How to Tackle Writer’s Block & Deliver Quality Content

How to Tackle Writers Block & Deliver Quality Content

Creating successful online content for people and search engines is tough! If you doubt this reality, look at all the abandoned blogs, social media platforms, and podcasts that are no longer updated. All of that momentum ebbs away. It’s sad. That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: it is entirely curable.

Facing Blank Page Syndrome In Your Content Marketing

For some content marketers, the prospect of facing a blank page or a blank Google Doc is daunting. Where do you even start? There are a variety of ways to solve this problem.

1 Use a Curation Strategy

With this approach, you rely on your research and professional judgment to bring together great content from around the Web. All you need to do is select a theme. For instance, an event management company might comment on the world’s largest conferences. If you love research, this is a good content strategy. There is one downside: it is more challenging to create a distinctive brand with this approach.

2 Comment on the News

Offering commentary on news stories is a well established way to create content. Some marketing professionals take the process a step further with newsjacking. With newsjacking, you look for any significant event trending in the news and tie it to your company. It can work, but this approach can also fail. For example, beverage brand Stella Artois tied their product to the annual Oscars awards in 2013 to attract attention in a tweet.

Instead, it is better to create commentary directly related to your industry or problems faced by your company. For example, if you run an accounting firm, you could create content about your audit ethics program. You can then tie this content directly to news events such as KPMG’s $50 million fine by the Securities and Exchange Commission. For example, if your firm had recently developed a new ethics program, you could tie that announcement into the SEC fine.

3 Create How-to Instructional Style Content

Explaining how to solve a problem, the steps of a process, and other kinds of “how to” content are some of the easiest ways to create content. With a software company, this content strategy is simple. Explain how to use the product to solve a problem. At CanIRank.com, we’re big fans of this content strategy, as you can see in our ecommerce case study featuring Bavarian Clockworks.

4 Steal Good Ideas

As the old saying goes, good marketers copy, great marketers steal. Does your competition have some content that is performing well? Steal it! Once you have the idea, consider how you can take a new narrative on the same topic. Can you go into more specific data? Can you reposition the piece for your users specifically? Identify how you can write about the same topic with a new or better spin for your users and get started writing! If you aren’t the first person to write about a topic, aim to make your piece better or different than what is already out there. Quality content should always be at the top of your radar.

What should do when none of those strategies seem quite right? Repurpose and get creative.

3 Tactics to Repurpose and get Creative.

User Content Tactic 1: Remix User Content To Create New Content

Analyze user generated content and create a visualization based on that website. For example, Virgin Holidays has used this user content approach to generate intriguing visual content in the form of video.

In this approach to content, users provide the raw data, and you provide the analysis, presentation, and commentary.

User Content Tactic 2: Use Contests to Incentive User-Generated Content

Contests are nothing new in the business world. In SEO and online marketing, contests are a great tool to encourage users to express their views about your brand in their own words. Starbucks, the global coffee giant which made 4.5 billion dollars in profit in 2018, is a master at engaging users with the #RedCupContest. Through this content, Starbucks has received thousands of submissions on social media. That’s a precious resource to use for future content creation.

User Content Tactic 3: Generate Your Own User Data And Create Content About It

As your customers use your product and the web, they are creating data as a by-product of their activities. Previously, we mentioned how Gong.io creates content for sales professionals based on what they observe in their product. IF your product generates such data, that is a great tactic. However, there are other ways to gather data: do your experiment. At CanIRank, we experimented with HARO (Help A Reporter Out): How to Hack HARO for Brand Feedback. In this case, we were the users of another platform.

Write with Promotability in Mind

Creating and publishing new content is an excellent strategy. It is also only the beginning! You can also use user data to assist in content promotion. After all, if you do not promote your content, fewer people will find it, and you will get limited marketing value out of it. Use these tactics to leverage user data in your content promotion.

• Leverage quotes and ask for shares. If you have directly quoted users for feedback on the content asset, ask them to share your asset. If there is no individually identifiable user content, use the other techniques.

• Tag companies and organizations. Does your content piece mention companies and brands? If the content mentions them in a positive light, those companies may be willing to promote your content.

• Contact your super fans to ask them to promote the content. Let’s make a bold statement. Anybody who positively comments on your brand more than once is a superfan! Make a list of these people and ask them to promote your content piece. Not sure who is a superfan? Check your email analytics and make a list of people who have above average open rates for your emails and reach out to them.

• Use your user content to craft a compelling headline. Data based headlines tend to perform well online. Here is an example of examples of a data-based headline from BuzzSumo: We Analyzed 100 Million Headlines. Here’s What We Learned (New Research).

The Conclusion:

As marketing professionals and SEO enthusiasts, we love data and analytics. If you’re like us, you’ve probably spent far more time sparing at Google Analytics charts than is healthy. Studying those data points is helpful, but if you do it too much, you can lose track of your customers. By using user data in your SEO and content efforts, you get direct contact with how your users think and feel. That’s why you need to make space for user data in your marketing program.

Originally published via Medium.