It’s one thing to write some content, publish it, and wait for the hordes of adoring fans and customers to come streaming to your door. Okay, when you’ve awoke from that dream, let’s talk about what it really takes to make your content do the tireless and backbreaking work of an army of men. Here are 5 steps we take when creating content, and they will work for you too!

1. Pick The Right Keywords – If you start out with the right keywords at the outset, half of your work is done for you! Think about what you want this content to do for you, and then go about finding the one primary and several secondary keywords you will use in the piece. Make sure you are using them in the title, near the beginning, and toward the end, and perhaps once of twice more. Don’t stuff!
2. Have  A Goal For Every Piece of Content – Know not only what you are purposing this content for, such as for your blog, an article directory, Web 2.0 site or other, but also what you hope to accomplish with  this piece of content. Is it designed to presell, gain subscribers, be a “persona” piece, or perhaps merely to deliver great value to your readers? Have a goal,  and stick to it!
3. Employ Proper SEO – Make sure your article is optimized well for SEO, so that you stand a good shot at ranking it in the search engines. This also goes for any other place you put it, especially self-publishing sites like Squidoo and HubPages where you can control the on-page SEO somewhat.
4. Get Social – Make sure you let those who follow or are friendly with you on your social networks know that you have published your next opus. Remember: if they re-tweet, or otherwise acknowledge your content, it also goes out to all their followers, and who knows what can happen with that!  (Hint, Hint)
5. Promote It ! – Lastly, make sure to promote your content, wherever it is. This even means dropping links to other sites that you may have guest posted on! If it has links to your site, you want it to become popular! Remember to social bookmark, drop links, and cross promote your content!

There you have it, 5 easy ways to help your content work harder for you. Don’t make the mistake 99% of marketers do, who think the job is done when the writing is finished!

You’ve heard the term “adding value” bandied about a great deal, and if you’re new to the marketing scene, you can be forgiven if at first you are a tad unsure just what value you can add to the conversation. This is understandable. However, it should become an overarching goal of yours to add value wherever you hang your hat online, and to become known for just that. Let’s examine why this is so important.

The first, and most obvious reason why, is that whatever you’re posting will likely have your name on it.  If this is an article, your blog, or a website, then people will be judging the quality of your whole business based on what they see there. If it’s less than stellar content, you can be fairly certain that most of your visitors will be of the one-time variety. This is also easy enough to discern from your site’s stats as well. Are you getting repeat visits? Is your site or blog being bookmarked, commented on, trackbacked to, ReTweeted, or otherwise noted? If not, then either your content isn’t all that memorable or your site marketing needs some help! If no one knows it’s there, does it really help you?

Moreover, lame content in no way helps you to snag any lucrative activities like guest blogging, ad swaps, and high content syndication opportuntities. You won’t be able to convince anyone to give you a shot if you have nothing of value to add. This isn’t limited to articles and blog posts: you can add value through videos, podcasts, consultations, ebooks and courses; but whatever you put out there, it needs to make a value statement about you and your business. Crappy content only takes you so far, about to next month, before you are found out and then summarily ignored!

Valuable content, on the other hand, can do wonders for you! It can land you accounts and gigs you never would have thought you had a shot at: guest blogging appearances, enhanced relationships with others who may be of great use to you in the future, and more and more popularity in the form of natural links to your work, which pays off in direct traffic as well as doing wonders for your SEO! All of a sudden, you’re ranking better — imagine that!

Make adding value your number one priority when it comes to any thing you do online. It will pay off in ways you can’t yet imagine!

Have you ever seen Scribd? What started out as a simple Web 2.0 site for depositing your content has evolved into something far more valuable, and for our purposes, a must-stop along the link dropping highway!

Scribd is an online repository where you can upload your content, and I mean almost any type of content: articles, whitepapers, reports, fiction, musical compositions, slideshows and more where it can be read by Scribd’s community of viewers.  This is very much an authority site, with a Google Page Rank at the time of this writing of 8 for it’s homepage. It is very highly trafficked, with an Alex rank of 213!  This is the very definition of a great place to upload your content!

Not only is it free to do so, but with the amounts of traffic coming through there, the possibility is very good that readers pick up on your content and download it to their sites, or link to it. Of course, the higher quality your material is, the better you will do. Also, Scribd does very well at optimizing their pages, so if you do your part — making sure your work is keyword optimized and of high quality — you stand a very good chance at having your documents on Scribd rank very highly in the search engines! (Not to mention that you could always throw a few links at them to help goose the  process along a bit!)

Another plus is that you can embed contextual links in the body of the content, which do very well with Google. Links from the body count more heavily than do links from navigation bars, footers, and nearly anyplace else. Make sure you use common sense however, and not try to be spammy and pepper your document with a bunch of naked affiliate links. The best use of a site like this is to drive links and traffic to your site or blog.

Scribd is very easy to work with, upload to, and download to your computer, mobile device, or even print on command. There is some premium content there that requires a payment, but for the most part, it is a free site. You can spend a lot of time checking out the various articles, useful spreadsheets and more. Just remember why you’re there in the first place!

It probably goes without saying that you should opt for high value in your web content over mass quantities of it at each and every opportunity. However, there is also a school of thought that exhorts us to get something up, out there, and working for you. While it’s certainly true that action is essential, and a certain “critical mass” may need to be reached before any tangible results are achieved, it’s our view here at Content Divas that great web content has many benefits that lesser quality material does not. Here are just four reasons why you need to think about this!

1. Increased Search Engine Rankings – Good quality content gets better search rankings for several reasons, but the primary reason is because more people are linking to it, ReTweeting it, Stumbling it, bookmarking it, and more. Lesser content typically receives none of these, and consequently fails to enjoy any of the benefits.
2. Repeat Visitors – The better your articles, the more likely people will be talking about them and coming back for more of what you  have to offer. This is a great way to start building authority in your space — by becoming the go-to person for your market and always delivering readable and useful content.
3. Personal or Site Branding – Having a site or blog full of great content, as opposed to very average articles and posts, is a terrific way to help brand either yourself or your site, or both! Once people get wind of your great content and start following you in various ways, you will be practically unable to stop this process from  happening. So, by far the best way to make sure you get a good outcome from this is to start with terrific quality from the beginning!
4. More Opportunities! - By becoming known as someone who creates great content, you’ll find yourself far more in demand. Guest posts will come far easier, and you will be asked to lend your talents to projects you may not have had a prayer at working on before. Remember, with the speed in which things propagate on the Web, this can happen far faster than it may have in the past!

Instead of just putting anything out there, make sure you put your best content forward. In the long run, you’ll benefit far more!

Many marketers these days are utilizing membership sites as a business model. This is a terrific way to go, seeing as how they offer recurring income that lasts for months, (most people last 3-4 months; while you’ve been acquiring more in the meantime, constituting real growth) and can require little to no work other than the initial setup. The setup has even been dramatically reduced, and you can have one up in a day if you’re so inclined.

Notice I said “can” require little work. It can go either way here. If you’re a one man band and doing all of this yourself, you are tasked with coming up with content compelling enough to not only keep the site going, but to be of value and help to your subscribers. Those who think they can slap some PLR articles up as content for their members are soon greeted with a slew of cancellations. Not exactly what you’re after!

Instead, make it your mission to deliver up the best content you can for your membership sites. This will not only keep them coming back for more, but attract new subscribers as well. If you are doing this solo, strive to write and create the finest, most cutting edge content you can manage, whether it be pure words on a page, videos, audios, or other.

If you are outsourcing this task, make sure your outsourcers are doing precisely that as well! In fact, outsourcing this kind of work makes the most sense of all! It’s very likely a large part of the reason you chose this business model in the first place. You are after recurring income with little recurring work! Seriously consider outsourcing the content, and use the time you save to go about creating your next stellar membership site! And then do it again! Before long, you’ll have a membership site empire running pretty much on automatic, which brings the marketers Holy Grail, Passive Income, into play.

If you’ve been marketing for any length of time, blogging, writing articles, creating Squidoo lenses, Hubs, and the like, then you more than likely have a pretty good grasp on what it takes to write compelling content that will lead your reader to your desired actions. My question to you today is, do you have any long form content in your quiver of arrows?

What I mean by this is special reports, whitepapers, ebooks, and courses. This is the next logical step up and can open up a whole new world of opportunities. Besides being the road to your own products, many of these can be used for various purposes such as for bonuses, free giveaways for list building, and indeed they can be sold. However you do it, it should be a part of your content marketing strategy.

Creating long form content isn’t as big a bite out of your time as you may be thinking. If you are able to write 30-500 word articles, those 15,000 words will make a respectable ebook. Less content will be needed for most of the other forms. Of course, they need to be tied together thematically with a semblance of an idea; don’t simply string a bunch of what you’ve written together and call it an ebook, lest you incur the shrugs of anyone who comes in contact with it. Come up with an attractive idea, write it in article sized chunks, and before you know it you’ll be sporting off your new creation, ready for duty wherever you send it!

If the thought of writing leaves you pale with fear, or you simply don’t have enough time left at the end of the day to accomplish it, you can still get the task done by outsourcing. In the end, this may be your best bet anyhow as it will very likely get done in a much quicker fashion and quite possibly better as well! You could easily accumulate a number of long form pieces that will do a solid days work for you, enabling your income and authority to grow exponentially.

Something to think about!