Quality content is not created in 10 minutes, but through careful planning. It’s not easy to create quality content because it takes a lot of time and effort, sometimes even money. Like a business, content is the product of your blog, having a good product will make your blog “sellable”.
Here’s how to create a drafting plan as the foundation of your content.
Think like a blog reader
Someone wants to read on your blog because they are fascinated by the topic or because the content feels capable of solving the problem. Therefore, before creating content, first consider what topics they are interested in. The most effective way is to pretend to make a reader alphabet for your blog, or a reader persona.
That is, you imagine the personality of someone who reads your blog in full. For example, for the GuideIM.com blog, here are some of the personas:
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- A man/woman aged 18-24 who has just started a blog with the aim of earning an income. He is new to the world of blogging and wants to learn ways how to make his blog popular and how to earn from his blog.
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- Men/women aged 21-31 who have an offline business and want to expand their business online. This person knows the magnitude of the benefits that he can get by expanding into the internet, but he doesn’t understand at all what steps to take.
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- An online marketer, ages 21-39, receives a regular income online and owns an Internet-based business. He wanted to learn advanced techniques of online marketing and increase his income through new methods.
Here are 3 examples of some of the reader personas of the ToolsIM blog. Next, note this persona anywhere you can easily see it. Every time you want to create new content, satisfy the dream of one of these personas.
What do they want to know?
Good content, of course, must provide new understanding for its readers, but what do they really want to know? The easiest way to find out what they are interested in is to go directly to the community site where they usually live hang out .
If your blog is about fitness, then visit a fitness institute. Almost all niches have their own institutions. Use Google to search for these forums with keywords: “niche” + forum.
As a reference, the following screenshots are from the guitar institute at musicians.com
From these 10 threads alone you will be able to receive content that is truly able to satisfy them. What’s more, most of these threads already have answers. You just need to make it back. Even if your blog is in Indonesian, don’t limit the community to only those who speak Indonesian. English-speaking communities are usually busier and you can find more inspiration.
Apart from forums, several communities on social media are also capable of being an alternative:
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- Facebook Groups
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- Google+ Community
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- Quora
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- Yahoo Answers
What are they reading?
To find the “basic material” of the content, you can also carry out a content search by utilizing several other sources, namely by looking for other readings that they like.
First, by using BuzzSumo . Enter your content candidate topic then enter it into the search field on BuzzSumo. This tool will issue search results in the form of well-known content from international blogs. Second, similar to the first method but the tool used is Topsy . With Topsy you can get tweets from other people who have published content according to the topic you entered. Third, look for well-known blogs that have topics similar to your blog. Then use QuickSprout to get which content is most popular on the blog.
In this way you can get many articles that are favored by readers. I need to remind you not to duplicate the content that you get, you have to create better content than what you have found here.
Time for keyword research
Many people misunderstand about keyword research. Many use keyword research systems to get new views of content. Wrong.
If you enter keywords into the research tool, the results that are issued are not many and are only around these keywords. For example, if you enter the keyword “new clothes”, then what will come out is “buy new clothes”, “cheap new clothes”, and the like.
As a result, you will not get many ideas and you will get lots of articles with similar topics (the reason is that everyone uses this method). Even though the right way to research keywords is to find the main topic first with the methods above. Then we just enter this topic into Google Keyword Planner or similar tools.
The goal of keyword research is to find out which combinations of words generate the most search volume. Not to discover new topics.
Content creation process
As I said earlier, quality content will not be finished in 10 minutes. At least you need 1-2 hours if you go through the right process, even more than a day. This is what the stages and duration of working on content in the form of articles look like:
- Topic exploration (20 minutes – 1 hour per topic)
- Writing ideas/framework (15 – 30 minutes)
- Post writing (1 hour)
- Repair and formatting ( 20 minutes)
- Drawings/designs (15 – 30 minutes)
The process of extracting this topic should be carried out continuously. That is, when you find an idea posted, write it down immediately on your cellphone, notebook, or if I use it Trello .
Why write post ideas/outlines? Articles that are beautiful and easy to read are usually detailed and the writing process is complex (but the risks are not complex). To facilitate the writing process, it is necessary to work on the framework.
Don’t be stingy with time, as bloggers, it’s only natural that we spend the most time on the writing process.
Promote content results
Even though the link I provided above has discussed content promotion, I will explain it again and add it here. Content promotion is sometimes forgotten because we judge that creating quality content is enough. Especially if you have spent hours creating content, it’s a shame not to be promoted.
The most effective way of special offers is to return to the institutions and social media where we get inspiration for this content. By answering the questions of community members there, we will get readers and also a good name.
