7 Must Haves For Engaging Content

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

Creating content that speaks to your audience on a regular basis can sometimes seem like a chore that never gets done - sort of like the dishes in the kitchen sink. Once you clean them up you’re already making new dirty dishes. Once you push out new content, you already need more new content. It never ends. But, it doesn’t have to be a chore. It can be interesting and even fun. After all, a solid content marketing plan is going to produce serious value for your business.

1. Know Your Why – Not just why you have to create content in general, but understand why you’re creating this one piece of content. What is the point of this article, white paper, blog post, or vlog? What do you want to convey to your audience, and why do you want to do it? If you can answer that for each piece of content and know what you want the results to be from pushing out any piece of content, you’ll be able to stay better focused.

2. Understand Who Your Audience Is – Everything you do needs to center on your audience. You should know who they are, what they want, what they need, and why they need it. Each time you produce content you need to know exactly who it is directed to so that you can word everything in a way that resonates with them.

3. Plan Ahead – Don’t create content from the seat of your pants. Instead, craft a plan in advance based on the time of year, holidays, celebrations, and products and services you’re pushing out. Knowing in advance what types of content you need to produce will actually aid creativity, not stifle it.

4. Craft Compelling Titles – Once you know the topics you need to produce content for each week, you can create titles to work with. You can use the titles yourself or send them on to your ghostwriter to do it for you. But, having the titles gives you the keywords and subject matter that the content should be about, to help you get started when it’s time to produce.

5. Mix It Up – Don’t think of content as just articles, or just blog posts. Content can be in any number of forms. By creating many different types of content you will keep the creativity flowing. Some types of content are best suited for a blog post; others are best suited as a podcast or video.

6. Ask Questions – When you’re unsure about what to do, ask a question and then answer it. Often you can use questions that your audience is asking on social media and in forums to frame your content to be something they want to consume. You can bet if one person has asked the question, more than one wants the answer.

7. Make Lists – When you produce content, from blog posts to videos, lists work well. Each point in the list gives your audience a chance to digest the information, and then the next point drives them forward to consume more. Titles that have numbers in them also get a lot more views than other types of titles.

Finally, consistently producing engaging content requires you to adhere to a schedule of some kind. Many people think they can’t produce creatively on a schedule. But the truth is, you can train yourself to be creative by doing it consistently, even when you think you don’t feel like it.

The plan of action that you create, based on the products and services you want to promote, along with the titles, will help you move forward creating consistently engaging content every time.