best and support the organization’s business goals. We also have to consider the longevity and flexibility of the taxonomy.

Futureproof and Organize Your Content

A well constructed content marketing taxonomy also helps future content strategy execution. It simplifies new audience-facing strategies by allowing you to slice and dice data in multiple ways. If you already tag content based on personas and want to personalize your audience experience, a content taxonomy helps determine which content to serve to whom.

Likewise if you’re looking to create a “recommended content” module. It’s much easier to automate data associations when you tag your content by topic or campaign. A content marketing taxonomy also helps organize your system of reusing, revamping, and re-promoting older content on different platforms or to new audiences.

A content marketing taxonomy helps determine how your website content should be organized. For example, with a well-organized taxonomy you can see which content types have the best bounce rates, click-through-rates, or time on page metrics. These insights help determine the order and flow of content on your website.

Content Marketing Taxonomy Planning (With Template)

When planning a content marketing taxonomy, first consider the constraints of your content marketing platform and other software for housing or planning content. Some software requires you to fill in preset fields for each piece of content, so you have to include missing tags in the name. Other software allows custom fields, so most tagging can happen separately, providing more opportunities for slicing data by multiple fields at once.

This is what content tagging looks like for a piece of content in Curata’s content marketing platform (CMP):

[SE]_ContentMarketingPlatformAnalytics_OneSheet

Fields (in CMP):
Distribution Method: Sales Enablement
Stage: BOFU
Author: Sasha Laferte
Persona: N/A
Topic: Analytics
Campaign/Content Marketing Pyramid: N/A

Consider including the following elements in a content marketing taxonomy.

For Written Content

• Distribution Method: This field allows you to separate the analytics for content items depending on how they’re shared. For instance, Curata’s sales team gets a separate content link for one sheets, eBooks etc., even if a gated version or blog version also exists. It helps us understand how content performs when shared by the sales team, and which content closes.
• Content Type: We include content type in the title because a name alone doesn’t always tell you all you need to know. Our content types include long form blog posts, eBooks, infographics, case studies, one sheets, and more.
• Content Title: Use the exact title of an eBook, blog post, or other piece of content in the title in your system for searchability. Inaccurate titles make life harder.
• Stage: This helps determine which metrics to examine to see if content is performing the way it was intended.
• Campaign: Allows searchers to look at a campaign’s metrics holistically and find all content created for a particular campaign theme.
• Author: Included to find options by an author or to compare author performance.
• Persona: Including personas allows you to find gaps in content creation, and enables future personalization and recommended content efforts.
• Topic: Topics also help you to look for gaps in content creation and allow for future personalization and recommended content efforts.

When separating by “content type” or “distribution method,” define what these mean. This way everyone dealing with the new taxonomy understands what each section means. It also ensures there aren’t duplicate fields. For instance, if someone posts all sales enablement content under [SE] but others call it sales enablement, you won’t be able to consistently find the content you’re looking for. Tracking and analytics based on this distribution method will also be incomplete or inaccurate.

For Images

• Size: Important for knowing how the resolution will look on different pages.
• Type: If you’re looking for infographics, charts, etc., this makes these pieces of content easier to find.
• Description: Allows searchers to look for content images based on keywords.

Tags, Categories, or Titles

Once you’ve determined which information needs to be included in your taxonomy, decide which information should be part of the title (and where). Include what should be included as a tag, what should be included as category, and whether or not any of this information should be externally visible to help your audience find the content they need. Here’s how we determined which piece of information fits where, and why:

• Title
  A title should cover the factors most likely to be searched for within a CMP. Clearly outline the structure of titles and explain the options within each section of the title.
• Tags
  A tag helps group your blog posts by topics. A content item can have multiple tags attached to it. Tags are keywords or phrases for the content item. As Blogging Basics 101 puts it, “If categories are your blog’s table of contents, tags are your blog’s index.” Curata uses tags and fields as two methods of labeling and grouping content. You can also use fields for campaign, author, length, and stage. Be aware if your tags are visible to the audience—as in WordPress—before determining what to include.
• Categories
  A category is:

… a topic you address on your blog. Your category list is like the table of contents for your blog. Categories are broad and can encompass smaller, more defined topics (i.e., tags). A category title should be descriptive and can be several words long.
–Blogging Basics 101

The difference between an externally visible blog category and a tag is that a category is designed for a broad grouping; a tag describes specific detail.

Externally Visible Tags and Categories

If your CMP forces content tags or categories to be externally visible, things can get tricky. You probably don’t want your audience to see your “BOFU” or “Content Marketing Carey” tag.

One solution is to store content on a community drive outside your CMP, and organize by folder and title. Create a graphic that displays the folder hierarchy that’s accessible company-wide. Determine whether the way you organize content is hierarchal, more like a funnel, wheel, or something different, and base your folder or organizational structure on this schema. It will make content more findable and assist you in streamlining the organizational process.

At Curata we keep content in both locations to fit the individual preferences of various departments. The spreadsheet below in our Google drive is also used to find content. The taxonomy is the same, but the organization is slightly different. This allows our sales team to find our content without sorting through pieces they don’t need or learning a new taxonomy. We ultimately decided to retain this inherited format to keep things simple for sales. It also allows for easy sorting based on content type, and includes a link to the content (with tracking parameters).

Having an external tagging and categorizing system as well as an internal taxonomy enriches your website’s metadata and boosts your SEO.

Implementation

Implementing a new content marketing taxonomy requires change management. There are several ways to go about this—here’s what we recommend.

Prior to developing a content taxonomy, assemble as diverse a team as possible to collect opinions and feedback. Content taxonomy can impact everyone from marketers to designers to engineers and salespeople. Getting their buy-in and feedback beforehand can save future headaches. Once you determine an official taxonomy, here are some simple steps to roll the program out company-wide.

1. Send an email notifying the entire company of the upcoming change
2. Make taxonomy changes to all existing content
3. Upload a document with the new taxonomy to a shared drive
4. Send an email with advice on the new system’s benefits and uses
5. Update the taxonomy regularly, and remind your company to use it

A content marketing taxonomy assists with content organization, findability, content strategy, and consumption. And it sets you up for more successful content marketing plans in the future. As James Goldman of CMSwire says:

[A] taxonomy is the backbone of executing journey-based marketing. It is the instruction manual for the tools, people, and processes used to manipulate, distribute, and target the huge volumes of content you need to produce in order to embrace content marketing.

For more information on creating a content marketing strategy that works, check out Curata’s eBook on creating a content marketing strategy below.

To this end, we sifted through analytics data to map traffic sources, page views, and leads generated online by clients using our website widget and mobile app.

The chart above is divided (from left to right) into sets of websites, with those enjoying the most lead generation on the left, and increasingly less leads as you move right. On the vertical axes, you have pageviews and uniques.

No Engagement, No Lead Generation

The pink line shows average pageviews by visitors who did not convert into leads. These are visitors uninterested in the content, which in turn leads to lackluster engagement and low pageviews. Note that this doesn’t mean all of them aren’t potential leads. It just means that the content you have was not able to engage them. It could be because of a fault in your audience targeting, your content plan, or both.

Uniques vs Engagement

The set of websites on the right with the most lead generation have the highest number of unique visitors. That’s the best sign of a good, healthy website. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s optimized to maximize conversions. This is why you want to see the blue line, indicating average pageviews by lead generating visitors.

It’s important because you can get more leads from existing traffic by increasing engagement. As you can see in the chart above, the set of sites in the middle have a sky-high level of engagement that has boosted lead generation compared to the set next to them. Those are getting more traffic, but with lower engagement. This means you can get more leads and sales than competitors who get more traffic—if you can better engage your visitors.

Best Practices for Driving Higher Engagement

Ok, so now you want to drive higher engagement. One thing that works better than almost anything else is to create a content plan based on buyer personas. However, most people want to write about what they know about and want to talk about. So a sales manager wants to talk about how to generate more sales and revenue, building and managing sales teams, etc. That’s fine if your buyers are also sales managers interested in the same thing. But everyone else will just glance at this content and move on.

To identify who your buyers are, create buyer personas to identify and flesh out each target group you want as customers. Each persona will have its own set of pain points. These are the customer needs that you must address in your content. Generate keywords from the pain points, and write about content focused on these keywords. It may not be what you do, and may even have no direct bearing on your company or product. But it will be what your buyers want to read about. This is what drives higher engagement.

Creating Buyers Personas

How do you actually do this? Let me give you an example. We did an exercise creating buyer personas for CEOs, sales managers, and marketing heads. One of the marketing heads is a digital marketing manager. We identified two key pain points for this particular persona that they wanted to know:

1. What makes a good website?
2. How to increase online lead conversion rates?

One of the keywords we came up with to address both these concerns was “engaging content,” and then wrote an article for this keyword. That’s what you’re reading right now!

Case Study Number One

Let’s examine a few sites we looked at among our clients for examples of how targeted content drives huge engagement. Take a look at Paul Hype Page & Co chartered accountants. This site has massive engagement, resulting in leads flowing in from all over the world.

Paul Hype Page & Co provide company incorporation and related services in Singapore. They’ve created a content repository in which each piece of content specifically targets every single need their customers have. The homepage workflow is so clear, any visitor landing on it knows exactly where to click and read an article telling them what they want to know. The only call to action (CTA) after reading the content is the visitor either calls or asks for a callback. Both of which happen frequently. The content is extremely targeted and engaging, and positions the company as an expert in the services a visitor is looking for.

Case Study Number Two

Another example is The Indian Handwritten Letter Co (TIHLC). It’s a startup that writes and sends handwritten letters on behalf of individuals and business users. The Indian Handwritten Letter Co. was doing pretty nicely as a three year old startup, but their traffic recently smashed through the roof when they got coverage in startup media portal Your Story. Suddenly everyone was talking about how TIHLC was reviving the lost art of handwritten letters. The lead generation from callback requests via their website widget increased massively. This is the kind of engagement good content creates, even if it’s not on your own site. All content you create should be optimized to maximize engagement: social media snippets, videos, infographics, media coverage—everything.

Four Simple Tips

What more can you to do drive higher engagement? Follow these best practices.

1. Create useful and relevant content based on buyer personas.
2. Track the engagement metrics. This means examining which pages have lower bounce rates, higher session durations, more backlinks, comments, and social shares, etc.
3. Start using more videos. According to Cisco, a full 82 percent of consumer web traffic is projected to be video by 2020.
4. Offer a click to call feature on your website. Over 50 percent of website visitors who call you to talk are qualified leads. Only two to three percent of those who don’t call will convert (conversion rates may vary by industry). According to Lucep research, adding a click to call tool drives engagement with website visitors, and can increase conversion rates by over 72 percent. It’s especially effective in converting website visitors who access your site using a mobile device.

Target the Right Traffic Sources

You can create the most engaging content possible, but it won’t be useful if your traffic is coming from the wrong sources. Here’s the traffic source chart for the same set of websites examined in the engagement chart.

You probably don’t need to look at the chart to know search traffic from Google converts into more leads than traffic from other sources. Google sends more than half (57 percent) of the lead generating traffic Lucep clients get.

Direct traffic from bookmarks and people typing in the website URL accounts for 23 percent of lead sources for Lucep clients. This is usually from repeat visitors, people who know the company, and/or leads advised to check out the website by someone in marketing or sales.

Only the remaining one-fifth (20 percent) of lead sources is website traffic from social media, referrals, email marketing, etc.

So we should focus on the primary lead sources sending us actual customers. Not visitors who are just passing through. This means Google, referrals, and one or two other key sources where you know your buyers can be found.

Lucep is a B2B SaaS platform. We get a relatively higher number of visitors from Facebook, but they don’t convert half as well as the fewer visitors clicking through from LinkedIn. Again, you don’t need to look at a chart to understand this.

LinkedIn is a B2B networking platform primarily used by decision makers. I.e. CEOs, startup founders, business owners, managers, and executives. These are the same decision makers who make up the bulk of Lucep’s ideal buyer personas. If you focus your marketing efforts on channels where your buyers are, the traffic you get will generate more leads.

Conclusion

You need to create engaging content, and ensure it gets distributed through the channels which lead straight to your buyers. That’s all it takes. You can plan it and implement it in a clear and scientific way that leaves nothing to chance. Use a documented content strategy to systematically achieve this lead generation. Download The Content Marketing Pyramid: A Framework to Develop & Execute Your Content Marketing Strategy eBook for efficient, effective content strategy.

A content audit ensures you know what content you have and don’t have. It helps you focus content creation and curation efforts on gaps in your inventory. An audit prevents investment in duplicate content. It enables you to identify and replace or remove outdated content, determine which content can be reused and repurposed, and improve the quality of your existing content.

Imagine you’re setting out on a classic “discover yourself” cross-country road trip. Some free spirits out there might argue that going without a map is the best way to start the adventure. Which is fine, if you’re ok with getting lost along the way, missing out on landmarks and opportunities you were looking for, and constantly struggling with breakdowns and time inefficiencies.

Which is also what you get when attempting to launch or execute a content strategy without a content audit to serve as your road map.

A content audit helps you develop and navigate a content strategy. It enables you to allocate and analyze all your existing content to identify what’s working and what isn’t. A content audit not only informs how you optimize existing content, but also the content you develop in the future.

Purposes of a Content Audit

There are many reasons to undertake a content audit, but the main one is to identify and qualitatively analyze your existing content.

For example, a content audit provides valuable insights into:

1. Which parts of your site generate the most traffic, and which pages convert the most users.
2. Which pages or posts within your site bounce users away, and (hopefully) why.
3. Identifying optimization opportunities for existing content to improve its ranking.
4. Pages that could be consolidated together to minimize overlap.
5. Which pages lack relevancy and could be removed from the site altogether.
6. The posts and pages on your site that rank best and engage users the most.
7. Which pages and posts on your site “should” be ranking.
8. Any gaps within your content strategy you can create new contact for.
9. Identifying and prioritizing the different content assets of a new client or campaign.
10. Which pain points within your site, content, and UX you can quickly fix.

Now let’s examine how to conduct a content audit. It can be a daunting task, but how do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

A Content Audit Overview

This table of contents is for those looking for quick tactics and improvements.

1. Content Audit Tools

2. Content Audit Documents

3. Allocating Your Content Inventory

4. Importing Content Data for KPI Metrics

5. Custom KPIs for Lead Gen Content

6. Keyword Research Audit

7. Auditing Content Backlinks

8. Checking for Readability

9. Existing Content Optimization

10. Addressing Content Gaps

11. Developing a Content Strategy

Getting Started: Tools and Documents

Content audits are hard work that can devour a lot of your time—but the benefits are absolutely worth it. You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you are and where you’ve been.

To get this process underway we need tools to help scrape the data. We also need to develop documents and spreadsheets to help organize our analysis.

Content Audit Tools

Let’s start with the tools required to conduct a successful content audit. There are many tools available that all prioritize different values in how they analyze and present data.

These industry trusted tools collect the URLs and metrics needed for the reference documents that inform a content audit:

1. Screamingfrog
2. Google Analytics (GA) Solutions
3. SocialCount
4. MOZ Open Site Explorer
5. MOZ Keyword Explorer
6. Google Webmasters Tool
7. SEMrush
8. Hemingway App

Content Audit Documents

There are three main documents to create for reference in a content audit. They are: a Content Inventory spreadsheet, a Keyword Research spreadsheet, and a Content Strategy document.

The first should look something like the screenshot below, and include all your pages, posts, and any metrics you focus on. Include relevant information such as title, target keyword, subpage, subfolders, anchor text, and backlinks. (To fully understand metrics and which ones count, download The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics eBook.)

Develop the second spreadsheet after you build a Content Inventory. A Keyword Research spreadsheet helps identify any content gaps and/or retroactive optimization opportunities that need addressing.

A content gap is a keyword or topic within your niche you have yet to develop content for. For example, a “comprehensive search marketing agency” specializing in SEO, PPC, and content for B2B companies will need to address all the keywords those verticals target. So, if you are writing on just SEO and content, you have a content gap in the PPC keyword niche that needs addressing.

This is where a content strategy document comes in. It should combine a broad overview with detailed action items for use as a roadmap to the future.

Allocating Your Content Inventory

You’ll spend most of your time in the content inventory spreadsheet during a content audit.

Depending on the metrics you look at and what you audit your content for, this spreadsheet should have all the necessary data and links needed to facilitate qualitative analysis.

It should end up looking something like the screenshot below, with your own twist of course.

Now let’s organize this spreadsheet to reveal the most useful insights.

Allocating URLs

Start off by identifying and allocating all the content posts within your domain. There are many online tools that can scrape this data. One popular tool many content marketers turn to is Screamingfrog.

Tools like Screamingfrog create a CSV of all your site’s URLs for uploading to your spreadsheet.

With all the URLs collated, you can then upload them into a KPI scraping tool. You can either automate the KPI scraping or tackle it manually. While the latter option will take longer, you end up with a more granular understanding of your content.

Importing Content Data for KPI Metrics

Depending on the metrics you want to improve, you’ll need to examine different sources to collect your data. Content audits should be comprehensive, which means looking at more than just basic metrics.

For starters, you need to cover the necessary optimization data to see what’s working and what isn’t. For example, each URL in your content inventory should include data such as:

• Title
• Primary keyword
• General description
• Meta Description
• H1
• H2
• Word count

These metrics focus primarily on your pages’ and posts’ keyword orientation. Such data points essentially tell you what terms you are trying to rank for, and how well you’re doing.

After the basics, start looking at how well each post is engaging users. Metrics that focus on this include:

• Click-through rate (via Google Analytics)
• Average time on page (via Google Analytics)
• Read percentage (via HotJar screen recordings)
• Bounce rate of page (via Google Analytics)
• Moz Page Authority (PA)
• Anchor text of backlinks
• Targeted backlink destination URL (via SEMrush)
• External pointing links (via Moz OSE)
• Social likes (via BuzzSumo)
• Social shares (via BuzzSumo)
• On-page conversions if applicable (via Google Analytics)

At this point, your content inventory should be very robust. But to go one step further, you can add in custom data to get a really granular picture of your content’s performance.

Custom KPIs for Lead Gen Content

Search is becoming more universal and users more omnichannel. To adapt to this, some content marketers have changed their content strategy to target a greater share of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), as opposed to just aiming for the number one ranking, or the featured snippet.

“Share of SERP” is a new comprehensive search marketing model meant to target all the different link types on a single search engine results page. Taking up more market share for your more profitable keywords helps to not only generate more leads, but also supply the demand to create new leads.

Instead of just publishing content aimed at generating backlinks to improve search ranking, content marketers are now leveraging guest posts as actual lead gen sales funnels. This means such content has even more metrics to track how well it’s generating leads. Some important metrics include:

• The domain authority (DA) of a target backlink
• The page authority (PA) of a target backlink
• MQLs (marketing qualified leads) via a post
• Actual on-site conversions from a post

You can find these metrics by examining reverse goal paths in Google Analytics. Crazy Egg shows how to check your reverse paths in GA and optimize for your ideal user experience.

The main point of a content audit however, is identifying which pages are crucial conversion bridges, and which posts generate the most MQLs and SQLS (Marketing and Sales Qualified Leads respectively).

Keyword Research Audit

When developing content, how you leverage keywords helps determine how well it ranks. Because of this, a content audit stresses the keyword orientation of your titles, headers, and copy. (If you’re serious about ranking well, also check out The Future of Search Engine Optimization: 5 Ways to Adapt Your Content for 2017 eBook.)

All this information should be in your content inventory already. Which should make this a bit easier.

The next item to build is a keyword research spreadsheet. It will contain data that informs how you optimize existing content, and the content you need to write in the future.

Let’s look at three different cases of keyword orientation. The first is an already optimized post that is good to go. The second needs more keyword optimization. The third post is simply miss-targeted and should either be removed or its keyword changed.

Title: Is Social Media Important for B2B Demand Generation
Primary Keyword: B2B Demand Generation
Topic: Social Media

Title: Optimizing Your Internal Linking Strategy: Weaving a Sticky Web
Primary Keyword: Internal Linking Structure
Topic: SEO, Technical SEO, Site Architecture, Link Building

Title: Easy Ways to Make Your Website Stand Out from the Rest
Primary Keyword: ?
Topic: Web Design, ?

Case Study Analysis

As you can see in the first screenshot, the first post is well targeted and uses the right keyword. Not only that, it targets the long tail modifications of those keywords and the user queries associated with that keyword. By directly answering user queries, the post is more likely to rank because it’s more relevant to actual user search entries.

The keyword is also used in different variations and different long-tail forms of the keyword throughout the post’s different headers. Make sure any internal links within your pages use the relevant keyword and proper anchor text. All this data should be in your content inventory waiting for you.

In the second screenshot, although the post is targeting the right keyword, its title isn’t exactly keyword oriented. You can’t see it, but the post also lacks a meta description. This is a quick fix you can add to your keyword research spreadsheet.

Copy and paste the URL and title to your new spreadsheet and input the necessary keywords to target when you go back and edit the piece.

Looking at the last screenshot, we can see that the piece is altogether misrepresented by the keyword it targets.

There are two choices: rewrite it or trash it altogether.

You may find you have far more irrelevant content than you realized when performing an audit. Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world. Trimming the fat is part of the process!

Auditing Content Backlinks

I mentioned above that prioritizing which pages you send backlinks to is one way to start leveraging content to generate leads rather than just links. Because of this, a content inventory should include data such as anchor text and backlink destination URLs (along with the domain authority and page authority of each).

You can pull all this data from SEMrush, or use the good old MozBar to check each post’s authority yourself.

While in SEMrush, check out which of your pages to use as backlink fodder. I.e. which pages generate the most conversions and actual revenue for your business. These are the posts that need the most backlinks, and where you want your traffic flowing. These should be the focus of your audit.

It’s not hard to lose track of backlinks and where you are pointing them. Especially if you are performing an audit deep into a content campaign in which you’ve published a large amount of content (I’m talking triple digits here at least).

If you notice some of your best posts sending backlinks to less valuable pages, add this action item to the keyword research spreadsheet. Backlinks, anchor text, keywords—they’re all related after all.

Checking for Readability

For a really granular content picture, you can even upload readability metrics into the content inventory or keyword research spreadsheet.

Yes, readability and user experience are hard features to report on. But not impossible. Add these metrics to your spreadsheets for an idea of your posts’ readability:

• Word count: obvious enough why this is important.
• Paragraphs: this number should be high—don’t bore readers with endless copy.
• Hemingway Score: this is a great tool for any writer. Prose should be direct, without too many long sentences, and easily consumed. The Hemingway app analyzes anything you paste into it for a readability score. Unlike paragraphs, this score should be as low as possible.

It takes time to copy and paste each blog post into Hemingway to get your score, but it pays off. You’d be amazed how many posts fall to the wayside just from being too wordy.

The average reading grade in America is eight. That’s a good level to aim for. However, it’s also important to remember that no writing or editing tool is always right. They’re guidelines, not ironclad laws. These data points are meant to inform your content strategy decisions, not make them for you.

Existing Content Optimization

At this point your content inventory and keyword research spreadsheets should be brimming with valuable data. Your content inventory should have all the necessary metrics required for informed and qualitative decisions about existing content. The keyword research spreadsheet should contain all the necessary insights to inform content decisions for the future.

They should look something like this:

Now you can examine exactly what your existing content needs to improve its ranking and user engagement.

There are basically five decisions to make about a specified content item during a content audit. Add a drop-down column at the end of the spreadsheet to record your final verdict on any given content item for future reference.

The five actions are as follows:

1. Keep: A post has passed inspection and is approved to keep as is on your site.
2. Optimize: A post is high in value, but isn’t as technically optimized as it could be. Requires back end improvements to boost its ranking.
3. Remove: The content is either irrelevant or a simple horror show you no longer want associated with your brand. Commit it to flames.
4. Repurpose: Certain posts may be too long, too wordy, or target too diverse keywords. They can be turned into different forms of content such as eBooks, videos, or serialized blog posts. Some pages may also be too short, but relevant enough to one another to consolidate into a single page. These also fall under “repurpose.”
5. Update: Some posts are topical. Others are meant to be updated from time to time. For evergreen posts remember to address the date they were last updated to ensure you keep them fresh.

These actions only address content you’ve already created. The real insights from a content audit come when you identify gaps you’ve missed and the corresponding content required moving forward.

Addressing Content Gaps

Once you’ve spent enough time combing through your spreadsheets, you’ll start to notice trends. And you’ll start to notice gaps in your strategy.

These are the treasure chests you’ve been drawing this map for! You should see which long tail modifications of primary keywords you’ve missed in the keyword research spreadsheet. Trends or affiliated posts you could’ve been developing will become clear. As will where your content strategy has veered off course or dipped into boredom.

Moving forward, leave no stone unturned when targeting keywords. Especially when developing content strategy. While focus and segmentation often yield a higher success rate, that doesn’t mean you should neglect the rest of your readership.

Developing a Content Strategy

This is the last of the three key documents. If you are performing a content audit as a third party, it’s the only one you give to your client.

A content strategy document should start with a general overview of the content audit. The general overview should provide clear-cut and quantifiable statistics about how much content was audited, the number of pages to be changed, and the metrics you focused on.

The intro should look something like this.

Then you can dive into detailed tactics and strategies. This is where the keyword research spreadsheet comes back into the picture. It will show the content gaps and keyword mishaps you can easily fix and assign as action items within your content strategy.

Make it clear which changes are the priority and why. That way there’s no miscommunication and the audit won’t have to be redone. (For a while at least.)

Takeaways

You’ve eaten the elephant. The whole darn thing—one massive bite at a time.

Now you can sit back and loosen your belt buckle as you pass the data onto someone else in your team.

Content audits may be long and arduous processes. But if you know what to look for and how to prioritize it, there is no better way to analyze your content’s performance.

You can take a content audit one step further. Consider building an ideal customer profile (ICP) to pair with your audit to really supercharge your analysis. If you haven’t built out an ICP yet, here’s a quick how-to guide from Lead Genius.

There are also plenty of automated content audit tools available, such as the below examples:

• Quick Sprout AutoScore
• Content Insight’s Content Analysis Tool (CAT)
• Blaze

Make sure you choose the right time to perform a content audit, such as re-launching a website or commuting a blog. Audits are best leveraged at times of change in your campaigns.

Regardless of how you go about it, remember that content audits will often drastically change your approach to content strategies and content teams. For a practical guide to creating a documented content strategy (which you can also use in parallel with a content audit), download The Content Marketing Pyramid: A Framework to Develop & Execute Your Content Marketing Strategy eBook. Any questions—let us know in the comments!

Not only is content marketing a thing, it’s an incredibly useful way to build your customer relationships and sales funnel. But if you only engage in random acts of content—publishing content on whatever topic strikes a chord on any given day—you won’t reap all the benefits you could. (See seven other Content Marketing Mistakes to Fix in 2017 here.)

Take an integrated approach to your content marketing. Bring together the paid, earned, shared, and owned media created within your company. You’ll see vastly improved results, and avoid some common pitfalls that impede many content marketing programs.

It all starts with a documented content strategy.

Not convinced? Let’s walk through four all-too-common content marketing pitfalls, and I’ll show you how a documented content strategy can save you from them.

Pitfall #1: Not Enough Time to Create Content

If you don’t defend your calendar, you end up putting off content creation until you have (perceived) time. As though some intergalactic traveling Time Lord is going to scoop you up and give you a few extra days.

Sorry, but that’s never going to happen!

(Oh, but I wish it would.)

You can take back some of your time however, by using a documented content strategy. It helps you prioritize the need to immediately execute against the random, last-minute requests that derail your to-do list. It helps you say, “No.”

Whenever an unplanned task comes your way, evaluate it by asking, “Does this help us advance our progress against our goals?” If not, negotiate with the person requesting your help. It may be that the goal they are trying to meet with their request is one you already have on your content map, possibly with a different approach.

Many of us are too programmed to reply with “yes” when presented with others’ requests. It means we don’t get through the things we need to do to meet our own goals and objectives. With a documented plan in hand you can’t turn down all of them, but you do have a good place from which to negotiate.

Pitfall #2: Not Enough Budget to Create Content

In a perfect world, we all have enough money to create an endless amount of beautifully designed, engaging content, with a boundless distribution budget. Alas, that world is not the one we live in.

Having a small budget is a poor excuse for not creating content though. It can become easy to get overly focused on what you can’t do. But having a content strategy and a supporting editorial calendar helps you actively manage your limited resources, and keep ahead of recurring content opportunities.

Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, take stock of the resources you DO have at your disposal.

Resources All Content Marketers Can Tap

• Employee subject matter experts. Chances are several of your employees are industry influencers in their own right. Or at least, subject matter experts in an area closely aligned with your customers’ challenges. Tap them to help you generate content ideas, and to provide bullets or even an article draft under their bylines. Include employee advocacy as a key piece of your content strategy, and assign your experts regular slots in your editorial calendar. (Read the Ultimate List of Content Marketing Editorial Calendar Templates to find the right calendar for your organization.)
• Data. Do you have proprietary data that can be analyzed and used to provide prospects with insights that help them do their jobs? Better yet, is this data you can access and refresh on a quarterly basis? Make sharing these insights part of your content strategy. Schedule the data pulls—and a slew of resulting content based on that data—in your editorial calendar.
• Existing content. Most of us have a lot of one-and-done content sitting in our shared drives, gathering dust. But when creating new content, we can use it as a base for derivative content. Add that derivative content to your editorial calendar.
• Recurring events. Do you host an annual conference? Does your organization sponsor or speak at an annual industry event? (Click here for The Ultimate List of Content Marketing Conferences.) Leverage the content created for and at those events as an ongoing content creation resource.
• Other people’s content. The content marketing team aren’t the only ones creating content in your organization. Find out what slides, return-on-investment calculators, or one-sheets your sales team has cobbled together and consider repurposing them. Similarly, ask your client success team what templates or frequently asked questions they’re using in their day-to-day customer conversations. Make your editorial calendar the key discussion point of recurring editorial meetings and invite these teams to participate.

Pitfall #3: Our Industry Is Boring, and so Is Our Content

Every industry—no matter how “boring” it may seem to you at the time—has topics that get industry experts or customers revved up and excited. It’s your job to identify these topics and document them in your content strategy. Then work with those influencers to co-create or quote them in your content. Don’t settle for creating mediocre content!

One of the big reasons many people create “boring” content that doesn’t drive leads, move them towards their revenue goals, or help build their domain authority, is they try to play above their league.

If a high-authority website already has page one of Google results locked down on a specific keyword, you won’t knock them from that spot.

Your top-level keywords provide the base for an editorial calendar with topics you can rank for in search. Check our proven process for creating a keyword research-based content plan in my upcoming webinar.

Pitfall #4: We’re Targeting Too Many People With Our Content

One-size-fits-all is a lie when it comes to clothing—and content. Defining your audience is an important part of documenting your content strategy. And the more you learn about your ideal customer, the easier it is to tailor your content to resonate on topics that matter to them.

If you are given a list of a half dozen or more brand personas and asked to address them with your content strategy, use it as an opportunity to work with your leadership to prioritize. If you do have vastly different audiences to reach, it’s better to draft individual content plans for each audience—and attach budget to it accordingly. Don’t try to come up with a plan that’s watered-down enough to serve as an umbrella.

Further, the content you create to meet the needs of the initial person conducting purchase research is different from the content needed to convince the budget owner. And the post-sale content that helps keep the day-to-day customer engaged with your brand is also different. Each different audience—and their different needs—have different business objectives that align to their role in the purchase process.

Document these differences in needs, objectives, and metrics in your content strategy. You’ll gain clarity into business priorities, so you know where to best spend your time. If you’re lucky, you may even gain budget.

Documenting a Content Strategy That Drives Business Results

After seeing everything a content strategy can do for your content marketing program, you’re probably thinking your ideal content strategy needs to be a 50-page tome, accompanied by a professionally designed animated PowerPoint deck, including three-year revenue projections.

That may be what some organizations expect, but it’s not effective. Can you really expect your whole content team—including contractors, freelancers, and agency team members—to digest and internalize all that? Probably not. And a content strategy that sits in a drawer isn’t much help.

Take a tighter approach to documenting content strategy: the content marketing strategy plan-on-a-page approach.

For those of you thinking, “There’s no way I can cram everything we need to do into one page!”—that’s right. You can’t. And you shouldn’t try. Instead, create an overarching content strategy document combined with individual channel plans as needed. Then you can link them to project management tools such as an editorial calendar, process maps, and templates.

Your content strategy plan-on-a-page should include these six elements:

1. Business goals
2. Business objectives
3. Strategy
4. Metrics
5. Differentiators
6. High-level content schedule

This is the format we used at the start of this year to define the content strategy for Spin Sucks. It guides our decision-making and planning for the year, especially when I come up with some hair-brained idea that doesn’t fit what we want to accomplish. (Even though it’s a really, really good idea.)

I’ll be walking through all of this, plus what to include in your editorial calendar, and how to go from plan to measurable return-on-investment in my upcoming webinar on Tuesday, April 11 at 12pm EDT. If you’ve been putting off documenting your content strategy, take the time to invest in yourself and see my proven framework for creating and executing against a content strategy that drives real business results. See you there!

This trend has been with us for years. According to an October 2016 TrackMaven blogging report:

Over the last five years, the average number of blog posts published per brand per month increased by 800 percent. However, over the same time the average number of social shares per post (from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest) decreased by 89 percent.

From content creation to content curation, marketers are encouraged to keep ‘em coming as part of their content strategy. But by whom?

Other marketers.

Has anyone asked readers about their preferences in regards to the content flood? I couldn’t find any stats regarding reader satisfaction with content published, or the percentage of content actually read, as opposed to just shared.

It seems uncontroversial to acknowledge that readers feel overwhelmed by the volume of content they’re exposed to every hour of every day. One result of this content flood is that the majority of published content reaches fewer eyeballs, and/or holds them for less time.

We only have so much attention, and it’s a numbers game—the more pieces of content being published daily, the less attention each gets.

That leaves marketers in a predicament. Should you keep increasing your publication rate, knowing that most pieces get very little attention, if any?

There is another option: to hold against the winds of quantity, and think of a different content strategy.

Quantity Tramples Quality

Imagine if your favorite artist released a new album every two months. Even if they maintained their quality control, you’d probably be bored with them in less than a year. But it’s likely that the fifth (or maybe even the fourth) album of the year would almost certainly be crap. There’s only so much we can produce without wearing out. (Curating other’s high quality content is the savvy way to keep a consistent publishing schedule without wearing out. Check out The Definitive Guide to Content Curation for more.)

Woody Allen is a classic example. He can’t stop himself from writing and directing a film every year like clockwork. The last year he skipped was 1981. With due admiration for Allen’s work ethic and vast ouvre, in the last two decades he had more than a few misses. Quantity eventually tramples quality.

Which brings us back to content strategy. Over-creating content doesn’t serve a strong purpose other than feeding our self-made content machines. If the remarkable Woody Allen can’t create a great film once a year, why do we, a bunch of marketers, think we can create a meaningful, insightful, original, and interesting piece of content every single day?

Introducing the Mega Post

I want to argue for a content strategy that utilizes a mega post. Unlike the daily post, the mega post is heavily invested in. It is well researched, written and revised with care and attention, and most importantly, arises from very specific circumstances:

1. When you have something meaningful to say
2. When this meaningful thing hasn’t been said by others yesterday, or last week

On top of easing the content flood, and allowing every piece of content to get more attention and respect, the mega post serves three purposes simultaneously:

1. Creating a social buzz
2. Driving traffic to your website
3. Generating inbound links

The mega post can be informative in nature, but is distinguished from evergreen content by having an element of newsworthiness. No, we aren’t news reporters and we’re not going to uncover the next big scandal. When I say ‘newsworthy’ in relation to content marketing, it echoes the two circumstances I mentioned above.

An original, impactful thought is by itself newsworthy in our industry. It’s something folks want to read, share, and quote. And insightful, researched, original content is great for repurposing and atomizing into smaller chunks, to form the foundation of an entire content strategy.

You Don’t Need to Choose

I’m not arguing for the abolishment of all daily posts. There is certainly a large audience for the informative, actionable content so prevalent today. “5 Tactics for…”/“10 Hacks for…”/“How We…”/Best Practices of…” These are valuable insights and tools that we constantly share with each other, and that is very cool of us. Really. I learned a ton from reading stuff other marketers write online.

So there’s a place for both mega posts and daily posts in any content strategy. But we need to adjust the balance. We need to tip the scale more towards mega posts.

Understanding the mega benefits of the mega post is a good place to start. Curata used its analytics software—Curata CMP—and found that Curata’s long form blog posts generated 29 times more leads than short form blog posts did.

The Value of the Mega Post Content Strategy

Coming up with the idea for a mega post is no walk in the park. I read through all of Google’s first page results for “content ideation” and realized that “idea” isn’t the right word for a mega post. Ideas are for daily posts. Usually, you can’t brainstorm your way to a mega post. You need to crush into it; to either have a singular thought, or something in your environment reveals itself to you.

Still, you should put “mega post” in your editorial calendar (and check out this Ultimate List of Content Marketing Editorial Calendar Templates to find the perfect calendar for you). If it’s something you are aware of and aim for, deadline pressure will improve your chances of coming up with one.

I will use a post from my employer, BrightInfo, to illustrate how a mega post isn’t planned in the generic sense of the word, but arises from circumstances. Regardless, it needs a strong guiding hand and tons of hard work.

I will also illustrate how the three benefits of the mega post—buzz, traffic, and links—come into play.

Background: How a Mega Post is Born

Let’s do this in bullets:

• We came across a post titled something like, “How we got featured on SlideShare’s homepage and had a gazillion views.” It was a convincing, actionable post.
• We decided we wanted to be featured on SlideShare’s homepage too.
• Upon further research we concluded that we need strong content, wrapped in a unique concept, that was visually captivating in order to get the editors’ attention. (The SlideShare homepage is curated by humans.)
• A few weeks to zoom in on a promising concept: a collaboration with Dribbble designers for an illustrated guide titled “The Content Journey.”
• A few more weeks to write it, and to contact dozens of designers on Dribbble to interest them in the project.
• Finally settled on 14 designers. Each got a portion of the text to work on. This took a few more weeks.
• A couple of weeks of post-production and we were ready.

Adjusting Mid-Stride

The thing is, this isn’t even the mega post. It’s a mega post we planned for, but the real mega post was born out of the work on the deck.

We noticed the SlideShare homepage went stagnant. No new “Today’s Top,” no new “Featured.” A month went by—nada. We wrote to them. They replied that all was well, and encouraged us to try and get featured.

We thought, “That’s weird.”

We decided to proceed with our detailed plan to get featured, even though it was obvious there was something fishy going on with SlideShare. Why? Because of two reasons:

1. We had an impressive deck in our hands
2. If it didn’t work, we could write about How We Didn’t Get Featured

We went ahead and published the deck on SlideShare and followed our plan of distribution. (See The Ultimate List of Content Promotion Tools for the best content distribution tools on the market.) We constructed our plan meticulously, using multiple resources that had done it before and written about it.

The distribution worked great—better than anticipated—and we got thousands of views in a few days. There were hundreds of social shares, and five high-level marketing blogs republished the deck.

We didn’t get featured on SlideShare’s homepage though. Two months later it remained stagnant with no change in the featured decks.

So we started working on a post titled “Is LinkedIn Killing SlideShare?” This turned out to be a true Mega Post.

Voila! Buzz, Traffic, Links

You want and expect buzz and traffic from every post. They’re the fundamental drivers of content. If your content can’t create a buzz, and the buzz doesn’t generate traffic to your website, why write in the first place?

There are of course other goals for content creation. To educate, establish thought leadership, elevate brand awareness. But if content doesn’t generate traffic, marketers would need to come up with a different tactic to spearhead B2B marketing.

A mega post should create a spike in your traffic metrics. Something like this:

Buzz leads to traffic, and buzz starts with a strong headline. We’re not going to get into clickbait and headline crafting; enough has been written about these two subjects. Let’s just say that the Oxford Dictionary defines clickbait as “content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.” Please remember that the size of expectation is proportionate to the size of disappointment—and folks don’t forgive easily.

Free Promotion

Besides a strong title, authority figures in your industry can also greatly help with social buzz. Some refer to it as influencer marketing. Without it, we would never have managed to create the perfect Twitter storm that erupted around our mega post. Not to mention the massive sharing we got on LinkedIn itself (the irony!).

As the previous Google analytics screen grab illustrates, the storm lasted quite a few days and sent traffic to our site in volumes we were unaccustomed to. This was in large part due to the fact that we grabbed the top spot in Inbound.org’s Sunday Mail two weeks in a row. They stamped our submission with a “newsworthy” top banner, and that made a big difference.

What truly separates the mega post from a daily post is backlinks. Sites will link back to your mega post because, as mentioned earlier, it’s newsworthy—it’s worth repeating. Websites and publications want to share it with their audience, and will swallow their pride if they’re not the one who came up with it.

The After-Effect of Backlinks

The value of backlinks far exceeds that of buzz and traffic. Obviously backlinking won’t happen without buzz and traffic; it also doesn’t work the other way around.

The difference between buzz and backlinks is like the difference between being handed a corn cob, and inheriting a parcel of land planted with corn.

Your website benefits from the backlinks generated by a mega post long after the buzz and traffic subside. Backlinks are the foundation of any B2B SEO content strategy as far as positioning your website and brand as an authoritative resource. The more high quality third-party websites link back to your post, the more trust Google places in it as a reliable source. When users search for information and your mega post appears among Google’s top results, this is as good as it gets online.

How do You Generate Backlinks?

This question is as old as the Internet itself. If buzz creates traffic which leads to backlinks—you might assume that backlinks happen naturally to validate your mega post. They do, but you can magnify this process considerably with effective content distribution.

While you’re getting ready to publish your mega post, conduct research on third-party blogs and publications that cater to your industry, and shoulder-industries. (These are any industries that might find your post interesting, given subject matter overlap.)

After the post is published, send an email blast announcing the publication and suggest they cover the “news” for their audience. Offer to provide any additional information they might request that is relevant to their readership.

Most publications appreciate a quality, original, well-researched and reasoned piece of content. All content marketers are chasing their tails for quality content. If it comes to their doorstep, they’re generally receptive.

Rein in Content Creation

According to CMI, 55 percent of B2B marketers aren’t sure what effective content is. And TopRank Marketing finds that 60 percent admit to struggling to produce engaging content. There’s no nice way to put this: more than half of marketers are creating content that by their own admission, isn’t engaging or effective.

It isn’t hard to speculate about the reason why.

The pressure to keep pace means B2B content marketers often turn out hurried, thoughtless, throwaway content far more often than they want to.

It’s time to call back the troops and adopt a more restrained and thoughtful content strategy. One that results in not just “content,” but meaningful content that can delight your audience. Refocus your resources away from constant short form content, towards more in-depth long form content, and you’ll reap the marketing rewards.

If you’d like to find out more about the mega post and the pyramid content strategy, join myself, Assaf Dudai, and Curata’s director of content marketing, Mitchell Hall, for the webinar: How to Create a Traffic Magnet.

A lot of these quick-tip/how-to/listicle articles do have value, even if they rehash the same topic again and again. Some information is worth repeating because it’s important. But I don’t have to tell you a lot of content out there is just the same couple of basic points, remixed and re-released into the fray, only to be swallowed up by the crowd. Because let’s face it, when you publish content, the crowd doesn’t stop; in a matter of minutes, throngs of newer content will have already overtaken your content.

That’s such a waste—not just a waste of your time, but a waste of an opportunity to have reached people who want more content written. I’ve written a lot of one-off articles, particularly when I first started as a content marketer. Some of them performed well; others disappeared into the void.

What I found was that the articles that didn’t disappear—the ones that continue to pull in traffic months after they were published—had one or both of these characteristics: 1) they offered something new to readers, and/or 2) they were written for a niche target audience.

This article is going to talk about the second characteristic which, in many cases, also leads to the first.

Tell stories that haven’t been told yet

A basic tenet of good writing is to look for stories waiting to be told. This doesn’t necessarily mean finding an entirely new topic; it could simply mean finding a new and original angle. But there are some niches that simply haven’t had a lot of writing done about them—something BuzzFeed in particular has been excellent at identifying. This is an opportunity to write something entirely new.

Just because your writing tends to fall under one subject, such as SEO or growth hacking, doesn’t mean you can’t apply your savvy to a new audience.

Here’s a case study of two of my own articles:

I’m on the marketing team at Venngage infographics, but not everything I write about is strictly about infographic creation and marketing strategies.

In June I delved into a very niche topic by conducting a study about creepypasta for the Venngage blog. Creepypasta is a genre of internet horror stories characteristic for their urban myth-type format and viral sharing. The article and accompanying infographic looked at the common “ingredients” found in popular creepypasta stories. Then I talked about how those elements could be applied more broadly to writing for any genre, tying it back into content marketing.

No one had done a similar study on creepypasta before (very few studies have been done about creepypasta in general) and no one had created an infographic about it. Because I targeted “creepypasta” in the article’s keywords, people searching that term continue to land on my article.

Another most viewed article of Venngage’s focused on a study our team conducted back in February seeking to answer the question: can you fall in love with someone through text message? The study played off a New York Times story that went viral two years ago, but updated it to appeal to a niche target audience. While dating apps are certainly gaining popularity, the people who regularly use them are still a minority. Despite a shrinking stigma against online dating, only 15% of adults actually use dating sites and apps, so the audience is still quite niche.

Psychology Today did a write-up of Venngage’s study, and that article continues to drive people to our blog.

Bottom line: look for a niche topic that interests you or that you haven’t written about before. Then, find a spin that makes it relevant to that niche target audience while still remaining relevant to your site. Not only will this make your job more interesting, but it will bring your site a whole new audience.

Start broad and narrow it down

Ok, so you know you want to write about a niche topic but you’re not sure what that topic should be. A good way to find niche topics is to start broad and then drill down until you end up with a niche.

How do you start broad? Try surveying a large number of potential topics through curation. For example, say you decide to write a curated post about 20 marketing how-to videos that every marketer should watch.

Say one of those videos uses a sneaker company in one of their examples. This enlightens you to an entire subculture of sneaker enthusiasts. You realize there is a whole art to taking compelling product shots of sneakers. Your next article could be about how to take awesome photographs of sneakers—an article that would be useful for collectors, marketers, and small business owners.

And writing about sneaker photography doesn’t have to mean going totally off the beaten path. You can still easily link it back to your main niche target audience in a relevant way, while also targeting the new audience.

Bottom line: finding a niche topic doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Look for links to niche topics from broader topics to create content that is specific but still relevant to what you know well. This makes for a more rounded content strategy. (To construct a comprehensive content strategy, check out the Content Marketing Pyramid.)

A small audience means less shares, but more long tail traffic

Now here’s the catch.

The creepypasta and falling-in-love-through-text-message articles didn’t get as many initial shares as other articles on the Venngage blog.

In the month and a half since it was published however, the creepypasta article consistently ranked in the top 15 most viewed articles on our blog, and the love study article has consistently been in the top five.

Every time someone looks at both articles, they see the infographics front and center. If they’re an audience that doesn’t have a lot of infographics made for them, this is exciting. The articles offer unique value to those audiences while also demonstrating our product.

In fact, the average time spent on page for both articles is significantly higher than our blog average.

That’s because content written for an audience that already has a large following needs to compete extra hard with existing content, and content that will soon exist. Content created for an audience with less content is more likely to be seen in the first place.

There are certain cornerstone articles that are constantly referred to in an industry niche: they act as references for the many articles rehashing the same topic. For example, in SEO it’s Jon Cooper’s Link Building Tactics article, Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique article, and Nadya Khoja’s 37 Proven Methods to Increase Blog Traffic article.

If you create content for an audience that doesn’t normally get a lot of content, and you take care to write something meaningful and actionable, you have the opportunity to create cornerstone content for that audience—content that they will refer back to time and time again.

Bottom line: yes you want most of your traffic to be relevant leads. But throwing in a special interest article every now and again can kickstart brand new traffic—traffic that will continue to trickle in over time. And you can still make it relevant to your site’s product or service.

You have to do some of the leg work

So you’ve written something for a niche target audience and targeted a specific long tail keyword. The problem is, your article isn’t going to rank on Google searches until people start viewing it and linking to it.

If your current content marketing strategy is simply to publish an article and send it out into the ether, that’s a problem you have to tackle first. But if outreach is already a part of your content strategy, you know virtually every article you publish needs a boost at the beginning. Articles written for a niche audience are no different.

Compile a list of contacts for different sites within that niche to reach out to. These don’t have to be small sites—often larger news sites will be interested in writing about a niche topic because it’s interesting and different.

For example, to promote the creepypasta article Venngage reached out to pop culture sites, movie sites, and tech/internet culture sites. In total, we reached out to about 150 sites and got six backlinks. For the love article, we reached out to around 150 sites and got five backlinks. Those are actually a pretty decent number of backlinks for each article; about 90% of outreach emails don’t even get a response.

It’s not enough to just promote your content—you also have to measure its performance. If you’re not attracting adequate traffic from a niche target audience to your content, the impact will be greater than if your content is targeting a bigger audience. That’s because less people in general are going to be searching keywords related to your niche topic than a more popular topic, so you need to make sure your page is one that people in the target audience are landing on.

When it comes to measuring content performance, counting social shares isn’t enough. In fact, social shares are largely vanity metrics. One of the best ways to measure how well content is performing is to count how many backlinks it gets using tools like Buzzsumo or Moz.

Bottom line: To get readers’ eyeballs on your content, you need their attention. Reach out to relevant sites—not only will this get you backlinks, it will also help you make new contacts. Measure those backlinks to see how your content is performing.

Mix it up from time to time: write for a niche target audience

Niche writers usually write because they’re passionate about it. But sometimes you need a break from something you’re passionate about for your content to remain fresh. Reaching out to a new target audience is exciting; it’s a new beginning where you learn new things—and it’s beneficial to your business. You can target niche audiences in a systematic way when you have a well thought out content marketing strategy, such as can can be found in the Content Marketing Pyramid eBook, downloadable below.