How to make a compelling Content Marketing Strategy (2020 Updated with Innovative Ideas)

This is my complete model for content marketing strategy in 2020. In this brand new guide, you will discover:

• What a content marketing strategy is?
• How to promote your content
• Content formats that are working today
• The leading content marketing patterns in 2020
• New content development techniques
• Great deals of sophisticated ideas, strategies, and techniques

Content Marketing Strategy Checklist

STEP#1: FIND A PROVEN TOPIC

STEP#2: FIND A KEYWORD FOR SEO

STEP#3: CHOOSE A CONTENT FORMAT

STEP#4: PUBLISH AN AMAZING PIECE OF CONTENT

STEP#5: OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT FOR SEO

STEP#6: CONTENT PROMOTION

STEP#7: TRACK YOUR PERFORMANCE

STEP#8: SCALE CONTENT MARKETING

What Is Content Strategy?

A content strategy describes the management of basically any concrete media that you own and produce: composed, visual, and downloadable.

It is the piece of your marketing strategy that continually shows who you are and the proficiency you give your market.

You may have heard how crucial content production is to the development of your service; however, as you will see throughout this post, it requires to have a well-planned function. When you establish a content strategy, there are some essential things to think about:

Whom you are Creating Content For

Who’s the target market for this content?

For the number of audiences, are you producing content?

Simply as your company may have more than one kind of consumer, your content strategy can accommodate more than one kind of reader or audience.

Utilizing a range of content types and channels will assist you in providing different content to each kind of audience you want and engage everybody your business works with.

The problem it’s going to solve for that audience

Preferably, your services or product fixes an issue you understand your audience has. By the very same token, your content coaches and informs your audience through this issue as they start to determine and resolve it.

A sound content strategy supports individuals on both sides of your item: those who are still determining what their primary difficulties are, and those who are currently utilizing your item to conquer these obstacles.

Your content enhances the services you’re using and makes your clients more competent users of your item.

What Makes You Unique

Your rivals likely have a comparable item as yours, which suggests your possible consumers require to understand what makes your product much better than the others. This is where content is available.

To show why you’re worth purchasing from, you require to explain why you’re worth listening to.

The Content Formats You’ll Focus On

What types will your content take? Infographics? Videos? Post?

After you have determined the subjects you wish to take a position on, you’ll require to figure out which formats to budget plan for so you can best reveal that position.

The Channels Where It’ll Be Published

Simply as you can produce content in various formats, you’ll likewise have multiple channels you can release to.

Channels can consist of owned residential or commercial properties, such as your site and blog site, and social network homes, such as Facebook and Twitter.

We’ll talk more about the social network content strategy in the detailed guide later on in this article.

How You’ll Manage Creation and Publication

Finding out how you’ll produce and release all your content can be a difficult job. A content strategy must understand who’s developing what, where it’s being released, and when it’s going live.

Today’s content methods avoid the mess by handling content from a subject viewpoint. 

When preparing a content calendar around subjects, you can quickly picture your business’s message. Assert that you are writing as an authority in your market or field. Find out more about topics in content strategy in the video listed below.

How to Do Content Marketing?

Alright, so now I’m going to show you exactly how to use content marketing to get more traffic, more social share, more backlinks, and more customers.

It is the same strategy and technique that I used to get 2 million people to visit my site last year. If you want to get a better result from your content, you’ll love this step-by-step guide.

Let’s start it right now!

You should read the same advice again and again?

– Public short, 500-word blog posts

– Make sure to keep your blog updated with fresh content

– You need to publish a new post at least once a week.

That stuff might have worked back in 2018, but it doesn’t necessarily work today.

Actually I am always thinking of a completely different strategy!

In fact, if you want to grow your blog into one of the most popular marketing blogs on the planet  (or …whatever your niche or industry is), you need to do precisely the opposite of what these so-called experts recommend.

Instead of a short blog post, you should only publish long-form comprehensive guides

Developed directly by you or any way in very strick cooperation.

We will get to this later on better!

Moreover, instead of keeping your site updated with fresh content, you should only publish a new post every 2 to 4 weeks.

We will get to this also later on better!

And instead of publishing something because it’s Monday, you better start to make a calendar to create and search your original content, only release it when you are convinced it is world-class stuff.

With all of these elements, let’s get into the specific steps:

Step#1: Find A Proven Topic

Your first step is to find the topic, but not just any question. It is a topic with a proven track record. Here is precisely how to do it:

1. Checkout content from one of your competitors that’s done really well.

You can go to other competing blogs and keep an eye out for posts that have lots of social shares comments or both.

For instance, I’m in the SEO niche and other small niches, and one of my main competitors can be for example CoSchedule, Crazyegg, Moz. And a while back, you will have to look through some of the latest content, and I noticed that blog posts site audits tended to do really well.

So, I understood I should have created a post called the ultimate SEO site audit.

Because that post is based on a proven topic, it quickly raked up social shares and backlinks.

Plus, your new post can rank on the first-page form your target keyword.

1. Look at competitor podcasts.

This is just like the approach we just talked about, but instead of looking at your competitor’s blogs, you will need to look at other podcasts.

I am sure that are some of your competitors who have a really curated podcast, let’s face it, many have a podcast these days. Check out their episode list. This way, you can discover some amazing topics you never thought about before.

1. Get topic ideas from online communities.

For instance, let’s say that you run a blog about the Paleo diet.

When I look at Paleo threads on Reddit, I noticed lots of questions focused on dessert, which shows me that there is a lot of demand for dessert related content in a paleo space.

You can use this exact process on Quora or on forums where your target audience hangs out, and if you want to scale this technique, I recommend trying out a tool called ”Answer the public.” This is a completely free tool.

This tool presents you with all sorts of popular questions, topics that people have in mind. And this leads you directly to the second step.

Step#2: Find A Keyword For Seo

After you have found a topic that your target customer is interested in, it’s time to find the exact keyword that they use to search in Google. Here is how you will have to do within this step:

Use YouTube and Google Suggest. 

This is an old-school keyword research strategy that most people still use all the time.

To use it, you start to type in one of the topics you found in step number one and then write down Keywords that Google suggests, and you can repeat the same process in YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and more.

Next, use searches related to, to find long-tail keywords.

Do you have noticed that there are these searches related to the area at the bottom of the Google search result?

If you don’t, you should quickly realize that it a goldmine of keyword ideas. For instance, if you search for a specific tour location and scroll to the bottom of the results, you will get a list of those awesome keywords.

The best part is that these keywords are not from some third-party tool, but they come straight from Google.

Step#3: Choose A Content Format

When I hear the word content, I automatically think about a blog post. 

However, a blog post is just one of many types of content formats that are out there. Beside Blog post, any other web page, there are YouTube videos, Native Video (For Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter), Lead Magnets, EBooks, Infographics, Podcasts, Quizzes, and more. 

All of those is there one format that works?

Not really.

The critical point here is to choose an arrangement that works best for you.

Focus on blog posts; are you an awesome writer?

Do you love getting in front of the camera?

Then make a video. Or maybe you are a fantastic designer, in that case, you would want to create a piece of visual content.

In fact, you don’t need to stick to one format.

You could take the same topic and cover it using several different forms. Some years ago, I started publishing various guides, and posts did really well.

All customers who decided to make a YouTube Videos on those topics brought in thousands of views every month.

There is definitely no perfect content format. You need to choose a format that you can crush and move on to the next step.

Step#4: Publish An Amazing Piece Of Content

It’s harder than ever to get your content to stand out.

In fact, if you look at Word Press stats, there are more than 2.5 million blog posts published every single day.

They also report that page views are down for the first time in 12 years, and we all think because of the very positive booming of other platforms like Youtube.

It is totally and always possible to create awesome content that stands out, but for your content to stand out among the millions of blog posts that come out every day, your work needs to be amazing.

Here Is How To Do It:

             1. Publish extremely actionable content with great CTA.

 It doesn’t matter if your site is about cars or economy; people want content that they can use right away.

For instance, when I was doing research for this article, I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube and listened to Podcasts about content marketing.

They were mostly filler advice. They tell you to make up the process for creating content, but they never showed you how! That’s why I personally prefer to explain every technique in a simple way. That’s why this article considered actionable content.

               2. Use lots of examples in your content. 

When it comes to content, there is one thing I found to be true; people love visual examples and lists.

According to the research, visual examples make learning significantly easier, which I include lots of examples in the article.

Now, do examples take a little bit more work than just saying do this or that?

The answer is YES.

Is it worth it?

Absolutely YES.  

                3. Focusing on your content UX. 

When people think about this concept, the user experience, they think about things like the software, but as it turns out, the content has a user experience too.

For example, if you read a post that the text is all squished together, you will find it really hard to read.

That’s bad content UX. On the other hand, if you read a blog post that has a big font and lots of white space which makes the post easy to read and skim.

That’s good content UX. To be clear, content UX is not just for blog content.

If your podcast content UX is the quality of your audio and if you are making a video, content UX is that video production value. In other words, when you make it easy for people to consume your content, it has a much better chance of driving targeted traffic to your website.

Step#5: Optimize Your Content For Seo

Literally, there are dozens of ways to optimize your content for SEO, but these suggested three strategies are working best right now.

1. Optimize for click-through rate. 

As you have heard, Google uses your site’s click-through rate as a ranking signal.

In other words, the more people click on your site in the search results, it will generally rank.

That’s why you want to make your title tag super enticing to click on.

For instance, the original title for a blog post did not have any brackets or parentheses, but I realized that I could make this tile even more compelling by adding intriguing text, add ons, more curious content such as (step-by-step case study) in the parentheses.

Try to do that more and more!

Next, use your keyword a few times in your content, especially in the first 150 words.

For example, I use my target keyword Content Marketing Strategy more than a few times in the post, including, of course, the first 150 words.

Do not stuff the keyword randomly; instead, include your target keyword where it makes sense. That way, Google can see that my page is about how to do a Content Marketing Strategy.

1. Link out to other websites. 

For example, an industry found a clear correlation between external links and Google rankings; then, whenever it makes sense, link out to resources that help you readers learn more about the topics that you cover in your article.

Step#6: Content Promotion

You need to be serious about content marketing. You need to learn about content promotion.

When I say to promote your content, I don’t mean sharing your content on social media sites, I talk about strategically promoting your content, so it gets lots of shares of links and traffic.

But how do you do it?

Here are three strategies that are working great for your content promotion:

          1. Content roundups. 

Roundups are blog posts that curate the best content from that week, and if you can get your link in front of someone that runs a roundup, you have a good chance of getting a link.

The best part is that there are roundups in pretty much every niche under the sun. For example, there is a roundup in the wine niche, and because your content actually makes their roundup better, you don’t need to beg for a link.

          2. Email newsletter. 

When it comes to content promotion, nothing beats email. For example, I sent out an email to my email subscribers to promote a blog post, and I also share it on Twitter.

A number of clicks on Newsletter jump up very high compared to Twitter.

So, if you want to get lots of eyeballs on every piece of content that you publish, you definitely want your email subscribers to know you just published something.

          3. Have you bosted Boosted Facebook posts?

Many people spend thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, and the result they learned from that experience can be harmful if you don’t know how to use it well.

What you should do is to “Retargeting.” 

For instance, I recently boosted a Facebook post.

Because I used retargeting to reach people that already visited my website, I only paid a small amount of money per click, which is my niche digital marketing is 3-5 times less than you would typically pay.

Step#7: Track Your Performance

So you just published a fantastic piece of content. It is based on a proven topic that has excellent content UX.

And you promoted it using the strategies that I just shared with you. The question is this one:

How do you know if all that stuff actually worked?

Here are two metrics that I recommend focusing on:

          1. Traffic. 

The bottom line, the whole point: this content marketing thing is to get more traffic.

So if your content isn’t bringing in more traffic, it is probably time to switch things up that content marketing and SEO can take time to kick in sometimes months.

For example, the traffic numbers from the early days of MyThailandTours, it took about 9 months for visits and analytics to really take off, and if I give up early on because the content wasn’t working, I wouldn’t have seen a huge traffic spike that got me going.

          2. Conversions. 

ROI, business goals, KPIs, whatever you want to call, basically with this metric, you’re answering the question, “is the content actually helping us sell more stuff?”

As you may already know, you can measure conversions in Google Analytics. If you see conversions moving up along with traffic, that is a sign that your content marketing is really working.

It is sometimes hard to measure those indirect sales that come from content marketing.

For instance, the number of conversions that I get that come directly from YouTube is really low, and if I only looked at Google Analytics, I would probably say YouTube is a waste of time.

 But I also discovered that my YouTube channel is a huge source of subscribers and sales. In fact, lots of new customers specifically set the YouTube channel as the main reason that they decide to buy a product. And it shows that the YouTube video is paying off.

Step#8: Scale Content Marketing

At this point, your content marketing is working well. You are getting more traffic leads and sales than ever before.

But this point you’re probably wondering how to scale the stuff. Before giving the answer, I have a quick word of warning I don’t recommend scaling by pumping out a bunch of blog posts; that is what most of the people doing at this stage, and it hurts them.

Instead of continually putting out awesome stuff, they start to focus on quantity, and because their content isn’t as good as it was previously, people stop reading.

I’m sure that you can think of a blog that you used to follow that fell into this trap.

Of course, you definitely want to scale, but you don’t want your quality to suffer because of it. For instance,

I only plan to follow my established ideas and create a total of about 3 to 6 posts on this blog each month.

Following the process a repeated with success on other websites.

A secret is to focus on scaling quality, not concerning too much about quantity.

A few years ago, a post blog was published in Google ranking factor study. The post was totally different from the type of stuff I used to read.

I then decided to follow the system! Not only that, unlike a small list post or a case study, which you could do it yourself, you have to assemble a team.

In the end, that new style did really well. It generates great traffic.

Plus, that single post has been linked to from over 2000 different domains. There you have my eighth step content strategy.

Five Simple Blog Revisions 2020

Now, I want to tell you about five super simple blog revisions you should make in 2020. All of these are based on recent Google updates and current data. So they’re really important and definitely worth implementing in your blog.

All right, so how to win on Google in 2020. Certainly, there’s a lot more we can talk about, but these are five super simple things that you can do to change your blog like today that are going to help you to succeed in 2020.

          1. Make sure that your website is well optimized for mobile. 

More than 65% of traffic on the web today is viewed via a mobile device, not via a desktop, and because of that, we should be building our sites more for the mobile experience than for the desktop experience.

However, because we normally write blog posts on a computer and not on the phone, we almost all our time on our own sites from the desktop.

Most WordPress themes are going to handle most of this for you. They’re going to have your website’s going to be responsive, and they’re probably going to have a different menu structure for mobile.

It’s going to look different, and it’s probably going to be mostly fine. But, there are a few things you should do with your content to make sure that it’s a better user experience for mobile.

          2. Include a fair amount of white space.

If your website on the desktop and especially on mobile is just full of content, big blocks of text photos.

Just not much space in between things. It’s overbearing, especially on a mobile device. If you see just the whole screen is constantly filled with information that’s not a good user experience, and people are more likely to bounce.

          3. Big blocks of text.

 What looks like a normal paragraph on a desktop computer can take up one, two, even three screens on a mobile device, and if you have to scroll like this to get through a single paragraph, it’s just overbearing for users.

It feels like a major time commitment. It’s the same impression when you read a book and the chapters are like 30 pages long, and you’re like, do I want to start this chapter cause it’s going take a while to get done.

At least I have that experience. That’s how it is on your blog.

Remember this!

Even when the paragraph is only like ten sentences long, so, stop writing the five-paragraph essays that have super long paragraphs where you’re proving an entire point in one paragraph and start breaking up and changing the various links of paragraphs.

And this!

Have a three-sentence paragraph followed by a one-sentence paragraph, maybe followed by a five-sentence paragraph, but never allow a paragraph to be more than about five or six lines long when it’s in the WordPress editor in Gutenberg.

If it’s more than six lines long there, it’s going to be way too long on a mobile device.

          4. Every blog post should shoot to win the snippet. 

The way we do that is by writing the best two to three sentence answer to the primary search question. So if you’re writing a blog post that’s meant to answer a specific question, answer it very clearly, succinctly, and with good information within a couple of sentences.

The reason that’s going to catch me flak from some of you is you’re aware that Google very recently put out an update where it used to be you could win the snippet position number zero, and you could also win position number one or two or three.

          5. Write headlines that appeal to people. 

In the past, where keyword dominated search results were just the way things were done. It mattered to write a headline that would let the computer know, let the algorithm know what your content is about.

That was important for ranking with the Burt updates and many updates and even preceding that.

Google is moving away from keyword-based search results and moving towards semantic-based search results based on what they think you intend, and what you mean by the things you search.

Now

It’s far more important to convince the human to click on your article than it is to try to convince the algorithm that your article is what you say it is.

The content in your article makes it clear to Google what your content is about. So titles that appeal to people by one, making sure that the title is relevant and descriptive for your content.

Making sure it’s concise, short enough that it will fit on the SERP, and then make sure that it also is appealing. So rather than just having a short title that’s descriptive, throw on something to it that makes it stand out from the others.

          6. Your website needs to have a good about page. 

This is getting more and more important as Google is expanding the definition of what falls into Y M Y L; it used to be that sites that had topics on your money and your life required a higher level of E A T.

But the definition of Y M Y L is moving to your opinions, your politics, your news, and many, many other topics.

And so it’s getting more and more important for all websites to establish a certain level of authoritativeness even if you’re in a fairly small niche.

a. The First step is to have an about page. A lot of blogs have just ignored this, or they have an about page that’s pretty trivial. Think about what you would want to see if you were looking at a website in your particular industry.

What kind of information about the organization that’s behind the website? Would you want to know to have a level of confidence that that information is legitimate? That’s what Google wants to see, and that’s what users want to see. And that’s how you can stand out a little bit above the crowd.

b. If you’re not the primary author on your website, list yourself as the editor of the site and give your background and why you have any level of credibility with this content. 

 If you are not familiar with your topic and you’re using outsource writers, then put together a pseudonym.

Build that about page around your company, your organization and give yourself a little bit of credibility that way and build up that authoritativeness with the about page being sort of the hub and the center of where you would send people to see why you have credibility in your industry.

          7. Embed videos on your website. 

The reason it’s simple is that you just go to YouTube, click the share button, grab the embed code, and just put it in your blog, and the video will appear there.

This is a part of the license agreement that video creators have with YouTube.

If that option is there, then you are allowed to put that video anywhere you want.

As long as it’s embedded back to YouTube, the creator of the video still gets credit for those views.

But what you get is better user experience in many cases, and you get people staying on your blog longer. Both of those things actually feed into the Google algorithm.

As well as other search engine algorithms, the more you can help the user, the better your articles will rank for future users.

And here’s how it’s extremely helpful.

Whenever you’re writing something in your blog post that’s kind of visual, you’re just trying to describe something that’s a little bit hard to explain in text.

Well, you could put in some photos, but if you just put in a video now, you can get users to click on that and stay on your website substantially longer.

It gives them the help they need, and it lets search engines know that users are staying on this page longer, which alerts them that it’s more helpful.

You can; instead of having to have a bunch of stock images in your blog posts that kind of feel fake anyway, you can use videos instead. It gives users kind of the same break that they get from the text.

It’s even more helpful because it’s highly relevant, it helps you, and it helps the video creator and helps the user.

Three Significant Tips Before Posting Your Content

You spend hours writing one piece of content, hoping that it’s going to bring in thousands of page views over the years to your website.

But if you don’t do these three things before you publish, you may waste all of that time of writing your post. So let’s not waste any time here.

Tip#1:

 The first thing that you should definitely do, every time you’re going to publish content, whether it’s a blog post or a video on YouTube, is to look through that content the way Google or the way the search engines are going to treat that content.

And that’s hard to do. It really is when you’re just starting out.

Do this exercise, think like Google; you think like spam this thing with keywords and all those things. And that’s not very different, but there are some processes that we want you to look through before you publish that can make a big difference.

• You need to look at who did you link out to because to Google that says something about you as well and the type of content you’re producing. 

You know, did you just link out to someone’s blog?

Or did you find a white paper from a college or a university or a government website that had a more scientific, a resource that you could have linked out to that says something about you?

So look through your links and say, what would that say about me if a machine were reading this?

• Make sure that you use the type of language that’s going to make it easy for Google to know what the topic is about. 

Let’s say we wrote a blog post that’s all about smokers, and we keep using the term smoker everywhere.

Google probably knows that we’re talking about pellet grills here, but it probably wouldn’t hurt if somewhere in that blog post we use the term pellet grills just make it really easy for the AI to know that we’re talking about pellet grills and not Marlboros.

It feels a little bit Google 2005 because Google has really improved a lot of semantic searches, but it does make a big difference.

When you’ve answered the main question, and now you’re giving some kind of other information around it, just think about it for a second, make sure we’re using the type of language that a searcher would use because the first thing that Google is using to rank websites more than links or anything else is relevance.

And so just give some thought to it and make sure we’re using that natural language.

• Look at the part of your content. 

That should be a Google snippet. The part of your content that really answers a specific question.

Let’s consider whether this is the right answer or not. Is this the answer that should appear in a Google search?

If somebody searched that topic, go to the search results page, and just critically examine your snippet.

Should what I wrote here to be the answer that Google gives us the snippet. If not, then let’s go rework that section of the blog post again.

Now just think about what data you can give the AI that would just, if an AI could smile, it would smile. It is likely to let it harvest some beautiful data from your website.

• Again, just read your content.

The way Google’s going to read your content is to go through all the subheadings in this blog post and just make sure that all of them are highly relevant to the main topic of the article.

If ever we stray very far from that main topic of the article, it makes it difficult for Google to really know what this article is even about.

In the blog posts, it can be really easy to make this mistake. It’s like you’re playing telephone; it starts to get weirder and weirder as the subheadings are irrelevant.

You just need to make sure that every single post does not stray, always ask yourself what the main topic of the article is and just keep it all highly on point.

So it’s really clear to the search engine to tell whether this article is about. So all of this information was all about looking at your posts like a computer’s going to read your post, at least being aware of it.

Tip#2: 

If this blog post or this YouTube video, whatever piece of content you’re creating, got 100,000 views, what would it do for you?

The point is when you’ve created this content, and you’re about to put it out in the world, think, how could I monetize this?

How could I get some value out of this? And oftentimes, it is like, what if I created this cool downloadable resource?

Could I get an email? Maybe that email list doesn’t monetize yet. That’s fine, but I can get your email, and I can start sending you newsletters.

Now

 I have an opportunity down the road when I do have a really good offer for you to monetize that.

Maybe I don’t have a course today, but if I just did this one little thing or this video, if I just put in this call to action, it would lead people to, of course, later on, if I were to create it.

And so just keep that in mind before you hit publish on that blog post.

Can I make this blog post worth more to me than just the ad revenue?

And that’s a really key point too. If you ask yourself this question and the only answer to the question is I can earn whatever ad revenue comes from 100,000 page views, then you’re probably missing out on some opportunities.

Tip#3:

If this is the first article or video that somebody watches from you, would they trust you?

You know, we’ve consistently built sites to success, and when we say something about SEO and blogging and YouTube, it matters to you.

I don’t know if I trust you. It’s an important thing to do, especially in the age of YouTube and everywhere else online that we get in the habit of having.

If you’re meeting us for the first time, sentence, or throwing things in there that people will just naturally understand that this person has some kind of credibility.

For someone, this is their first blog post that they’re reading from you, or it’s the first YouTube video that they see from you, and you have to establish credibility.

Questions and Answers Section 

1. How do you write a content marketing strategy?

Eight Steps to writing a content marketing strategy:

STEP#1: FIND A PROVEN TOPIC

STEP#2: FIND A KEYWORD FOR SEO

STEP#3: CHOOSE A CONTENT FORMAT

STEP#4: PUBLISH AN AMAZING PIECE OF CONTENT

STEP#5: OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT FOR SEO

STEP#6: CONTENT PROMOTION

STEP#7: TRACK YOUR PERFORMANCE

STEP#8: SCALE CONTENT MARKETING

2. What is the difference between content strategy and content marketing?

Content Strategy is the thoughts and analysis aimed at creating a successful marketing plan for content. Content marketing is the product itself that follows on from the plan. This will, of course, overlap. 

3. What is a content strategy framework? 

Content strategy framework is a structured master plan on how you will set about developing material, why you’ll be developing it, for whom you will be producing it for, and how it aspects into the purchasing procedure.

Secret parts of an efficient material structure are Goals and Clear cut audiences. 

4. Why is content marketing strategy important?

Since it permits you to link with and inform your consumers and leads, content marketing assists to enhance conversions, not just are you working to construct trust and relationships; however, you are likewise motivated conversions by providing customers the details they require to make an informed buying choice.