Creating Custom Content: Step-by-Step Criteria

While we’ve spoken at length about how subscribing to a syndicated blog service to provide you with content is perfectly fine, we have to admit that there’s a lot to be said about the benefits of custom content. If used alone, custom content can provide your audience with a direct view of your unique insights, observations, and experiences.

There is another approach, however, that combines syndicated content with custom to form a sort of hybrid between the two. This hybrid approach not only ensures that you can provide your readership with consistent content and yourself with the SEO benefits of predictable posting but also allows you to chime in on topics of particular importance to your readers to provide your own perspective. However, in order for either the strictly-custom or hybrid approaches to work, you will have to provide your readership with valuable, quality information. To help you achieve this goal, we’ve assembled a step-by-step list to ensure your content is created with success in mind.

Step 1: Selecting a Topic

Quality content requires a purpose beyond “I need to put something on my website.” You will need a topic that provides considerable benefit to a wide audience that includes your best-fit target. For example, if you were deciding between writing a blog article comparing Intel and AMD CPUs and how well they disperse excess heat, or an article describing basic security best practices, you should ask yourself which of those posts provides the most benefit to the your target, who we will assume is the typical small to medium-sized business owner. In this case, the security best practices piece would almost definitely attract more readership from the SMB community. Staying with the same example, the security best practices piece also does more to solve a business owner’s commonly-held issues than the heat-dispersal one would, educating your readership with a mostly-evergreen, educational topic that retains its relevance.

Step 2: Selecting a Delivery Format

Of course, not all content takes the form of blogs, so you have some options that can allow you to play to your strengths. You have other options, after all: there’s not only written blog posts, but also live events, deliverables, not to mention video content. Are you better at producing videos than you are at creating publishable written content? It may be a good idea to focus more of your efforts on video content. If your written content stands stronger than your other pieces, focus on producing more of that. You should also try to take your audience into consideration as you determine how to convey your point. Are they the type who are often on their social media through their phones, or are they more often found at a local coffee bar, thumbing through a local Chamber of Commerce publication? Determining this will help you to direct your content directly to the ones you want to see it.

Step 3: Production and Proliferation

Finally, it’s time to just get down to business and crank out your finished piece. Remember, the quality of your content comes from the value you can provide your audience. As a result, as long as you are communicating valuable information clearly enough to be understood, then you are doing well enough for your purposes. This is not to say, however, that you shouldn’t include a touch of uniqueness, which will do nothing but help you in the long run. By providing an insight or anecdote of your own, you are able to stake a claim that the content is directly from you.

Once you’ve completed production, it’s time to share your content as much as possible. Share links to it on your social media accounts to encourage your followers to navigate back to your site, and cross-link to it in other blog posts that touch upon similar or related subjects.

Remember, practice makes perfect, so as you create more and more of your own content and observe what works and what doesn’t, your’s will get better. Your readers will be looking for one thing above all else: value! As long as you provide them with information they can use to help them save resources doing something they have to do, you are doing what you should be.

For more advice as you work on your marketing, reach out to JoomConnect anytime!