If you want to attract the right type of customer–your Ideal Customer–into your business and position yourself as the go-to company to solve their problems, then you need to be producing lots of high-value, quality content on a consistent basis that shows the world you are the company that solves a particular problem.
But producing content is hard.
- It takes time.
- Where do I get my ideas for content?
- Where do I start?
In this article, we’ll show you a process and provide a framework you can download to be up and running with delivering high-quality content on a regular basis today.
Here’s what you need…
Headlines
How do you get inspiration for headlines? What kind of content is your Ideal Customer interested in?
To gain some insight into what your Ideal Customer might already be reading, go to feedly.com and signup for a free account. Feedly is a news aggregator application. It compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources you can customize.
Once you’ve signed up, type in the business sector your Ideal Customer falls into and choose a few news feeds to add to your Feedly dashboard. Now you’ll be able to see what people are interested in and are talking about in that particular space.
Let me give you a template for headlines that actually convert and get read.
The question that people have when they’re consuming content on the Internet is very simple: “What do I get and how easy can I get it?” So here is a blueprint or a template that you can use to start writing headlines. I’m not suggesting you write all of your headlines using this framework, but this is a place to get you started.
HEADLINE TEMPLATE
# of Ways You Can [Receive Benefit] OR [Remove Headache]
Here is an example based on this headline template:
5 Simple Tweaks You Can Make on Your Website in the Next 7 Days to Increase Leads
As you come up with headlines you think might work, archive your headline ideas in a spreadsheet or Evernote or whatever works for you. The idea is to develop a repository of content topics that are ready to go to get your creative juices flowing.
Now, schedule some time in your calendar, once a week, to write some content.
Content
Many people get stalled at this point. They say, “Content is hard. It takes time.” Yes, that’s true, but again, I’m going to give you a framework that will help you start writing content and knocking it out quickly. Here are the six main points to cover in your content to give you a place to start:
- The Promise
What is the promise of the content? How is the person going to be better off after reading your blog post or listening to your podcast? - The Problem
This section of your content needs to outline the problem that they are facing. This is designed to reinforce why they should read your article. - Mythbusting (optional, but highly suggested)
If you can bust a myth in any piece of content that you can create, it goes a long way to positioning you as the expert. - The Method
In this section, you actually present your 3 to 7 teaching points. - Dos and Don’ts
Outline some of the tips for the advanced and the mistakes that newcomers make. - Next Steps
Finish off your piece of content with a call to action or an action step. Give your readers something to do and they are far more likely to remember you.
Publishing Calendar
Now that you’ve got your headlines, you’re creating content on a regular basis, you need a publishing calendar. There are multiple tools out there you can use for this. I simply use Google Calendar. We work to publish a blog post every Monday.
To download a copy of our Content Creation Framework, click here.
If you need help developing your content or just don’t have the time to do it, contact us. We’ll be happy to help!
