What Content Should I Create?

You know what time it is? It's time to learn about the forms of content should consider creating.

Blogs

Blogs are a very popular way to create content. Most people think about blogging when they enter into the content strategy/content marketing realm. Blogs are updated at regular intervals. They have a lot of preexisting familiarity and traction in the market, meaning that if you do content creation on there, people are very familiar with the format.

A cool part of blogging is commenting, guest posts, and you can create track-backs. There's a lot of integration of blogs into the fabric of the community of the web, which can be very helpful to help earn that early traction. When done right, blogs are inherently SEO-friendly and social sharing-friendly.

The challenge with blogs is that they require regularly updated content. You probably don't want to create a blog if you only post once every month. This take up a lot of time and can push great content below the fold on your site.

Data

Research stats, graphs, and charts, are awesome content. Look at all of your data sources and imagine they could be an infographic, then create it. It could be a single chart. It could be a collection of research data. In the search engine world, there are lots of things like eye-tracking charts and click-through rate charts, and things that are showing data in unique formats. People love this.

They're powerful for earning links and citations. There's a barrier to entry from a data collection, analysis, and publications standpoint, because it's very challenging track success as the content spreads. It can become a competitive advantage if you can do some excellent tracking.

Pictures

Photos, graphics, and visuals tend to be shared a lot on the internet. They make their way all over places like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest. The challenge is they often have low engagement. Someone looks at them for three or four seconds, then they click the Back button.

Video

Video has a strong branding impact. On Moz's own blog an average post tended to outperform Whiteboard Friday. Soon Whiteboard Friday got popular and started to perform just as well. The time on-site and the engagement that people have with Whiteboard Friday is a much stronger one than what they'd have with a standard blog post. You watch Whiteboard Friday and you have a memory of this weird looking, bearded guy telling you about marketing things.

Video is also sharable across platforms. It can perform on multiple platforms. Remember that video often doesn't get engaged with. A lot of people won't click that initial video and this can bring down that sharability and that virality it's exceptional.

Video is extremely hard to do well. It's hard to write good scripts. It's hard to find good people to present. It's challenging to get all of the words out correctly. It's challenging from an editing standpoint and a production standpoint.

There are just all sorts of things that make it a strong barrier to entry. If you have those skills, video can be quite good, and if you don't, video can be really tough.

One of the unique things about video is that it can reach YouTube's powerful and very large audience. Remember that YouTube is the world's second largest search engine! It gets a billion plus searches a day.

Interactive Content

Interactive elements, tools, or calculators are very powerful, because they create excellent engagement.

This could be a calculator that helps calculate taxes or mortgage rates. It could be a link graph tool, like Moz's Open Site Explorer. Something like Vizify that takes your social networks and creates awesome landing pages is great too.

These drive a lot of links, shares, and word of mouth if they are done really well. The downside is it's hard to do them well, as hard as video, sometimes harder depending on who you are and your skillset.

Choosing the Right Content

When you're considering what content form you should produce you need to ask, "what are my skills, abilities and resources?" If you have a lot of money, a have a nice film studio, a great camera, and a great crew video might make sense. If I don't have those resources, maybe it makes less sense.

You should consider your audience's needs and their preferences for consumption. People who are professionals at work in the banking industry don't watch a lot of video at work. In fact, for many of them, YouTube is actually banned at work or for people who are on a mobile device, video can be frustrating. Be considerate and empathetic towards their needs.

You should be thinking about the uniqueness of the value that the content provides. Don't ask if this is a really good video, but how is it uniquely better?

How is this video uniquely better than all the blog posts you could read or the infographics you might see? There has to be something unique about it, or it's not going to perform well.

Finally, analyze the ability of the content to perform on the chosen channels. If you're doing a lot of content creation for SEO, you should be thinking strongly about, link back attribution when dealing with any content.