Tag: content marketing

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Advice from social media and SEO expert Lisa Weinberger

Originally published on TechRepublic. Interview by Nicole Nash.

During a very busy travel year, training internal teams and speaking at conferences, this interview was completed on a 6-hour plane ride.

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If you want to integrate SEO into your social media strategy, read this interview to learn one expert’s approach. She also reveals her favorite analytics, SEO, and social media tools.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, low-quality websites were everywhere, malware and viruses were difficult to avoid, and search engines had a hard time telling valuable content from fraudulent sites. Thus came Search Engine Optimization (SEO), wherein website creators tried to work the search engine system by packing websites full of keywords in a struggle to rise to the top of the search rankings. This practice often turned otherwise great websites into difficult, obnoxious to read, headache-inducing junk that damaged the company’s reputation and cost them business.

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Do you set goals for your content?

Creating content has become the driving force for many online marketing strategies. With the buzzword of “content marketing”, not only does a business need to create engaging and thorough content for their own site, but they also need to consider the marketing plan way before they ever hit publish.

When speaking to many content creators, and discussing the topics they want to create, more times than not they automatically use the word, story or article. I understand, I spent many years creating content just with words so it took me a few years to retrain my brain into thinking about the different content types.

  • Infographics
  • Data-driven surveys
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Slideshows
  • Interactive charts
  • Widgets
  • Social content
  • Visuals
  • Screencasts

Till this day you won’t see me on video (unless someone records my presentation), though I have been approached a few times, to get in front of a camera and use video as a content type. Maybe one day in the future, once I get over my fear of being in front of a camera, will I appear on video. But I have reached outside my comfort zone when developing content to use visuals, audios (even led an internet radio show) and being “PearlyWrites” on social media.

To get back to the original question, when starting to brainstorm about a piece of content, do you set goals first?

Since we know that a piece of content can take a few hours to a few weeks to create, you want to get the most use or “legs” from your efforts. Some goals for content can be:

Depending on what the initial goal is will direct which of the above you are going for. If you are strictly going for rankings, then the brainstorming session will start at the keyword and the conversations that are centered around the particular keyword.

If the goal is to earn authority and attribution, then the first question you ask during brainstorming is:

  • What question are you answering for the user?

Then the second questions are:

  • Who would be interested in this piece of content and why?

Once these questions are answered, it directs the content creator to drill down even further to reviewing what the competition has done and making the decision of how to approach the topic from adding a different perspective, or using a data set which is unique only to your site. Using unique data sets is a strong approach when wanting to hit a few of the above goals. It allows for not only earning authority in the niche but links and gets the community talking about it.

Have other goals not mentioned here? Share & let’s learn together.

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