It’s undisputed: well-crafted, high-quality content is how a brand builds an audience, trust, and loyalty today.
Great content helps you earn the attention of the people who need your product or service. Existing loyal customers are drawn to quality content, too, in large part because it builds trust and authority, creating top-of-mind awareness for your brand.
The quality of your content also correlates strongly with how favorably the content — and therefore your brand — is viewed by and served up in search engines.
If you’re convinced that creating quality content is worth the effort, the five heavily researched tips in this post can have you creating winning content in no time.
But what’s easy to describe isn’t always easy to execute, especially for brands whose staffs are already stretched thin and who often see “create quality content” as another task in a long line of blindly ambitious goals.
“Quality” isn’t a matter of judgment from web searchers and search engines
Ask 10 marketers how they define quality content and you’re likely to hear explanations that include a laundry list of buzzwords, phrases, and acronyms that few business owners have the time or the inclination to understand:
- “It all comes down to Dwell Time.”
- “The key metric is Time on Site (TOS).”
- “If your content is of high quality, it should acquire a meaningful number of links.”
None of these statements is inherently wrong, but they are all fatally flawed, largely because they amount to after-the-fact goals that place all of the emphasis on judgment by search engines and web searchers.
In other words, these are elements appraised after you design, create, and share your content.
What’s most important for business owners, however, is to have a way of knowing if your content will build authority, trust, and, hopefully, customer love before you get to this judgment by third parties.
Accurately assessing the effectiveness of your content requires a process — one that makes the creation of quality content feasible and replicable for brands of all sizes.
Developing a foolproof approach to consistently create quality content
In the last decade, I’ve written for numerous print and online newspapers, magazines, and online blogs, in addition to editing print magazines and online blogs with millions of annual readers. Over that time, I’ve been fortunate enough to help hundreds of brands with content marketing, content strategy, and SEO.
The biggest constant in every area of my work is that most brands struggle to consistently create quality content.
For a long time, I thought the culprit was a lack of talent, as most brands simply didn’t have it. Or goals, since so few are clear on what they should be. Or chasing Google and the other search engines.
But in the last three years, while working with dozens of brands and managing a large, successful marketing blog, I was able to uncover exactly what causes content creation problems, how to eliminate those issues, and what the results can be once that rock is rolled away.
I was able to develop, vet, and distill a five-step process that has led to hundreds of bloggers and brands being able to successfully create content on a consistent basis.
Here are the five ingredients I’ve found your content needs to build trust for your brand.
Ingredient #1: Accuracy
Is the information factual? Is it backed by data, research, or at the very least, capable of being corroborated by a third party? As…
