How to create good content

The most obvious definition of "good content" is something your consumer finds useful and wants to read and share. This is the type of content they'll return to your web real estate to find more of, which will contribute to your bottom line. Some ideas of good content are interviews, thoughts, experiences, good ideas you get from friends and readers and case studies that are relevant to your audience.

What your content is about will depend on your audience. Before you begin your content marketing campaign you will have analysed your audience and got to understand their demographics, their interests, their online reading habits, and other important information. This information can tell you at least what kind of content they like, and hence, you should be creating.

Once you know this, you'll need to create fresh, relevant and high quality content, and share it across social networks. Your content needs to be original and establish you as a "thought leader" in your field - the place your audience goes to first to get information on a chosen subject. Curated content, collections information on a relevant subject, are also useful to the consumer, as they can save time searching through the cluttered web space looking for useful facts.

Fresh and topical

Good content doesn't only need to be fresh and topical, it also needs to be varied - large chunks of text can be heavy on the eye. Links, videos and images can all interest and attract readers to your website, encouraging them to keep reading and to share the content via social media.

Blogging, writing articles and white papers, curating content, adding links to YouTube videos and sourcing copyright-free stock images takes time and skill and, if you don't have internal content producers, it might make sense to hire the services of a content marketing specialist to lend a hand.

Now that you know how to create good content, we'll look at its job in my next opinion piece.