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Сontent plan for a month in 10 minutes: possible or not?
We all are suffering from the creative crisis from time to time, especially while creating a content plan at the beginning of the month. It’s a common problem of every person who is involved in the process of writing. Let’s try to withstand it.

In this post, I’ll show one method which helps me to automate the creating of a content plan. Okay, it may take you a bit more than 10 minutes, but I can guarantee that you’ll find dozens of ideas.

Where we usually find it 

It’s not that difficult to come up with 10 random topics. It’s much more difficult if you remember that the article should always be relevant to reader’s interest and need. Only this way you’ll get traffic, likes, and shares.

So how to find such topics? I think the most logical way is to find what questions people ask at Google, but there are other ways as well. I’ll describe the most common ways and sources to do that.
Forums

Check the forums and find questions people ask right now. Pay attention to the questions that haven’t been answered fully so far. Be the one who saves people from this pernicious ignorance.

I use Google operators to find such forums. For example: yourkeyword inurl:forum




Check all your queries with this method and follow the discussions. Also, after publishing the post, you can get back to this forums and leave a link to your article there.

Even simpler way is to find lists of the best forums. There are a lot of such lists like this.

Question-and-answer sites 

Use resources like Quora, Reddit, etc. You can sort the results by type and time.



The method is the same: find interesting questions, check the answers and choose few of these ideas to cover in your future posts. 

Competitors

Go and find some inspiration on competitors’ blogs. You shouldn’t rewrite their posts, just pick up some ideas from the most popular posts and write your own opinion on it.

For instance, if your competitor has a post on how to carry out the link building issues, write that content marketing is much better and show how to do it.

Also, you can check most popular articles in your niche using tools like BuzzSumo.


You can type your keyword and filter your results by date. You’ll get the list of most shareable articles so that you can assume what people would like to read.
Also, here are a few useful tips to write better.

Some other hacks

• Take a look at the discussions in the topical social media communities;
• Read the comments under the articles in your niche and get out the readers’ problems from there;
• Type your keywords into the Google search box and check related queries suggested by Google;
• Ask friends and experts in your niche and find out what they would like to read;
• Track Google Alerts and Google Trends;
• Ask your readers through some questionnaires.

Automate the creation of a content plan

All these ways I’ve described are efficient and useful, but imagine how much time it takes. It’s obvious that content marketers are trying to automate this process.

For this purpose, I use Serpstat — an all-in-one SEO tool. It consists of 5 features, one of them is a keyword research. The most interesting section here is Search Questions.

This feature performs people’s queries in forms of questions. It’s taken from Google, Amazon, and YouTube in real time. Serpstat arranges them in groups by the question word. Let’s try it.

In action

Imagine that you’re running some beauty blog and you lack the ideas. First of all, create a list of your main keywords. For example — makeup, manicure, hair styling, hair care, skin care advice, etc.

Open Serpstat, type your keyword into the search box and choose the database. Serpstat has 17 regional databases, including UK, US, Canada, and Germany. Tew days back it launched the French base.

Then go to Keyword research > Content Marketing > Search Questions.



Here you see the most popular words which are related to the query, and graph of question words.

And here is the best part — a huge list of questions that real people are searching for in the search engines.



What is it? It’s a list of topics for your articles. Now you have to do some work manually. Filter this list, choose the ones that fit your blog and create a plan. Mine looks like this:



You can find some useless or completely stupid questions but you should think wider. Even these questions can be used for the article. For instance, ‘the most strange users’ questions about SEO of this month’.

Conclusions

There are a lot of ways to find users questions, but it takes a lot of time.

With the help of SEO tools, you can get hundreds of questions from the real users in a few minutes. Answer it in your posts, and next time Google will return your article for this queries.

Share your own hacks on how to handle content plan issues faster in the comments below!

About the author:
Anna Rud is a Content Marketer at Serpstat. Developing rich and quality content and implementing brand strategy are her key responsibilities.
https://twitter.com/anathewriter

Sponsored post gives you link building opportunities to get new clients and improve site authority which is one of SEO best practice. However, Publishing sponsored content without knowing how to do it can be harmful and will be the cause of Google penalty. 

Many digital marketers thought that sponsored content is one of the best options to reach customers if you are one of them you are living in a dumb world. Instead of publishing sponsored blog post, social post, try posting articles naturally. It may cost you some extra money to remove "sponsored disclosure" on other blogs when you purchase articles, but it will give you more natural backlinks. There are some critical facts on publishing sponsored blog posts which you must know before you advertise in such a way.


Approximately 30% of Internet users say they find traditional banner advertising distracting and will actively avoid sites where the ads interfere too much with content.

This reality has forced publishers to search for new revenue options. Sponsored content has become a popular—and effective—choice, as this week’s stats demonstrate.

15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Sponsored Content

1. Despite demographic and content differences, business and entertainment news users are highly receptive to in-feed sponsored content if it is relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy.

2. Sponsored content is viewed by nearly half of business and entertainment audiences as enhancing the value of the overall website experience.

3. Seventy percent of individuals want to learn about products through content rather than through traditional advertising.

4. People view native ads 53% more than banner ads. 

5. Native advertising generates 82% brand lift.

6. Seventy-one percent of publishers received no major complaints from readers for featuring sponsored content.

7. The majority of readers, 54%, don’t trust sponsored content.

8. One study found that 57% of readers said they’d prefer their favorite blogs and news sites run banner ads instead of sponsored articles.

9. Three-quarters of publishers and media buyers alike have embraced sponsored articles. And there’s no secret to its recent success: 25% more consumers looked at sponsored articles than display ad units, and native ads have been found to produce 18% higher lift in purchase intent and 9% higher lift for brand affinity than banner ads.

10. Native advertising spend is expected to more than quadruple by 2018.

11. Sponsored content has been said to be a possible antidote to ad blocking, which cost publishers more than $22 billion in lost revenue last year.

12. The Atlantic says that 60% of its revenue is today generated through sponsored content.

13. On average, consumers spend almost two-and-a-half minutes with a branded story--the same amount as editorial content.

14. Almost three-quarters of marketers (72%) think that branded content is more effective than magazine advertisements.

15. Fifty-one percent of local news sites that sell advertising said they are now selling native advertising or sponsored content, compared with about 20% a year earlier.

You never know what to expect launching a new e-commerce project. The most common and efficient way to take stock of the situation and minimize the risks is to pay attention to your competitors. 

In this article, I’ll share some tips on how to take advantage of your competitors learning the sources of their traffic and analyzing their achievements.

Why is this necessary?

In fact, a good SEO specialist will never start promotion without exploring the niche. It’s necessary to:

1. learn the whole subject, the competition within the niche, choose the channels of promotion;
2. identify leaders and outsiders in the niche;
3. compare the structure and usability of competing sites;
4. adopt successful strategies for your project;
5. assess their mistakes and weak spots to prevent them in your strategy;

How to make a detailed analysis of competitors?

So, how to gather all the information about competitors from scratch? 
For this purpose, I’ll use multifunctional SEO-platform Serpstat and analytical platform SimilarWeb or its plugin for Chrome.

I’ll describe every step of the process using an example. Let’s imagine that we’re running an online store selling drones.

Step #1 Analyze the volume and competitiveness of the subject 

Serpstat offers two ways for competitor analysis:

• by keywords
• by domain

The second way is useful when you are already promoting, but want to get the maximum traffic and collect all the missing keywords for your project. 

The first way is suitable for exploring the niche. Since we’re considering competitor analysis before launching, I’ll use keyword research module at Serpstat. 

On the main page, enter the keyword "drone" into the line, choose the search engine and run the analysis.

Here is what you’ll see: 

Image: imgur.com


Analyzing the overview, pay attention to the search volume to find out if there is a demand for your product. As we can see - it’s 550 000 for drones. It’s a promising result. 
Also, check the commercial queries like “buy drone,” “order drone,” “drone for sale.” 

You can also take a look at the Keyword Difficulty feature. This parameter shows how difficult it is to rank high for the desired keyword. It based on backlink analysis, the presence of domains and URLs with your keyword in title, main pages in the SERP. 

Thus you can assess your chances of getting to the top of SERP for your keyword in a few minutes.

Analyzing this number you need to decide if it’s really worth spending valuable time and money. Of course, you can beat every competition, but if you see the highest score, it’s probably not worth efforts.
We can see that KD for our keyword is 32.85. It’s an average score, so there is a big chance.

Step #2 Select the leaders in the top 

Pass to the “SEO Research” section and choose the tool "Competitors." Then sort the results in descending order by common keywords and analyze them by all parameters.



Image: imgur.com

Selecting your direct competitor, pay attention to:

• The indicator in the column of "common keywords" should be as close as possible to "all keywords" indicator. If the domain has 1000 common niche keywords with the general number of 600,000 phrases, this is obviously not a direct competitor. For example, look at the service “best buy” in our list. The difference between two columns is huge because it’s electronics corporation. And we’re looking only for specialized stores.
• If both domains have the closest “common / all keywords” indicators, but a strong difference in the visibility parameter,  focus on sites with higher visibility. It means that they have more needed phrases in the top.
• If there are sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon and so on - just remove it from the list manually. Do the same with informative blogs.

Thus we identify leaders and outsiders within the niche. A bit later we’ll analyze their site structure, assortment, and USP. 

To extend your list do these steps with the commercial queries.

Step #3 Select the most visited competitors, investigate their traffic channels and site structure 

Now we should select the most visited sites for the detailed research. Analysis of their traffic sources will show us the real picture and help to choose channels to pay attention first. For this purpose, I’ll use SimilarWeb plugin.

Visit all the sites one by one and check:

• estimated visits
• time on site
• page views
• bounce rate (better if it’s low)

Image: imgur.com

Now pass to the "sources" tab to see where the most traffic comes from. 



Image: imgur.com

In our case, the competitor's site receives the most amount of traffic from the organic search. So, we should pay attention to it. Collect statistics to understand which source brings the most traffic in your niche.

If another competitor gets traffic from PPC and SMM be sure to investigate his advertising campaigns and social networks.

To analyze PPC-campaigns of competitors, you can also use Serpstat.


Image: imgur.com

For SMM-campaigns: SocialBakers, Karma, Rival IQ, Buzzsumo.

At this stage, we also should analyze site structure and usability. Browse their sites and find what they’ve missed. Is site navigation convenient? Is there available all needed information? Do they have any unique proposition? Would you buy the drone at this online store? Why yes? Why not? 
  
Thus you can learn competitor’s mistakes and avoid it creating your own strategy. Also, you can get inspired by their good sides and note something for your site.

Final thoughts

As you can see, competitors analysis is an important step before launching your product. By doing this, you can:

see the niche coverage;
check current traffic channels and know what to focus on;
learn the mistakes to avoid it;
steal some ideas (but like an artist);
and get more traffic as a result.

You always should think critically: even the biggest competitors can be wrong. And if you find their weak spots, it won’t be difficult to surpass them.

Content is the king, we have heard it a lot. And, why wouldn’t we? It has a plethora of benefits to offer. One of them is its contribution to a company’s online marketing strategy. Almost every big business has been implementing a content marketing strategy to drive greater business benefits. 

Marketers understand the importance of content marketing, but do they know how doing it right? Most of the businesses are taking content marketing too lightly, especially the startups gearing up to step into the new territory using content as a powerful weapon in the armory. 



Only 9% of B2B marketers consider their efforts to be "very effective," that means amyriad of companies are still trying to discover where they get sidetracked from the path to success. At times, your content marketing strategy needs a few tweaks and fixes, and sometimes you’re evidently doing it wrong.
But, if you think you are giving your full measure to your startup’s content marketing efforts, yet you're way too far from the desired results, mentioned below are some of the reasons why your content marketing efforts have been backfiring. 

1. Your plan needs to be refined. 

In order to success, you should be clear about the results you are going to have from point A to B. Still, regardless of the logic behind creating a content marketing strategy, a great number of startups are unable to have any direction prepared while generating content.

a) Start with the KPIs:

Goals are important for every strategy and work plan; the same goes for content strategy. Discover what metrics are essential for your business regarding traffic, shares, views, click-through rates and conversions, then track them for several months. Always remember that your efforts demand time if you need informative results.

b) Adjust and develop:

Once you have assembled valuable information about your KPIs, you need to translate the information into steps to adjust and develop, depending on what is working plainly best for your strategy. Things and practices that do not make an impact on your bottom line should be eliminated, whereas positively performing options deserves your focus.

c) Contribute:

Many content marketing companies are hired to execute result-driven strategies, but you need to come up with your strategy. Even if you are employing any agency or individual to write content for you, you should devise your strategy, and if your digital marketing agency is creating a strategy for you, you still need to take an active part in fine-tuning it for the best interest of your business.  

2. You’re lagging promotion efforts.

Creating content is good, but what’s the matter of creating it when there is not promoting well. Some marketers think that Google promotes quality content, which is right, but promoting your content makes it more reputable and attract new audiences. 

Agree, there are numerous ways for the content promotion, but you need to find out which way is best for your brand. Maybe email newsletters get you more traffic and lead, whereas pitching influencers in their industry may count for you, or maybe social media platform works for you.

3. Your content quality is below par.

Sometimes, your promotional efforts are good, but your content does not match up to the standards. Reason can be many. Maybe your writer is not good. Remember that if you are paying peanuts, you will get monkeys. Paying less isn't going to provide you the quality you want. 

It’s daunting to discover the topics to write about when you lack experience as a creative producer. Introducing themes and topics, and piecing them together that reads well is intriguing. Make sure your content marketers can help you with.

You also need to check if your targeted audience finds your content interesting or not. Dull and boring content will be read less; you have to present content that is engaging, focused and valuable.

4. You’re exaggerating your expected results. 

Because content marketing demands time, you should not expect amazing results within few weeks, or even month. You have to give your content some time to power up and deliver some organic results. If you are waiting patiently for the results, then you will start to observe the benefits.

Your expectations should be realistic. The results may be drastic, but you might not double your profit or triple your website traffic. However, even little improvements in your results can result in a bigger impact on your business’s bottom line. Digital Marketing, specifically SEO is all about gradual improvements instead of overnight success.

To wrap up

Content marketing is not something to be taken lightly. You have to be sure you are doing it well inside out. These were only a few reasons why content marketing effort may fail; there are much undiscovered out there. However, just because results are not coming up immediately, you should never give up.


Author Bio:
Mawiya is a creative writer in a digital marketing agency that provides content writing and SEO Service in UAE. She is an enthusiast hiker with a passion for writing and eyes for latest marketing trends. She has also tried other occupations: dog-trainer, fitness trainer, and transcriptionist… However, creative writing is her most favouriteand recent one

Grow your business by telling its story

A case study is Freshdesk, which was a startup company for helpdesk software in 2011 when its founder, Girish Mathrubootham, wrote and published an article about the motivation behind starting his company. He shared it on Hackernews, which brought over 30,000 new visitors to the Freshdesk website and 175 people signing up in just 2 days.

11 sales came directly from those SEO rankings.

Create Impressive Content

Write For Your Community

Choose, map out and refine your idea

Posting is just the start

Melissa Stevens is the author of this post. She is an expert in digital marketing and currently working on growing her LED shoe brand: See our line of Toddler LED Light UP Shoes.

1. Always personalize your content

2. Produce better content for your sales team

3. Hire a full-time content writer

4. Try to create a video series

5. Include videos to your landing pages

6. Market strategies through social media

• Deploy more Facebook Ads

• Try out Facebook’s new unique feature

• Create a strategy on Instagram

• Start your business on Snapchat

7. Interview experts from the industry

8. Provide guest blog on a popular site

9. Spend more time on your blogs

 

https://unsplash.com/search/computer?photo=GwVmBgpP-PQ

10. Start an influencer marketing

Takeaway

Design a great landing page and create quality content to generate maximum leads to your business. Sometime writers may run out of ideas even the most creative, productive bloggers faced this. In this post, we will help you to push the trigger to explore ideas.

All of us who create content, whether for an online medium or for other media, know that there are certain times when the article can fall into the rut. Often content creators suffer "writer's block" in which for a time they fail to generate truly fresh and new material.

Every writer must have experienced such situations. So it is critical to have the skill or know different type of information to cope with the situation.
Much of the building of a content marketing strategy is based on experimenting with new types of content. 
Your audience can love your current content, but that does not mean it's all you have to create. Betting on new and different types of materials can expand your reach and attract more.

To help you create different content, here we are giving 20 types of content for your landing pages with which to generate leads and collect useful information about them.

1. Ebooks

Ebooks are the popular way to generate leads and gain credibility within your industry. But it may take the time to visualize the results. Therefore, it is important to make sure that you are dealing with a topic that will be of interest and will help your target audience.  

2. Courses

Your audience may be interested in completing a form in exchange for a video tutorial. It depends on your production capabilities, you can issue a live tutorial or publish a previously recorded and edited. Be that as it may, ask your readers for the email or other information in exchange for the tutorial, to gather information about them.

3. Product testing

Sometimes your potential customers will want to try your product or service before deciding if it is what they are really looking for. This is an excellent way to grow and keep loyalty since those people who convert are satisfied with the test they have made of your product.

That is why it may be worthwhile to provide a free trial of the product or service with no other commitment on the part of the potential customer than to fill out a form with your data.  
Also read: How to Build Content Marketing Strategy Plan That Actually Unbeatable

4. Demos

If potential clients are ready to learn more about your product or service, provide demonstrations with your equipment. You can insert in your web demos of its operation and even close meetings or video calls with the most exciting clients.

These calls to action are especially valuable in the sections of the site that explain the differentiating aspects of your company or the characteristics of your product.

5. Contests

Everyone love contests. You can learn good enough about your audience while offering them a bonus for trusting you. With them, you can increase your reach by leading potential customers to your website.

You can run contests on your own site, or on almost any social platform, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Also, you can opt for one with a simple or more complex mechanics.

6. Cheat sheets

The cheat sheets are short and concise information that someone can mark for future reference. They are complete guides of terms, orders, symbols or other information that can constitute a quick reference. So the more visual and without great details the better.

7. Checklists

Checklists are another type of low offer that you can include on your landing pages so readers can print or download on their desktops. It includes clear headers, colorful design, and limits navigation on the page to quickly attract the visitor.

8. Series of emails

A series of emails are a list of several emails sent to a person who specifically decided to receive them. It differs from an email marketing subscription in which in this case a finite number of submissions are sent.

This format is especially popular during holidays such as Christmas when many brands make thematic promotions with a duration determined at the time and in that interval they send the users periodic informative announcements.

9. Email Subscriptions

Blog subscriptions in addition to driving more traffic to your website can also help you generate more conversions. But how do you get blog readers to become potential customers?

First, you can turn them into subscribers by only asking for their email address in exchange for sending them blog information on a weekly or monthly basis. It is essential that it is easy for them to subscribe for example using a one-step form.

10. Guides

Information guides have a multitude of styles, formats, and sizes, from some that include detailed explanations to shorter and more short ones. They are provided or users with useful, more or less profound information in a guide format.

11. Kits

Kits are pieces of content grouped into a single offering. The user is offered content and similar information at a single time. For example, an English kit that includes an interactive presentation, a report with original research data and a glossary of terms.

12. Original data and research

Data and metrics have become especially valuable as many concepts become more intuitive with figures. Having original and quality data about your industry will help you build authority and confidence in your audience. The problem is that analyzing and taking advantage of them requires a lot of time, resources, and experience.

One of the least expensive ways to collect original data and research is to conduct a survey of your subscribers, potential customers, and industry professionals. Then make a report or infographic and share it so that it can be downloaded by the visitors of your website.

Annual reports are similar to the original data and research. They usually focus on information about a particular organization, or to an industry in general. So they can be useful resources for a significant number of users.

13. Podcasts

Thanks to this type of content you can create a loyal audience and position yourself as a strong brand that provides a good user experience. With them, you will be able to put the voice to your mark with a relatively small budget (only a microphone and a good communicator are needed). If you do a good job, your audience will look forward to your new podcast.

When working with podcasts, one of the best ways to get information and keep users loyal is to request the subscription of these to receive updates and news. By offering a "latest news" subscription, you can maintain the public up-to-date on related information, such as industry trends or forecasts of future communications.

14. SlideShare Presentations

Like a blog, SlideShares is an excellent way to generate traffic. We may allow access to your information in exchange for completing a form. If your SlideShare is good enough, it can be a method that requires a low level of effort and high conversion results among your potential customers.  

15. Information Templates

Templates are an excellent system for creating original content for yourself. These can be of different types: calendars, worksheets, work schemes or infographics.  

16. Events

Hold events that the audience you want to attend. There are lots of possibilities, you just have to think which one will be most suitable for your goals and target. The most important thing about this type of communication is that whatever your event, ask the attendees for their contact information so you can send the event data and your personalized invitation.

After the event, you can follow the participants to inform them about similar occasions or where to download content related to the event that may be of interest to you. It is interesting to add calls to action in these communications that invite users to subscribe to other types of content or your social profiles.

17. Tools

Developing interactive tools can take time and effort to be difficult to grow, but if they are actually useful to your audience, the payoff often pays off.

18. Free applications

Although a priori may seem like a free product does not generate business, in fact, they are a great opportunity for lead generation.

Giving free versions of your product or service, may be versions with fewer features or functionality than payment, provide significant advantages over your competitors. The only thing to ask the public is to fill out a form.

For example, booking.com in addition to posting links directing users to the App Store or Google Play also offers the option of receiving a link to download the free application via email. For convenience, some users are willing to provide this information in exchange for useful content for them.

19. Webinars

The web seminars are a useful content format for the introduction of your target to the sector of your industry and establish yourself as an expert on the subject. A successful webinar takes a lot of work, particularly regarding planning and promoting it, but with the right strategy, it can be an excellent way to generate high-quality content.

20. Whitepapers

Whitepapers are more academic and persuasive than ebooks. They are structured to present a problem, and then provide a solution to this. People download them because they provide detailed information.

The great thing about white papers is that they can be created for almost any industry. A form is usually required to be downloaded. Allowing visitors to auto-complete this data with information contained in one of their social profiles makes the process simpler so that more users will be encouraged to complete it.

Generating different types of downloadable content for your users is the best way to keep your content fresh and current facilitating the task of reaching and loyalty to the audience of your interest.

What is evergreen content marketing? Why should you create evergreen articles on your blog? Evergreen content is essential for a digital marketer to driving consistent blog traffic from Search engines. It's a type of killer content which improve search rankings regardless of day, month or year.

In Online Marketing we say that content is evergreen when it is able to last in time without it being outdated. There is no expiration date. It brings value to the user today and also within six months or six years.

On the Internet, where a day equals one year, where everything goes out of fashion before we find out that it was, where almost anything expires long before it gives us time to taste it, the most valued contents are those that remain in the weather. Contradictory? Maybe yes, but the current trend is for evergreen content.
It is not a content that has a date to fit for consumption: it does not respond to the news, or to a particular moment in time. News about the latest update of Twitter would only be interesting the day that the news is published, or a few days later. But an evergreen content would be long last even if it's known by the public by the social media. Evergreen content never fades out to the wind of enormous blog posts. 
On the contrary, an evergreen content fits perfectly anytime. It always responds to recurring themes and constitutes an added value for anyone who is interested in it.

These are content that doesn't need numerous updates over time. However, they always need to be reviewed and up-to-date, albeit to a lesser extent than other types of content. They never end up being considered obsolete.

Evergreen content is key to boosting your organic traffic & SEO.

Evergreen content is merely relevant to now and then (even after 12 months) regarding how people wants them. Whether you are a blogger or digital marketer, you must use quality content for your blog and marketing strategy to improve your performance. 
Perhaps of all marketing strategies that corresponds to SEO is the most disorienting to the professional who wants to take their blog, business, projects next level by the internet marketing.

It seems that we have no choice but to walk the path that marks us Google, leaving aside traditional SEO tactics and betting on the quality content. It is important to understand Google's bid in this direction. An evergreen quality content can rank you higher on Google search, and it's always.

Make your content reusable.

If you want your strategy to last a long time, you should treat all of your content as a part of a bigger picture. Make sure it can be used again or that your new campaigns can find a way to refer to it in the future. Also, find a way to use it on a variety of platforms and media.

They support various formats, in what regards: ebooks, infographics, posts, whitepapers... and are absorbing at the SEO level for its ability to continuously generate interest, engagement, links and traffic.

Therefore, finding a balance between evergreen content and others more related to today will be the key that will definitively open the door to success in Content Marketing.