During one of the BlogWorld sessions, Chris Crum sat in on Marcus Sheridan’s presentation, and in it, he discussed some techniques and strategies to keep in mind when creating content. First and foremost, make sure your company has a blog and is using it to create content that addresses concerns and questions customers may have when researching the field your business targets. In his session, Sheridan used his own personal experience to make his point about how successful blogs are important to web businesses.

Sheridan started a company that sold swimming pools and spas, and after the housing crash, the normal marketing techniques weren’t offering much fruit, and so, he started a blog that focused on the long tail instead of competitive keywords. In fact, Sheridan suggests leaving these expensive ventures — targeting competitive keywords — to the bigger companies, while focusing on the benefits of content marketing. Sheridan offers this suggestion for those who aren’t sure what they should be blogging about:

“Every question you’ve ever gotten should be a blog article. The question itself should be the title.”

To further his point, Sheridan discusses an article he wrote about the prices of fiberglass swimming pools, and after the success of that particular post, he continued to create content concerning that specific subject. Of course, with the ever-present specter of Google’s Panda update hanging over a site owner’s head, you should be mindful of creating duplicate content because if Google suspects you are simply repeating yourself to reap traffic and ranking benefits, your site will be punished. Don’t just focus on title alterations, make each piece you create individual enough to stand up on its own.

Sheridan goes on to offer seven suggestions on creating successful content:

For the first two points, Sheridan mentions cost and price. It is important to have these two things on your site, especially if you are selling something. Granted, these points should be common knowledge, but apparently, some are still struggling with the idea, but as Sheridan points out, there aren’t many — if any — sales that happened without the price being known, or, as he says it, “nothing happens in business without money.”

With his third point, Sheridan suggests using your company blog to solve problems related to the industry you are targeting. This is an important aspect of creating quality content, that is, giving your potential customers content they can use. To facilitate this content creation, Sheridan mentions monitoring Google for problems related to your industry, and creating content around these issues. As Crum mentioned, with Panda still affecting sites with duplicate content, be aware of duplication, even if the problem your focusing on persists within the industry.

Points four and five deal with the Versus/Compare aspect of acquisition. Customers are always comparing products to one another, therefore, create content that does this for them. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is by creating comparison articles that focus on your product as opposed to your competitor’s. Let people know why your “widget” is better.

For point six, Sheridan mentions awards, because people like to see which company/product is the best. He also offered a personal allegory concerning this, mentioning an article he wrote about fiberglass pool design awards, a post that even his competitors linked to because they appreciated the fact Sheridan’s content mentioned their product. These competitors even linked to Sheridan’s post, which is always a valuable outcome. He finished this segment by suggesting if there are no awards in the industry you are targeting, “go make up your own. Your opinion is pretty valid in my opinion.”

Finally, Sheridan’s seventh point mentions breaking news. Be an authority in the field you are targeting and by getting out in front of the breaking news surrounding your industry. This helps build trust with your potential customers, because there’s security in the idea of doing business with an entity that knows its field.

In his closing points, Sheridan suggests thinking like a consumer and creating your content with that in mind: “Address every single question, and you will be successful.” That being said, if you are going to focus on a content marketing strategy, be aware of duplicate content, or at least, what Google perceives as duplicate content, because there’s nothing worse than getting good rankings for your hard work, only to have them ripped away because you didn’t vary the text of the content being punished by Panda.

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

Have anymore that you would like to share? Please leave them in the comments! And make sure to leave a name and url and I’ll add the best ones to this list and cite the source!

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If first time visitors aren’t enticed by your first post, they’ll probably leave without scrolling down to see what else is there. You can maximize you pages per visit by ensuring your highest quality posts are at the top when new visitors arrive there. Most blogs unfortunately use strict chronological posting with the top post always being the last thing you wrote. You can make sure your top post is of the highest quality from the perspective of a new user by actively controlling it using one of these methods (listed from easy to advanced):

• Posting unique articles after you post resources, then digging the articles and other lower-quality posts from the perspective of a new visitor (e.g. posts about content or posts directing visitors somewhere else);
• Using a sticky post plug-in to directly control the top post;
• Rewriting and using multiple WordPress loops (like I’m using on this blog) which allow regular posts to be separated from a ‘featured’ article section.

2. Use at least 1 2-4 keyword search string in every post title. If you want to use highly creative titles, put a separator symbol (like a |) and then put a keyword description of the subject matter after words. Make sure to use a keyword or subject description of 2-4 words that EXACTLY match what some people search for (if you don’t want to do research, you can use intuition and still end up with traffic). This sounds so simple, but over and over again I see new and old blogs with only creative titles and no keywords. It makes a huge difference, because on everything from other bloggers linking to you, to the value of the keyword placement, to the link from social media sites the keywords in the title help Google know what a page is relevant for. Here is an example of a keyword we rank for as a result of targeting post titles: New Internet Advertising Model | Content Production Turned on It’s Head. Note that it ranks for new internet advertising model.

3. Put posts in one category only (MAYBE two, but no more). This is absolutely critical for new blogs. If you put the same posts in multiple categories you’re creating lots of pages with duplicate content on them. Without getting into search engine algorithms, Google doesn’t rank pages with the same content on them as high and if you don’t have a lot of links and authority, that much duplicate content can make your site “appear” really spammy and reduce its ability to rank; it could also increase the amount of pages Google puts in it’s supplemental index. I’ve seen lots of newer blogs with 50% of their content in the supplemental index largely from problems like this.

4. Have a prominent subscribe button with feedreader options, a highlighted button or area to subscribe via e-mail and a link to instructions on what rss is and how to use it (lots of industries target less-than-tech savvy individuals and I run into mainstream people who don’t use rss or know what it is; by describing the subscription process, having multiple, easily found options and a subscribe-via e-mail-link, you’ll increase your subscription rate and the amount of visitors that return to your site.).

5. Use your robots.txt to disallow the Googlebot from indexing duplicated portions of your blog If your site is new and most of your pages contain the same content, it’s going to affect your search engine rankings. A new blog doesn’t have a lot of “juice” to push all those pages and when Google see’s all that duplicate content, it’s likely to put many of your pages in its supplemental index. Duplicate content portions include alternative ways of showing the same posts (like sorting by different categories that contain mainly the same posts).

6. Track what keywords people are finding you by on the search engines and write more on those topics / keywords.

7. Make sure your post topics, blog purpose, and name are clear within 3 seconds of landing on any page or post on your blog. This is accomplished by correctly making all the elements in your blog work together and target one message.

8. Use images at least some of the time, and if you have the ability, video or flash. Visual content can dramatically increase the percentage of people who visit your site.

9. Give references with links to other blog posts you’ve written on the same topic. Always try to give new visitors links to back-history on specific words / topics and provide easy links for them to be able to locate similar posts, follow the history of the current conversation (e.g. if it’s a follow up) without having to search through your blog for them. This has to be done with human references; the automated ways just generate crappy lists.

For example, on this blog ,when I talk about different aspects of marketing your blog, I often reference posts that I’ve written on the same subject, making it easy for visitors to find other relevant information without having to search for it.

10. Make your posts easy to scan. If you’re using lists, bold the most important part so readers short on time can get the main points without having to read through everything. We’re in a tight competition for eyeballs, and people need to be able to scan your blog posts quickly, especially if they’re lists and intended for social media marketing.

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