If I start writing about why creating content can be beneficial to any sort of website on the web, this will turn into an article about the benefits of producing content.
However, chances are that if you are reading this, you are already aware about these benefits.
With that said, let’s take a moment to talk about publishing frequency and consistency.
Why do you need a long-term content strategy?
If you didn’t already know, here are a few benefits of consistently producing high-quality, value-centric content:
- The search engines take time to take notice. If they simply ranked every website that produced an article on the first page, the search engines’ job will become incredibly difficult. Not to forget, there would be no coherence or consistency in the experience of the users that use said search engines to search for information.
- Consistency in producing content also helps you build a unique audience that you can call your own. These are people that have followed your content and regularly check your website and social media handles to find new content that they will love.
- Finally, consistency allows you to increase the traffic coming gradually but surely to your website. Even if you are not selling anything through your website, there are a myriad of ways in which you can monetize the traffic coming to your website.
Now that we have discussed the why of consistently producing content, let’s think about how you can do it.
To determine that, let’s look at the common reasons why people fail to consistently put out high-quality content.
The Challenges Associated with Producing Content Consistently
Consistently producing great content is one of the most surefire ways to find success online. But then, why isn’t everyone doing it? Here are just a few of the common challenges that stand between everyday people and internet fame:
- Lack of ideas. This one is perhaps the most common and most relatable challenge related to producing content consistently. Coming up with unique ideas, and doing it day after day, week after week, month after month, doesn’t just seem daunting on the outside, but is a real challenge.
- Lack of motivation. Even with consistent efforts into producing and publishing of share-worthy content, the internet can be an unforgiving place. It can take several weeks and months before all this effort starts showing the desired results and that can be incredibly demotivating for anyone.
- Lack of commitment. This one is also very common but only a few people accept that they have this problem. However, the truth is that most of us lack the kind of commitment required to keep producing content consistently without expecting immediate results.
The truth is, all these challenges, when boiled down, can be traced back to a single challenge that most overlook when creating content- the lack of a plan.
On the other end of the spectrum, having a long-term content plan is the one solution that can potentially help anyone overcome the three major challenges associated with consistent production of content.
In the following sections, I will walk you through the exact process of building a long-term content production plan that will ensure you never run out of ideas, have no problems with motivation, and can commit to consistently producing awesome content.
Without further delay, let’s jump right into it:
Building A Long-Term Content Plan: The Steps
Like all good strategies, a long-term content strategy uses your strength and existing resources to make it easier to be consistent with your content production efforts. Let’s see what that means in step 1:
Step 1: Performing A Content Audit
A content audit does exactly what the name suggests, it helps you identify your existing content assets, gaps in your existing content bank, and locate opportunities to create content in the future.
In other words, at the end of a content audit, you should have definitive information about the content you already have. This information can then be used to inform your strategy in the subsequent steps.
As you may have already guessed, performing a content audit involves documenting your existing content inventory. To do so effectively, try to collect the following data points:
- Titles
- Formats
- Targeted Buyer Persona
- Targeted Buyer Journey Stage
- Additional Notes
If you are not selling anything on your website yet, you can ignore the buyer’s journey stage data point. However, you must still have a well-defined audience, whose attributes can be utilized to define one or more buyer personas.
Defining these personas will enable you in the following steps to craft different content buckets that each target a different persona or a different stage in the buyer’s journey.
Not to forget, defining buyer personas will also enable you to work effortlessly with external marketing partners that you may hire in the future, like an SEO company.
Step 2: Competitor Research
When it comes to building a content marketing plan, you can never have too many sources of inspiration. In fact, using a paid or free backlink checker to spy on competitors is a big part of many content marketing strategies. So, it only makes sense to take a download of what content your competition is producing before you start coming up with your own ideas.
When conducting competitor content research, you are essentially collecting the same data that you collected in the previous step, but from your competitors’ websites.
Once you have compiled both data sets, it should be easy to identify gaps in your own content, and that of your competitors. These gaps will help you come up with unique ideas in the steps that follow.
Step 3: Perform An Audit Of All Upcoming Events
No, we are not talking about random events. We are talking about upcoming events in your company that can benefit from the support of content initiatives.
Essentially, you are collecting the following data about upcoming events:
- Event name
- Event type
- Theme of event
- Titles of content that can be used to support event
Collecting this data will benefit you in several ways. Here are just a few:
- You will be able to plan the content needed to support these events. This will enable you to bring the required attention to said events.
- You will be able to plan your regular content production efforts in a way that they don’t get disrupted because of these events.
- You will have plenty of time to think of inbound marketing ideas that can be utilized to support the event.
Step 4: Create Goals For Each Month
Without definitive goals in place, creating a plan is a vain exercise. With goals, you can not only ensure that all your content and content production efforts have a sense of direction, but you can also verify if the content you are producing is actually helping you the way it should.
My recommendation is to follow HubSpot’s SMART goal making strategy. It’s quite simple. It says that your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
An example of a SMART goal would be:
Increasing organic traffic for keyword “content marketing” by 30% within the next 30 days.
Step 5: Create Content Buckets For Each Month
Now that you know what content you already have and what content you will need in the coming months, it is time to create content buckets.
Your existing content types, combined with the information of upcoming events should help you identify different content buckets for each month.
For instance, if you have an upcoming webinar about guest posting, you can dedicate a content bucket to blogger outreach. Within this bucket, you can talk about the best practices involved within the process and how a blogger agency can help.
This way, not only will you have a guiding path for topic ideas, you will also have a set theme for every month’s content. Additionally, when producing content, you will know exactly what purpose the content is supposed to serve (theme/goal), who it is talking to (buyer persona), and how it should be structured (depending on the targeted buyer’s journey stage).
Step 6: Start Writing
With goals and content buckets in place, all that is left for you to do is to come up with finalized titles and start writing content.
When doing so, however, don’t forget to conduct preliminary keyword research for each one of your articles. This way, you can enjoy both SEO and content marketing benefits from the same pieces of content.
Conclusion
A long-term content plan, coupled with relentless implementation can be the differentiating factor between you and your competitors. I hope that this guide will help you craft a content plan that propels your online presence to success.
If you have any questions or queries, feel free to drop them in the comment section and I’ll try my best to reply with a solution/answer.
