ideation - Express Writers

3 Bucket Approach to Consistently Profitable Content Ideas

June 11, 2024June 3, 2024 by Adam Oakley

The dreaded writer’s block. We have all been there. You stare at a blank content calendar and need thirty days worth of fresh ideas. However, not just any old idea will do. For the time and resource investment to pay off, they must be PROFITABLE content ideas. What do you do? While crying and browsing LinkedIn for new jobs is one option, we have a better idea. Use our three-bucket approach. It’s a form of brainstorming for ideas that uses content goals as your guide to ensure the ideas you do come up with will generate the results you need to grow. Let’s leave the blank page behind and join the three-bucket approach together. What Is the Three Bucket Approach to Content Ideas? Whether creating new content or refreshing old content, you need a strategy for finding endless topic ideas that won’t waste your precious time or drain your resources without promising a return. The three-bucket approach begins with the end. Before creating content that generates results, you need to define what results you want. I recommend summarizing your desired results in three buckets or overarching ideas and goals. They will keep your marketing content focused on the end goal and ensure what you publish contributes to those profitable goals. Here are three buckets that we use at Express Writers and works well for many similar brands: SEO & Brand Awareness: Create content that will appear in search engine results, generating traffic and getting our name out. Lead Generation & Nurturing: Create content encouraging web traffic to fill in forms, read multiple articles, and engage with content as they move through the sales journey. Sales: Create content that promotes products and services and drives sales. While your buckets may look very different, SEO should still be a top priority, as over half of web traffic comes from organic search. Can content fall into multiple buckets? Most definitely! For example, some content will be SEO cornerstones but also drive sales. The key is filling your website with content that falls into at least one bucket. Otherwise, you are creating content for content’s sake. Connect Your Buckets to ROI Goals Let’s not just leave your goals as buckets. If you want to turn your content into profits, you will want to define what success looks like. Let’s start with the SEO bucket. For SEO to be successful, how much of a traffic increase do you want to see from organic search? Define that number and monitor how well your content performs to keep you on track. Lead generation might refer to a target number of new leads you generate each month or a target engagement rate. Sales will be an easier category to track as you can use unique tracking codes in your content to monitor how many of your readers click the link and purchase your product, sign up for your demo, or request a quote for your services. Fill Your Buckets with Seed Keywords Along with establishing goals, you also want to list seed keywords. At this point, don’t worry about search traffic and deep research. Your seed keywords are terms that define who you are as a company. They are very broad. For Express Writers, our seed keywords would be terms like “Content marketing,” “Content writing,” and “SEO.” You don’t need to stick with just three, but you also don’t need to list over a dozen seed keywords. If you have too many seed keywords, consider finding a term that captures several keywords into one overarching idea. To start, list three to five seed keywords. These might define your industry or cover your product categories. As you move forward in your three-bucket strategy and begin brainstorming, those seed keywords may change as you find better terms to describe your business and categorize your content. How to Generate Content Ideas That Turn a Profit Once you have those buckets defined and benchmarks established, it’s time to fill them out and overflow them with topics! At this point, you will set those three buckets aside. We are just looking at brainstorming and jotting down as many topics as possible. Sorting them into buckets comes later. However, you will want to keep those seed keywords handy as they’ll provide a starting point. Discover how to find blog content ideas with five tried-and-true methods. 1. Perform Keyword Research If your goal is search engine ranking, this step is a must! Keyword research not only finds topics for content but also identifies topics most searched among your audience. Our favorite tool is SEMrush, but we and other marketers also use Ahrefs, Buzzsumo, and Moz. It’s time to pull out those seed keywords again. They will be a starting point for your SEO. If you’re using SEMrush, you will type the first seed keyword into the search bar, such as searching “Content marketing.” From there, SEMrush will return a list of related terms. At this point, you don’t need to be too picky about the terms you save. As long as they’re relevant, all those recommendations could become potential blog and web page topics. Add all the keywords relating to your topic into a list, which you will export into an Excel file and add to your master list of content ideas. SEMrush 2. Use Google Search Google offers three different ways to discover new topics for your website. The first step is to begin typing your seed keyword into Google search. Google will suggest searches based on what people commonly type after the seed keyword. These suggestions are constantly changing and usually reflect trending topics. If you perform a search of your seed keyword, Google has two sections on the search results pages with follow-up search suggestions. The first is “People also ask.” This section is near the top of your page and includes long-tail keywords and questions that people often ask relating to your search. This is a goldmine of topic ideas. About 8% of people phrase their searches as a question, … Read more

The Content Marketer’s Café with Julia McCoy, Episode 4: How to Set Up a Content Creation Workflow & Process You Actually Enjoy

January 1, 2021October 14, 2017 by Adam Oakley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p8a7QILXZA [clickToTweet tweet=”Catch the fourth episode of The Content Marketer’s Café with @JuliaEMcCoy, all about #content creation workflow hacks!” quote=”Catch the fourth episode of The Content Marketer’s Café with @JuliaEMcCoy, all about #content creation workflow hacks!”] The Content Marketer’s Café with Julia McCoy, Episode 4: How to Set Up a Content Creation Workflow & Process You Actually Enjoy This is for the content creator that has sometimes felt stumped at the creation phase. Here’s a few questions that might have ran through your head: Where do I begin? Do I just jot down an idea and start writing? I have a keyword. Now what? I’m here today to give you a few quick hacks on how to approach the content creation process in a few key workflow steps that will make it easier, less challenging, and natural, every time you sit down to write. Ready? Even if you’re an experienced content creator, it’s normal to feel like you’re right at Square 1 again when it comes to creating content. How do you get past that and get into a comfortable swing with content creation? 3 Phases in Content Creation Approach it in three phases: Ideation, Creation, Preparation FYI: These stages will differ if you’re writing for a client: example, clients usually have topics and keywords prepared, so you might be able to skip stage 1. Why Stages? My Wake-up Call to Stop Rushing But here’s why you need to think of creating content in stages. When I started out in my agency, I was the sole staff member at my agency, and I was scared of growth and investing in what I needed to have, to grow. So, I did all my content, and rushed when it came to getting it out. I barely double checked what I published. A year later, my husband who is our CTO actually asked me why I was rushing through my content creation process, when I did it so carefully for clients. That was a turning point. Now, I invest hours if not weeks into one piece of content and following a process. Here’s how rushing harmed my content: When the content I’d thrown together started ranking 2-3 years later, in super high organic places on Google – example, #2 for the long tail phrase hire an SEO content writer – I got zero conversions. Only when I rewrote that crappy but high ranking content did I start to get conversions from it. (I ended up investing and paying double to fix the crappy content.) The perils of “rushing content creation” happens for many business owners. But if you start right and devote time and care to this process, and in the long run, your maintenance and “fixing” costs will be much less. So let’s discuss these three stages. 1. First, IDEATION. This is where you come up with a topic that is worthwhile. Think of content ideation like a crosspaths. You need to choose one road for every content idea you (or your client / team member) have, to make sure that idea is worth investing the time of creation into. Once you have an idea: Map it to a goal early in the idea phase. That way you stop low ROI from even happening. Then, research and finalize your topic idea. Write it down. It’s easy to know what you should be creating, when you know how your content idea aligns to your goals. EXAMPLE: If you have a new site, skew towards looking for keywords that are relevant to your searchers so you can get some rankable content ideas going. Use a keyword tool to find that data. OR If you have an existing site, map your ideas in a sales/brand awareness direction and think of trending topics that you can add your authoritative voice to, in your industry. Use Quora to research trending questions being asked in your topic area. #WordFromTheSponsor: I go really deep into each areas of this process and much more, in my new industry course. Get off the fence and invest in yourself, if you’re looking to grow your skillsets! Go here: www.contentstrategycourse.com 2. CREATION. This is where you write down the topic, put it in your editorial calendar, and get started on writing. This stage includes drafting, writing, and optimizing the content, or having writer/writers creating it for you. Time here should really depend on the piece, AND your creative flow. Finding your flow in the creation step is KEY. For example, I write best at morning and late in the day. I know that, so those are the only times I write. You MUST block off times around your creative flow. Don’t create when you’re tired. Eat lunch if you haven’t. Simple stuff. If you schedule your content around your creative flow and when you’re most charged up and refilled, you’ll create GREAT content. This doesn’t mean you have to spend weeks writing – once I know and have researched my topic, I can write a 2000w blog from start to finish in one day if I match the writing to my creative flow. 3. PREPARATION: This is where you fine tune your piece and if it’s for your site, decide when to publish. ALWAYS get a second pair of eyes on your content. That could be an editor, a creator you work with if you run a company and have a team, or an editor if you’re an agency writer. I don’t ever publish my content without a second pair of eyes on it. When it comes to publishing, think of dates you can publish that will especially appeal to the topic – if it’s seasonal and applies to a holiday, publish and tie to that holiday week or date. Even Google’s birthday can mean you write an SEO topic and tie it to that day. Final Tips: If you’re doing the writing, there are also easy ways to “hack” and simplify that process. Examples: You can invest in a transcription service and … Read more