Every month, the FM Content Strategy Meet-up gets social media masters, bloggers, writers, WordPress experts and more in the same room to talk strategy. At one such event, CoSchedule’s Nate Ellering shared some of his pro tips on how to get the best out of content strategy. He writes tons of blog posts on the subject for CoSchedule, and is a master as studying analytics and pumping out helpful content. Thanks for sharing, Nate!

Nate’s Guide for Content Strategy

1. Content Core (aka Know your audience)

It’s true for businesses, it’s true for blogs/social media. Know what your audience is looking for! Look at the challenges for your audience, and position your product as the solution. One way to do this is find the keywords that people are searching for. Then try and build the best content on the Internet to solve that problem.

Resource: Why Smart Marketing is About Help, not Hype by Jay Baer

2. Skyscraper Technique

The Skyscraper technique is about rising above the clutter of the Internet. If you’re going to publish anything, why would you shoot for anything less than the best? Otherwise you’re just adding to the noise.

Creating the best starts with researching what’s out there for certain keywords – and researching the heck out of it. Find all the best content you can find around the keyword, and then publish something that’s better than everything else. Lots of times it’s long-form, detailed, and super actionable.

Exhibit A: People often search for “Best times to post on social media.”

There were endless blog posts answering the question. So CoSchedule found the top 10 sources that get the most backlinks. They analyzed those to create: What 10 studies say about the best times to post on social media.

*Important*: Once you publish that content, reach out to influencers and let them know you built upon their ideas. It’s courteous, and they are more likely to share it.

To conclude, search the term one more time and find the post, and find the ones that existed before the ones you published. Ask them to reference you in their backlinks.

Learn more about the Skyscraper Technique in CoSchedule’s thorough blog post.

Resource: Brian Dean’s  backlinko.com.

3. Content Foundation

Because the skyscraper technique is so important, it’s OK to start slow at first with your blog publishing schedule. After all, your aim is to publish the best. There’s a learning curve to any new project; it takes time to do it really well. The first 6 months is maintaining that momentum. Your goal after those 6 months is to publish more than you are today. The first stage is about publishing really good content.

4. Content Goals

Content is data. Determine what you want your goals to be, monitor subscribers, and turn that into e-mail subscribers. A great way to monitor how many blog posts you want to be working towards is to use this matrix:

Goal Matrix:

goal # ________ of ________ = # of blog posts needed to hit goal

current # ________ of ________ per post

For instance: a goal of 8K views, over current 1,000 pageviews = goal of 8 blog posts.

5. When is the best time to publish a blog?

Blog posts: Mondays at 11 AM.

Social Reach: Saturdays and Sundays 9 AM to 12 PM. Thursdays 9 – 10 AM.

Go into this knowing your audience is different from others. Use your data from Google Analytics to tell you when your post performed well. Stick with what worked.

6. Timing for social media outlets

Lots of optimal times on Twitter throughout a day.

Facebook: late day and weekend activity. Friday, 1-4, Wed. 4

Google+: 9-11 AM

LinkedIn: B2B social network. Best times are right before work, lunch break, and 5-6 PM

7. Schedule for Goals

Figure out what content works for the different social networks.

Tip: Think, “My audience could be on any of them, why not publish on all of them?”

Explore with a variety of outlets: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest

When you have evergreen stuff, you can get more traffic for the work you’ve done by sharing again. Day after, week after, month after. Try for 4 tweets a day at the right times.

8. Headline

Nate really likes long headlines – as long as they tell the real story of what they will say in the content. If you come out with a really good headline, you better back that up with really good content.

Resource: Check out this free headline analyzer.

Some that do well are How To, List Posts, and Questions. Give away tools and then give away content that makes the tools better.

 

Most importantly, don’t always follow what your boss says – find out what your customers want. Send out a survey and find out how they engage – video? blog? photos?

Follow these tips and you’ll be well on your way to rockin’ the digital content world.

Thanks again to Nate and CoSchedule for sharing these pro tips!