What Content Should You Publish?
Blog content is a key place to create content for your audience. After your blog is posted, content can be curated or repurposed for articles, ebooks, videos and podcasts. The question is what content works the best?
Discuss Content Ideas and Use Keyword Research to Find What Is relevant and valuable to your Audience
Once we know our ideal content and who our audience is, set up the blog and the service provider. ( I recommend WordPress)
Now to get started!
While you may have loads of ideas for your posts, don’t forget that they must be in sync with the services you provide and have relevance to your target audience. Ideally, the posts should include the keywords that you have chosen that best describe you. This way the search engines know who you are and what you represent in addition to your viewers.
Keyword research tactics and keyword basics are described by Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, in Introduction to SEO: Tactics and Strategy for Entrepreneurs.
Rand explains:
“When you’re thinking about your audience, we want to take a look at the folks we know are in the group we want to target and ask ‘what are they searching for today that they can’t successfully find or aren’t being well exposed to?’”
Your target market consists of your patients and your prospective patients if you are a health provider. Now it’s time for the next tactic. The basis of your content, keywords and topics for your market is the 5-step process.
5-Step Process
- Designate your keywords, topics and terms: Kick around the ideas for your audience with your office staff, people who are familiar with what your audience is looking to see.
- Use a keyword research tool: Insert your terms into a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner, Moz, keywordtool.io
- Group them: Group your terms and ideas together and determine which ones are most aligned to your strategy.
- Build a spreadsheet and prioritize terms: Now, it’s time to get organized. Build a spreadsheet with the data you got in your tool, such as keyword, estimated search volume, difficulty and opportunity and assign a priority to each one.
- Select the content that hits the 3 keys: Take your top terms and content that will serve your goals, the user’s needs, and the keyword targeting, the 3 keys for effectiveness and search engine optimization.
Rand advices:
“What’s the thing where when you read the first few search results you say, ‘This is great, but I wish they…’. If you have great answers to that, don’t ask ‘how do we make something as good as this?’ but say ‘how do we make something 10X better than any of these?” That’s the bar that’s been set because it’s so competitive to try to rank for terms today.”
The next tactic comes from Seth Godin in The Modern Marketing Workshop:
“Great marketers set their own agenda. This means getting out of reaction mode and focusing on your strategy.”
Select the Format of Content
Blog posts, videos, and podcasts, each play a role in your content strategy and it’s up to you how you use them. They each tell a story and appeal to the audience in a way that is most appealing to them i.e. reading, seeing, hearing. Each modality appeals to certain segments of your crowd.
As Seth Godin says: “Marketing is the act of telling a story people want to hear.”“And making that story so vivid and true that the people who hear it want to tell other people.” This is accomplished by the 4 qualities your content needs to have:
- Emotion: What emotion do we want people to feel?
- Change: How are you changing people with your product or content? Does that emotion change them in a way that helps your brand?
- Alert: Once you’re changed someone, how do you build the privilege of being able to tell them when you have something new?
- Share: How can you get people to tell each other?
Videos in Your Content Marketing Strategy
According to recent research, 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI while social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.“51% of marketers say video drives the biggest ROI in your content marketing strategy.”
With this in mind, it is a no brainer that videos would work well to grow your practice and strengthen your brand. And now, it is easier to create than ever before. No longer do you need expensive technical equipment. You have all that you need, right in your hip pocket.
Check out DIY Viral Video: A Mini Class on Making iPhone How-To Videos, where Nicole Farb teaches how to create one of the most popular video styles out there with just your iPhone.
Her framework consists of these basics:
- Length: Keep it under 60 seconds at the most and under 30 seconds is ideal.
- Have a strategy: Include props to show the steps
- Gesture your users: Communicate with hands since many videos are viewed without sound.
- Use your tools: Skillshare uses the Hyperlapse tool. Place your camera on a tripod which you can buy rather inexpensively. (I got one recently for under $10 at Best Buy)
- Start with a compelling image
- Don’t strive for perfection: Many simple home-brewed videos go viral every day.
Podcasts in Your Content Marketing Strategy
Podcasts are super popular right now as a content form, and for very good reason. They can be listened to while at the gym on a treadmill, in the car or train on the way to work or any other conventional setting where your mind is active and you have time. Creating them takes very little effort.
According to Neil Patel, host of The Indian Startup Show (the #1 tech podcast in India), he explains the basics in Getting Your Podcast Off the Ground!
Step 1: Pick Your Topic or Niche
Find a specific niche for your topic. Since there are over 100,000 podcast shows out there, get specific! My podcast is “Marketing Tips for Doctors”. There is no mistake as to what it’s all about…marketing tips for doctors.
You can search on these tools-
–cast.market (a research page for podcasts)
–iTunes charts (to see what’s popular and where there are gaps)
Step 2: Equipment Setup
A basic setup consists of a microphone and software for recording your voice. This can range from as simple as your built-in mic (which I don’t recommend due to the poor sound quality) to an external USB mic, audio interface, and professional recording software. There is even a small but effective microphone that attaches to iPads and is therefore mobile.
Personally, I use an ATR2100 USB Microphone that sounds great.
It’s small & portable which makes it perfect for taking on-the-go.
Step 3: Find your Guests for Interviews or Create scripts for a Monologue
Line up the guests that are experts in the topics that you want to feature on your podcast.
You can use your existing social network to reach out to people you already know or are connected with on Twitter or Facebook. Once you’ve gathered a list, put together a template outreach email (as you’ll be doing this over and over). Introduce yourself, the topic of your podcast and a podcast gift or call to action.
Step 4: Edit Your Podcast and Add Music, or background Sounds
Fortunately there are loads of options for hiring a podcast producer to stitch your episodes together. To start, all you really need is 6 files: The intake, your main interview, content, the call to action, the out take, and music, in addition to your podcast cover.
Upload these files to Google Drive or Dropbox. Then edit, add intro music, the main interview, the action you’d like your listeners to take and the out take. Save with a name so that you can retrieve it later.
Step 5: Upload and Promote
Good for you! Your podcast episode is now ready for upload to iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, or anywhere else and promoted alongside the rest of your content!
Give your interviewees a copy of the podcast so that they can promote their episode, enabling you to be heard to a larger audience. If it’s engaging, chances are good that they will sign up for more, thereby increasing your subscription rate.
Doing this:
- Increases your visibility
- Increases your fan base
- Helps promote your services
- Grows your practice
- Strengthens your brand
- Promotes you as the celebrity or authority in your field
If you need help doing this, call 516-647-3002 and we can get you started!
