Is Content Marketing Suicide?
It’s no secret that content marketing is a key element to having a successful online presence. Writing a blog not only creates content that can be indexed by search engines, thereby increasing your long tail search rankings, but it also helps build your reputation. For example, I write posts for this blog that cover SEO, social media and web design. I know that there are many small businesses looking to grow their businesses online, and they want to use SEO and social media to do that. Sometimes they even want to build their own websites. You might be one of them. The traditional way of thinking about this would suggest that content marketing is suicide for someone like me. However, in an age of information overload, I know that you can find just about anything you’re looking for. I figure that you might as well find it from me. I figure that if I provide you with the tools and advice that you need to tackle your search engine optimization and social media projects, you’ll start to trust me. As you and your projects grow, and you need more help or advice, it’s not unreasonable to hope that you’ll turn to me. However, most business owners don’t have time to tackle these kinds of projects themselves and my blog is an open look at what I know and how I think about digital marketing.
But I Don’t Know What to Write About?
I suggest (insist) that my clients use content marketing. The most common response I get is: “I don’t know what to write about?“
Coming up with ideas for blogging can be challenging, but it’s far from impossible. If you have a skill, or knowledge, that people need (and you have customers, right?) you’ve got something to write about. The difficulty comes in organizing what you know so that you can present it in an organized and coherent manner. It’s something that every blogger (or editor) struggles with. Even me. So I sit down and I brainstorm.
My brainstorming method of choice is mindmapping. There are tons of great mind mapping tools available, including bubble.us (online) and freemind (desktop), but I prefer pencil and paper – at least to start.
A few weeks ago I sat down and in about twenty minutes I came up with the map pictured below.
A quick count shows nearly thirty terminal items. Each of those endings represents at the very least one blog post. Many of them are broad enough to use as starting points for more specialized mind maps – which will give me more great ideas to write about.