Oct 18, 2017 10:19 AM
(This post was last modified: Oct 18, 2017 10:20 AM by Pixie Interactive.)
Hi folks! So, I recently wrote a blog post for my personal portfolio website, titled "10 Content Marketing Tips You Need to Know" and I thought some of them could certainly help you here at HackForums. There is not at all enough focus on content marketing in this forum, but this is me taking a first step towards that.
I have picked three specific items I think are very relevant for HF users. For all 10 tips, you will have to read them here.
3 Tips for Writing Content That Pops
These days, content marketing is all the rave. Search engines are getting smarter, so traditional search engine optimization like keyword research and meta tags just do not cut it anymore. These days, if you want to succeed on the digital medium, and especially on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, you need an awesome content marketing plan, and you need to base it on a whole lot of data.
I want to help you get started with that. Below are the top 3 content marketing tips you need to know, whether you work in a large company or a small business. I have categorized the tips according to which step of the content marketing process they belong in. I know I wish someone had told me these when starting out in content marketing some five years ago.
I. Sort by Affinity
One of Facebook’s most valuable, but perhaps most overlooked features when it comes to finding out what your target audience is interested in – which is pretty important if you are trying to write content that grabs their attention – is using Facebook’s Audience Insights and sorting page likes by ‘affinity’. A lot of social media marketing gurus and courses will tell you this is the end all, be all of Facebook marketing, and try to push it on you for an unreasonable mark-up. In fact, the tool is free, and it is priceless.
In the example below, I have used Audience Insights to find out which interests are shared among those who like ‘Hootsuite’ on Facebook. I sort the results by affinity, which gives a multiplication factor. If it says, for example ’10x’, that means users who like this page are ten times more likely to also like that page, than the average Facebook user.
![[Image: iy7R9Bm.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/iy7R9Bm.jpg)
Among Hootsuite’s followers, Amy Porterfield (a famous online marketing expert) is the most popular brand to follow and users who like Hootsuite are 290x more likely to follow her. With this information in mind, if I wanted to reach Hootsuite’s key demographic, I would reach out to Amy and suggest we co-author a blog post, or I would write a response to one of Amy’s recent articles, for my followers to read.
Benefit:
By using this clever, free tool, you can find a lot of topics to write about, that you otherwise would have not thought relevant to your following.
How to:
1.Go to Audience Insights and plug the name of the page or interest you want to compare to.
2.Click the “Page Likes” tab
3.Scroll down and click “Affinity” to sort by page affinity.
II. Quora Is a Gold Mine Waiting to Be Tapped
Another brilliant, user-generated way to find interesting topics to write about, is by using Quora. It is basically a user-maintained Q&A session. Users can also select a range of topics they have know-how in, and answer others’ questions. In essence, this means Quora is a constantly maintained catalogue of common questions in your industry, and tapping into that can lead to a lot of blog posts. This very blog post was in fact inspired by a question I answered on Quora.
![[Image: N7XvcbH.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/N7XvcbH.jpg)
In the screenshot above, I have searched for the most recent questions under the topic “Content Marketing”, and already it gives me several ideas for future blog posts (there’s something to get excited about!). I recommend you sign up already now, and start getting familiar with the Quora dashboard.
Benefit:
Users are throwing questions right into your lap, for you to elope with and write a blog post about. It is like your own never-ending FAQ survey.
How to:
1. Sign up on Quora and choose at least four or five topics that you are knowledgeable in, and that relate to your brand.
2. Whenever you come across a question you can answer, do so. This helps build your personal brand.
3. Take note of frequently asked questions or recurring issues, and write a blog post about those, that you can refer to when the question is asked in the future.
III. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
When producing your content, you have to be both careful and creative in shaping your copy. You know users search for a wide range of keywords, and you know it is ill advised to repeat the same string of three keywords over and over again, so how exactly do you go about finding the language your customers use, without sounding like a broken record? Enter LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing.
LSI analyzes a given keyword or keyphrase, and finds closely related keywords to it. This allows you to write in synonymous and flexible language, and the search engines (which use LSI technology themselves) are more than plenty capable of catching those queries. For example, when a user searches for “bike” and you wrote “bicycle” that is still going to be a match, plus you will rank higher for “bicycle” too. LSI is therefore a great tool for growing your SERP ranking across multiple keywords, plus it makes your copy looks closer to natural, fluent speech.
![[Image: mJKUPZF.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/mJKUPZF.jpg)
In the example above, I am researching for this blog post, trying to find closely related words to this topic. You may recall seeing a number of variations on these phrases throughout this blog post. That helps me rank better in overall search results.
This will also help you find keywords to compare in the Google Keyword Planner. See, I told you we would come back to it.
Benefit:
Using LSI techniques allows you to have a more natural, flowing prose in your blog posts, while still hitting all the valuable keywords and their nearest variations. It is great for ranking across a number of keywords, and improving the overall search engine sentiment on your content, as there is no risk of keyword stuffing or other duplicate content like it.
How to:
1. Go to the LSI graphing tool from our friends over at LSIgraph. Write your primary keyword and hit “Generate”.
2. Grab at least the top 25 keywords on the list, and plot them into Google
3. Keyword Planner, or – if you have already identified a primary keyword – use them as synonyms to that keyword throughout your text.
I hope these three small tips help you out in writing for your blog, Facebook page, or wherever you do your SEO optimization. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.
I have picked three specific items I think are very relevant for HF users. For all 10 tips, you will have to read them here.
3 Tips for Writing Content That Pops
These days, content marketing is all the rave. Search engines are getting smarter, so traditional search engine optimization like keyword research and meta tags just do not cut it anymore. These days, if you want to succeed on the digital medium, and especially on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, you need an awesome content marketing plan, and you need to base it on a whole lot of data.
I want to help you get started with that. Below are the top 3 content marketing tips you need to know, whether you work in a large company or a small business. I have categorized the tips according to which step of the content marketing process they belong in. I know I wish someone had told me these when starting out in content marketing some five years ago.
I. Sort by Affinity
One of Facebook’s most valuable, but perhaps most overlooked features when it comes to finding out what your target audience is interested in – which is pretty important if you are trying to write content that grabs their attention – is using Facebook’s Audience Insights and sorting page likes by ‘affinity’. A lot of social media marketing gurus and courses will tell you this is the end all, be all of Facebook marketing, and try to push it on you for an unreasonable mark-up. In fact, the tool is free, and it is priceless.
In the example below, I have used Audience Insights to find out which interests are shared among those who like ‘Hootsuite’ on Facebook. I sort the results by affinity, which gives a multiplication factor. If it says, for example ’10x’, that means users who like this page are ten times more likely to also like that page, than the average Facebook user.
Among Hootsuite’s followers, Amy Porterfield (a famous online marketing expert) is the most popular brand to follow and users who like Hootsuite are 290x more likely to follow her. With this information in mind, if I wanted to reach Hootsuite’s key demographic, I would reach out to Amy and suggest we co-author a blog post, or I would write a response to one of Amy’s recent articles, for my followers to read.
Benefit:
By using this clever, free tool, you can find a lot of topics to write about, that you otherwise would have not thought relevant to your following.
How to:
1.Go to Audience Insights and plug the name of the page or interest you want to compare to.
2.Click the “Page Likes” tab
3.Scroll down and click “Affinity” to sort by page affinity.
II. Quora Is a Gold Mine Waiting to Be Tapped
Another brilliant, user-generated way to find interesting topics to write about, is by using Quora. It is basically a user-maintained Q&A session. Users can also select a range of topics they have know-how in, and answer others’ questions. In essence, this means Quora is a constantly maintained catalogue of common questions in your industry, and tapping into that can lead to a lot of blog posts. This very blog post was in fact inspired by a question I answered on Quora.
In the screenshot above, I have searched for the most recent questions under the topic “Content Marketing”, and already it gives me several ideas for future blog posts (there’s something to get excited about!). I recommend you sign up already now, and start getting familiar with the Quora dashboard.
Benefit:
Users are throwing questions right into your lap, for you to elope with and write a blog post about. It is like your own never-ending FAQ survey.
How to:
1. Sign up on Quora and choose at least four or five topics that you are knowledgeable in, and that relate to your brand.
2. Whenever you come across a question you can answer, do so. This helps build your personal brand.
3. Take note of frequently asked questions or recurring issues, and write a blog post about those, that you can refer to when the question is asked in the future.
III. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
When producing your content, you have to be both careful and creative in shaping your copy. You know users search for a wide range of keywords, and you know it is ill advised to repeat the same string of three keywords over and over again, so how exactly do you go about finding the language your customers use, without sounding like a broken record? Enter LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing.
LSI analyzes a given keyword or keyphrase, and finds closely related keywords to it. This allows you to write in synonymous and flexible language, and the search engines (which use LSI technology themselves) are more than plenty capable of catching those queries. For example, when a user searches for “bike” and you wrote “bicycle” that is still going to be a match, plus you will rank higher for “bicycle” too. LSI is therefore a great tool for growing your SERP ranking across multiple keywords, plus it makes your copy looks closer to natural, fluent speech.
In the example above, I am researching for this blog post, trying to find closely related words to this topic. You may recall seeing a number of variations on these phrases throughout this blog post. That helps me rank better in overall search results.
This will also help you find keywords to compare in the Google Keyword Planner. See, I told you we would come back to it.
Benefit:
Using LSI techniques allows you to have a more natural, flowing prose in your blog posts, while still hitting all the valuable keywords and their nearest variations. It is great for ranking across a number of keywords, and improving the overall search engine sentiment on your content, as there is no risk of keyword stuffing or other duplicate content like it.
How to:
1. Go to the LSI graphing tool from our friends over at LSIgraph. Write your primary keyword and hit “Generate”.
2. Grab at least the top 25 keywords on the list, and plot them into Google
3. Keyword Planner, or – if you have already identified a primary keyword – use them as synonyms to that keyword throughout your text.
I hope these three small tips help you out in writing for your blog, Facebook page, or wherever you do your SEO optimization. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.
