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Picking the Right Topic for Content Marketing

By Snap Agency October 26, 2017

Content marketing has become some what of a buzzword for small businesses, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not effective. In fact, content marketing is probably one of the most useful marketing tools that small businesses can use.

It has an extremely low barrier entry, in part because of the low cost of content marketing, that means it’s accessible for companies of all sizes. You don’t need a huge marketing budget, as you would with TV or radio ads, instead, you can put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) and get going.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy. You do need to be creative, and you must be strategic in the content that you create and in the way that you market it. If not, you’ll end up wasting your hard earned cash and your limited time.

As with most things, it’s crucial that the first step you take is in the right direction. With content marketing that means that the topic you pick must be spot on, if not, you’ll struggle to see success regardless of how well you market it.

Picking the right topic should be fairly easy because you’ll want to stay within the realm of your businesses speciality, i.e. gardening if you mow lawns. This isn’t just because this is the topic you have expertise in, it’s because you’re going to attract traffic that’s interested in the piece of content and you want them also to be interested in your business.

What Are You Looking For?

When you’re looking for the perfect topic you should be considering; the volume of people interested in the particular topic, how it’s likely to perform on social media, the sites that could potentially give the piece coverage and its relevance to your business.

In a realistic world, you can afford to lose on one of these key points, but any more than that and you might be heading down the wrong path. The goal of this brainstorming should be to come up with the idea that will generate traffic, links and social shares.

That’s why content marketing is so great; it doesn’t just bring customers in today, it helps your SEO so that you can bring in new customers in the future.

With that in mind, it’s crucial that you think of content marketing as both a tool to attract traffic right away and also as a link building method. Of course, it needn’t be one of the other, and it should ideally be both at the same time.

Volume

When we talk about the volume of a keyword we are referring to the number of monthly searches that the term receives on a search engine. But when we talk about volume in content marketing we refer to the number of people in the same who are interested in the topic.

So that you can visualize this a little better and understand what we are explaining, let’s think of the world of sport.

An enormous amount of people love a sport; a smaller amount watches baseball and an even smaller amount support the Toronto Blue Jays, with only a tiny number interested in the kit manager for the Blue Jays. So, we can say that the volume of people interested in sports topic is huge, whereas the number of people interested in the kit manager is relatively small.

With that in mind, it’s probably smarter to create a piece of content around sports in general rather than the kit manager. This is intuitive, but it’s important to understand why that’s the case and it’s because more people are likely to be interested, so more people could consider sharing or linking to your piece of content.

Target Sites and Linkability

Most business owners seem to understand the idea of volume, but many struggles with finding topics that have great ‘linkability’. What we mean by ‘linkability’ is the potential for others to create backlinks to the piece of content.

Some types of content are much more compelling; some will perform better on social media and others are much more link friendly.

For example; educational content will receive more links, but it doesn’t perform as well on social media.

The second thing to consider is the target sites that you want to attract links from. It’s always a good idea to have a list of potential targets before you start creating the content, this way you can craft the content to fit the websites better.

During your research you might discover that your list of target sites are unlikely to link to your piece of content, making it a dud. As you create more pieces of content, this will eventually become intuitive, but it’s relatively complex at first.

That’s why many of our clients have hired us, because we know content marketing like the back of our hand and can get you featured on websites that you wouldn’t be able to achieve by yourself.