Content marketing isn’t just about blogs and articles. There are various ways to repurpose your content, reproduce existing content in various other forms, and even publish content specifically geared for various channels and opportunities available. Of course it’s hard work but every minute and bead of sweat shed is well worth it. Here are 8 types of content that are a must have for your blog or website:
Special Niche directories or resource pages
Go deeper into your niche or the topic you blog about. Is there a way you can shore up resources for your readers to benefit from? If you blog on personal finance for Americans (as an example), you can create resources pages under various categories and sub-categories.
For example, for the personal finance blog or website example:
- Stocks
- Stock Brokers
- Latest on Stock Indices and stock prices
- Tutorials and advice on stock picking and investing
- Real Estate
- 75 Leading Real estate Websites in the U.S
- List of leading Realtors
- Best Real Estate Portals
- Taxation
- News, Trends, and Latest Information on Taxation in U.S
- Resources to know everything about U.S Taxation Basics
Make Khan Academy an inspiration; it’s popular for a reason. Go ahead and develop niche directories and special resource pages for every conceivable category and sub-category you possibly can. In effect, you are almost creating web directories of sorts within your own pages.
Info graphics & Slide Decks
Infographics are hot these days for the simple reason that data is more digestible when presented visually. They are all the rage today and all that you need to do to start with infographics is to visual data flow, research and collect data, and create infographics. For creating infographics, you have options:
- Hire specialist designers who can design these infographics for you.
- Use special tools such as Piktochart, Easel.ly, and Infogr.am to start creating your own infographics without any professional help.
Alternatively, you can also use the same assets you use for infographics (data sets, graphic elements, etc.) to create slide decks that you can publish on your own blog or on Slideshare and other such public domain websites.
Interviews
Interviews are popular because they aren’t bland, and because interviews are perhaps are closest you can get to a story. Your source (the person you are interviewing) is another human who has a story to share.
Your interviewing fleshes out the story during the course of the Interview itself. In effect, the story is a personal, authentic account of the person’s life and about his take on the subject that the interview is about.
For instance, if you are interviewing a blogger or an entrepreneur, the content (produced as a part of the conversation with your subject) is unique, personal, and inspiring already.
You don’t have to be a journalist or a professional media person to take interviews. John Bardos of Jetsetcitizen.com interviews other location independent professionals and that makes up for 80% of his content on the blog.
Did we mention that you automatically get linked to and develop a powerful network of close associates and friends, thanks to your interviews?
Podcasts
Did you ever tune into podcasts like EntrepreneurOnFire.com or Mixergy.com? How about learning the best of startup insights from Seth Godin, a popular author and a prolific blogger?
Podcasts aren’t new. Somehow, they were forgotten for a while until Apple developed an app exclusively for Podcasting and then the rest of the industry followed. Podcasts now get a fresh new lease of life and podcasts now consist of both audio casts and video casts.
Once you create your podcasts, you’d have to aim to publish them as available feeds on iTunes and other sources such as Blogtalkradio.com. Podcasts – once created – are like everything else that must be promoted.
Videos
If you needed just one content type to focus on, choose video and transcripts for these videos, which can substitute for the conspicuous lack of text on your blog. According to Mashable, more than 4 billion videos were viewed on YouTube alone by the end of 2012. TechCrunch reveals that more than 32.1 million U.S households now watch online video through traditional media such as Television.
Videos are huge already and they’ll probably be next only to text as far as reach is concerned. It beats text and any other form of media output where effectiveness, clarify, and engagement factor is concerned.
Webinars
Webinars allow you to enthrall live audiences remotely. Unlike videos, which are recorded and then published, webinars are live and are more interactive. Leading webinar solutions such as Gotowebinar.com and WebEx.com provide you with instant solutions to go live worldwide. If you are looking for ways to use webinars more for training, teaching, and educating your readers/visitors/viewers/subscribers, you also have additional options such as WizIQ, and Udemy.com where you can repurpose your webinars are lessons – more exposure, visitors, and credibility.
Cheat Sheets, Whitepapers, and reports
Everyone likes tricks, cheat sheets, hacks, secret files, special reports, and eBooks. Plan to publish these as a part of your business even before you make your website and leave it to the world to see many people also appreciate exclusive templates for getting things done or for battling any of those repetitive and mundane tasks.
Hubspot regularly publishes an eBook, a free report, or a template of some sort or the other for its readers, subscribers, and email subscribers.
It’s called inbound marketing – the kind of marketing that takes an altruistic approach to marketing so as to make people come to you instead of spending millions of dollars to “go to the customers”.
What can you create for your business? Can you think of productivity hacks, special cheat sheets, timely web reports or e-reports? If you brainstorm enough, you’ll be able to come up with content that makes you an indisputable leader in your niche and amass loyal readers for life.
Social Media Content
Did you ever stop to think if 140 characters on twitter and a few more words on Facebook would ever make an impact? They sure do. Ask Chris Brogan and Kim Garst on Twitter and they’ll swear by their success. One look at Mary Smith’s Facebook Fan Page and you’ll know why she’s called as the Facebook Fan Page Queen. Justin Beiber just overtook Lady Gaga’s insanely large Twitter following, at the time of this writing.
Social media works. It just does.
Social media is the best way to nurture long-term leads, engage with others, build relationships, and invoke trust. If it weren’t for social media, any business – small or large – would have to spend millions of dollars for the level of nurturing and engagement social media provides.
How many of these content types are you actively producing? What works for you and what doesn’t?
