content house

You’ve heard it countless times: Content is king. But what if I told you this isn’t true? To explain that further, what if I told you royalty-level content simply isn’t enough to make you win online? No matter how great your content is, it’ll get you nowhere unless you know where to focus when you publish it. Content might be king, but your audience and your place of publishing is what rules the kingdom. And wouldn’t you rather own a castle in a kingdom, rather than wear an empty crown? I call this concept a content house. (I teach this original concept in my book, Practical Content Strategy and Marketing, and in my 6-week educational Content Strategy & Marketing course.) In today’s blog, I’ll give you a sneak peek into my original concept and answer questions including: Why is a content house important? How do I build my own profitable content house? Is there anything to avoid when building my content house? Ready to dive in? Let’s go. ⬇️ [bctt tweet=”@JuliaEMcCoy has a sneak peek on the Write Blog at an original concept from her content strategy course: the content house. Why is a content house important? How do you build your own content house? Learn more ” username=”ExpWriters”] How to Build an ROI Foundation with a Content House (Plus, How to Get Your Own House Started) – Table of Contents What to Avoid When Building Your Content House What Exactly is a Content House? How to Create a Solid Content House in Three Steps 1. The Foundation of Your Content House: Knowing Your Audience and Creating a List of Long-Tail Keywords 2. The Walls of Your Content House: Quality, Consistent Content and Optimized Web Pages 3. The Roof of Your Content House: Measuring Success (And Failure) What to Avoid When Building Your Content House What you shouldn’t do when creating a content house is build it on someone else’s property. Facts here, family. Think of it like real estate. You get a lease on a piece of land and lay the foundation for a house. Slowly, you work on the house until it’s strong and beautiful. You furnish the house to make it unique. But what happens when the landowner decides to end your lease? You guessed it. Your house comes crashing down. All those years of persistent effort to build it boil down to nothing. Today, it’s tempting to focus effort on building a content house on someone else’s property. For instance, there’s social media. Since there are 3.8 billion social media users, why not create a ton of content for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? Source: We Are Social Or why not focus on guest blogging to gain credibility, leads, and higher ROI for your brand? The answer is the same for all: These platforms don’t belong to you. And since they don’t, you never can be sure they won’t change in the future, leaving you to scramble for another platform to start from scratch. [bctt tweet=”What you shouldn’t do when creating a content house is build it on someone else’s property. #contentstrategy ” username=”ExpWriters”] As an example, consider what happened with HuffPost. In January of 2018, HuffPost announced it would close its contributors’ platform. This came as a shock to the 100,000 writers who owned accounts on HuffPost. As a contributor myself, I lost my HuffPost login overnight. Did I panic? Weep because I lost years of hard work building content on the platform? No. Far from it! My hard work was safe. In fact, Express Writers lost no traffic with the close of my HuffPost contributor account. Why? Because I had a solid content house built on the right platform: my own website. What Exactly is a Content House? Your content house is your presence online. It’s filled with consistent, quality content created to fulfill, enrich, and educate your audience. Of course, your content house needs real estate to rest on. This real estate is your website. You need to have your own domain first, and then to focus on building it up like a house with content your audience can use to improve their lives. When you start with this and treat social media marketing and guest blogging as secondary, you’re on your way to achieving huge ROI for your brand. [bctt tweet=”What is a #contenthouse? It’s your presence online. It’s filled with consistent, quality content created to fulfill, enrich, and educate your audience. #contentstrategy” username=”ExpWriters”] How to Create a Solid Content House in 3 Steps To build a content house, you need to start with your foundation: knowing your audience and researching long-tail keywords. Then, you need build upwards from there, crafting quality content and optimizing your pages with keywords. Finally, attach metrics to your house to track how well it’s doing and find out which elements need to change and what content needs to be updated. Let’s get into each of these steps one by one. 1. The Foundation of Your Content House: Knowing Your Audience and Creating a List of Long-Tail Keywords Before you start writing anything, you need to know who you’re addressing and what you’ll write. Without these two key elements, your content will be flat, generic, and useless. A. Who to Address When Crafting Content The main goal of your content is to enrich people’s lives. Your readers should see you as an authority in your industry, and trust that you have what it takes to solve their problems and help them reach their dreams. The problem is, what are these people’s problems and dreams? If you don’t know your audience on a personal level, it’s impossible to reach out and help them better their lives. So, the first step you should take when building your content house is to find out exactly who your audience is. You can start with a tool like Google Analytics. This tool helps you track your site visitors and gain information such as their age, gender, and location. Next, you want to … Read more