1. Create a Buyer’s Persona 

A buyer’s persona refers to a semi-fictional representation of the target audience of your brand. Buyer personas have been used by brands for decades to market their products and services effectively. Some brands develop a range of buyer personas to capture the different ranges of audiences they are targeting. A buyer’s persona may include – name, demographic details, behavioral traits, personal interests, buying habits, pain points, professional goals, etc. Buyer personas facilitate a better understanding of your audience’s behaviors and interests. This allows you to create content especially tailored for them. 

2. Map Out the Buyer’s Journey

Besides buyer personas, another thing that you should develop early in your content strategy is the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey refers to the steps your customers take, from identifying a problem to making a purchase decision to address that problem. It should be noted that buyers have different goals at each stage of their journey, which is they should be addressed with different kinds of content at each stage to keep them engaged. For instance, if a prospective customer is just identifying the problem, they should not be hit with your sales pitch video. Similarly, if the customer is about to make a purchase decision should not be hit with an article about the issue in the industry. Mapping out the buyer’s journey ensures that your customer gets the right kind of content at the right time that addresses their concerns. 

3. Choose the Right Formats for Your Audience 

As discussed above, content can be created in a variety of formats. Everything from audiobooks to webpages is considered content. As such, picking the right format for your content pieces is crucial. Think about the end goal of your content pieces and the format should align with that goal to maximize its impact. 

4. Optimize Your Content for SEO

To improve its searchability, optimize your content for search engine optimization (SEO). This can mean incorporating relevant keywords, formatting your content into bullets and numbered lists to improve its readability, and adding meta text and alt descriptions for images. 

5. Delegate Content Creation 

Content creation is not an easy job, and it gets more difficult if you have to produce a lot of content. If you do not have enough in-house writers, consider delegating some work to ghostwriters. There are many advantages of delegating content, such as better quality, fewer grammatical errors, reduced timelines, and more creative pieces. 

6. Promote Your Content

Content creation is not enough. You have to promote it to ensure people see it. Spread your content across different platforms to get as many readers/viewers as possible. Some ways to distribute your content include newsletters, paid social media posts, email blasts, and website pop-ups. 

7. Make Use of Tools

Use various strategic tools to get an edge over your competition. Many SEO tools can help you improve your rankings and make improvements in your content. Other tools like Canva and Vidyard help you create videos and images. Various reporting tools measure how your content is performing across different platforms.

8. Identify KPIs to Make Improvements

Reporting tools can help you understand the performance of your content and make changes to your content to improve traffic. For instance, you should have a measurable goal for each content piece in terms of the number of views, or clicks, to analyze results over time. This will allow you to re-evaluate your strategy and make adjustments if you are not hitting your goals. 

9. Create an Editorial Calendar

Sometimes, it might be hard to manage the process of content creation with so much going on (from creating a buyer’s persona to marketing). As such, it is crucial to have a content calendar to know what content to create and when it needs to go out, and what needs to be published. 

10. Improve your Headlines

Headlines are the first thing your audience will read. If your headline doesn’t work, then the content may be a wasted opportunity. Create eye-catching headlines that invite readers’ curiosity. 

11. Make Your Content Interactive

The highest-performing content is interactive content. Audiences like to engage in the content they receive. It doesn’t have to be complicated (quizzes, polls, infographics, etc., are great examples of easy interactive ideas). 

The key to successful content creation is a well-balanced content strategy. The above-discussed content creation will help you get started with the content creation and marketing process.

The post Content Creation Tips to Grow Your Audience first appeared on Publir.

Understanding Your Audience

While your content can appeal to a variety of different audience groups, your goal should be connecting with your regular readers. Tailored content makes your audience feel important and valued. This means that these readers can become promoters of your brand. 

You need to truly understand your audiences and create buyer personas for targeted content marketing. For instance, if you are selling beachwear, you may want to write different content for those who live close to beaches (and visit frequently) and those who live far from beaches (and visit only a few times a year). Curate your content based on your buyer’s persona. 

By creating a buyer’s persona with your customers’ characteristics like profession, age, gender, industry, daily tasks, etc., you can target your messaging to different groups of audiences. 

Assessing Content Quality

1. Relevant KPIs – You can assess the quality of your content by looking at the relevant KPIs, including dwell time, search visibility, and reader engagement. Search visibility shows the website’s content ranking amongst a variety of keyword combinations. Dwell time refers to the amount of time a person spends looking at your website’s content. Reader engagement measures your readers’ interests, thoughts, and opinions. 

2. Use Data Analytics Tools – Instead of assuming what your audience likes or not, use the various data analytics tools to uncover the patterns of content sharing and engagement. Different data analysis tools can tell you how your content is being shared across various social media channels against your competitors. Find out what kind of content is the most successful and tap into that space to create more relevant content for your readers. 

3. Content Audit – Conduct a thorough content audit to reveal the strength and weaknesses of your incumbent content strategy to make improvements moving forward. A complete audit assesses your link structure, current topics, metadata, etc. An audit helps you figure out the shortcomings of your current strategy, thus, allowing you to improve future content marketing campaigns. It is important to note that content strategy is not static, i.e., it should change with changes in market conditions, audience interests, and so on. Therefore, you might need to conduct content audits frequently throughout the year. 

4. Engagement Statistics – The best way to assess the quality of your content is by monitoring your engagement statistics, including views, likes, subscribers, and comments. If you are new to the content creation space, look at what your competition is posting. What generates the most audience attention? Understanding what customers want will help you create content that will cater to their interests. 

5. Check Page Traffic and Rankings – Use Google Analytics to check your page’s organic traffic, the number of keywords, and the ranking of those associated keywords. If you have written something that is of high value for your readers, your page traffic and rankings will organically go up. 
6. Look at Your Competition – One way to assess your content quality is by comparing your content with your biggest competitors. See what your competition is putting out there and what kind of content is trending. Try to make content around similar topics by adding your unique touch to it.

Creating a Sense of Community and Belonging

Creating a sense of community and belonging is crucial to successful content creation and marketing. Your audience should not just be passive consumers of your content. They should feel as though they are a part of a community. One of the ways to make audience members feel a sense of community is by involving them in the process of content creation. Make the channels of communication transparent and incorporate their inputs. Acknowledge and appreciate your readers from time to time for their valuable time. Share content in a way that makes them feel they belong. This can be done with high-quality personalization and customization. Share content that makes them feel seen and heard. Use different ways to ask for your customer’s feedback and opinions in crucial business decisions. For instance, asking them in a poll what they think the next post should be about. This gives them a sense of belonging to a community where their opinion is valued. 
Content creation is an effective marketing practice that publicizes your brand and allows you to reach new readers. A good content creation strategy includes understanding your audience, assessing content quality, and creating a sense of community and belonging. As experts in the programmatic advertising market, Publir offers a one-of-a-kind unified platform specifically built to maximize earnings for digital content creators. We provide complete solutions for Ad Optimization, Subscriptions, Crowdfunding, QuickShop, and AdBlock Recovery.

The post Growing Your Paid Readership: A Guide to Content Creation first appeared on Publir.

Content curation refers to the process of collating, segmenting, and presenting relevant information to your audience that they find useful. Basically, you find material relevant to your consumers and share it strategically through various marketing channels. Constantly creating new content is difficult. It is beyond the marketing budget of small businesses, ad agencies, or start-ups. This is where content curation can help. Collecting relevant data from various authoritative sources and sharing it with your audience in different formats can generate interest in your product/service. With a curated: created ratio of 60:40, you can save time, money, and effort and recycle content for your audience. But how to find the best content and how to curate content that is ideal for your audience? This is where content curation tools come in. 

Top Content Curation Tools In 2021

Tools help you find relevant content or content ideas and make it convenient to share this across different social media platforms. Tools offer you relevant content from various sources to solidify your content marketing strategy while boosting brand visibility and SEO ranking. Content curation tools help you engage with the audience at your virtual door. If used well, these tools can save you hours that you’d otherwise spend combing through content to find something useful for your site. Here are the best content curation tools that you can use today – 

ShareIt

A free content curation and influencer discovery tool, this is a blessing for bloggers and social media teams alike. Simply type out a keyword, and ShareIt will pull out a relevant list of content pieces and social media handles, across a multitude of formats like blog posts, videos, and more. There is a separate influencer tab that gives out a list of influencers and popular websites relevant to your search term. ShareIt is great for sharing content directly because it has social media buttons next to content suggestions. It also has some nice add-ons. 

Listly

Everyone loves a good list, and Listly provides the same and how! Easy-to-read, numerically ranked, and pleasing to the eye, it is a great way to present content. Listly allows you to sort relevant information into lists on your website. Users then have the option to vote content up or down. This active engagement feature makes a lot of sense because you get live feedback and can better engage an audience. Zoom in to what effectively speaks to your audience with Listly, a great tool to throw up many ideas to populate your site with interesting, engaging, and relevant content. 

Flipboard 

This mobile and desktop app allows users to make mini-magazines with back-links to popular news stories, websites, and blog posts. After creating a magazine, users can make them public so consumers can follow this content and share them on their respective social media channels. Include your company’s blog posts and links in your own magazine too, so readers can learn more about your business. All you need to do is download the app and make an account. Flip through the magazines of other users, and use your mini publication feature to share their stories. Free and easy to use, Flipboard is popular because it shows customers news and hot trends related to their industry. 

Scoop.it

Loved by both amateurs and professionals alike, Scoop.it has amazing filters and curates content really quickly. Other content curation tools pull out information well, but you still require information and articles based on relevant keywords, Scoop.it finds popular words and phrases and as you curate, you can keep modifying them. An automation feature makes this easy to use. The app finds posts for you, and you can send those out where they need to go. A marriage of content curation and social media with a vibe like Pinterest, Scoop.it needs just one topic of interest to throw up relevant articles and suggested relevant topics to view. Its smart engine can keep an eye on topics you’re interested in, helping you identify related content. It integrates easily with WordPress and allows for content curation across channels like websites, emails, and social media. 

Elink.io 

Curate content for your email newsletter, social media, and website from various websites and share them in a presentable way, with context. This tool can be your friend and save you hours. Allowing users to save links on the go and turn them into relevant, shareable content, Elink.io helps you convert your links into a web page, and even embed them on a blog or a website, or put them into a crafted newsletter. Choose from their 30+ highly responsive and interchangeable templates. This tool has 80,000 users worldwide, a testament to its popularity and content curation abilities. 

Feedly 

Content managers and marketers looking to stay on top of trends and stay connected with industry leaders can rely on Feedly. This app finds blogs from popular writers and sites, giving you the best articles that can enrich your own posts, or be useful to customers when dispersed through your marketing channels. This app can take a lot of guessing out of content curation, helping you be more specific. 

Pocket 

This acts as a great content curation bank as it can help you collate content to save and read later. Store all your chosen articles, images, and videos in one place for reference. Group articles with tags and find them easily thanks to Pocket’s in-built search function. This app also integrates with over 500 others, like Evernote, so syncing is easy.

BuzzSumo

With various options to track down content and specify what you exactly want, Buzzsumo allows you to filter articles by influencer rank, allowing you to know who created the piece and giving you sharing frequency within the last day or year, or even by the specific type of content you want. Buzzsumo is for those who want to be specific to the last detail. You can receive alerts when new content hits the web so you stay one step ahead of competitors. 

QUUU

Quuu is free software that integrates with most social media scheduling tools, this can help you analyze social media posts, platforms and channels, before recommending content for you either to share in your integrated scheduler dashboard or from your account onto a website. Quuu even has an auto-pilot function that can automatically schedule out tweets and social media posts. 

Curata

Discover content relevant to your respective audience by fine-tuning, customizing, and categorizing content sources. You can then review and distribute the results, all from one central app. Publishing and promotion features help you repurpose curated content across your social newsletter, automated marketing platforms, or your blog.

Final Thoughts

 In conclusion, if you want to be visible, you have to stand above the crowd. It is not an easy thing to do, but content curation tools can help you lay the groundwork for your next content marketing campaign. Before browsing through hours of content, wait and research some effective curating tools that can save you precious time, and fine-tune the content you ultimately serve your audiences. Read our blog on finding the content your audience really wants to see so you can ace the content marketing game.

The post 10 Content Curation Tools To Use In 2021 first appeared on Publir.