Rand Fishkin of Moz SEO fame – has a great series called Whiteboard Friday. In this particular episode of Fishkin gives us a great example of why it’s critical to make sure that you know what your audience wants, before you go out and spend a ton of money (and time) on content creation.

He maps out 5 things, that as business owner, you should take into account when making the decision what type of content to create.

He even gives you links to his whiteboard notes (and a complete transcript) so you can review what he’s talking about in detail.

You can view the entire video post here, and below are five key takeaways in Fishkin’s video post:

1. Get to know the industry, niche or community that you are operating in. Find out who are the big influencers in your industry. You really need to understand a niche before you can create content for it.

2. Use the discussion forums, Q&A sites, social media and blog comments to find topics and discussions that inspire questions, curiosity, and need.

3. Validate that if you created something (a) it would be unique, no one else has made it before, and (b) others would actually share it. You can do this very directly by reaching out and talking to people.

4. Visual and/or interactive content is going to perform a lot better than text. Visual content historically goes viral much faster, much better, be picked up by news sources, be written about, be embedded in social media graphics, far better than dry data.

5. Align your audience’s goals with your business goals. I know this stuff may seem like overkill at first and you’re probably wondering what does this have to do with my website? Everything, because content is the stuff you put on your website for your visitors and customers to consume and hopefully come back for more (over time) and where you can eventually find the right opportunity to close the sale with them.

Content marketing isn’t going away – in fact is gaining steam and is fast replacing many of the short-live gimmicks and hacks, that Google and all of the other search engines are bound to catch on to.

So don’t waste your time – invest for the long-term and you’ll reap the rewards for all of your labor. Remember – it’s pace not race. Enjoy!

Question: When it comes to generating content for your customers, what’s the one thing that you’re getting hung-up on the most? Share your questions and comments below.

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The post was updated July 31, 2020