The world is more connected than ever. In today’s landscape, it pays to be part of the group. Staying ahead of the curb means diligence. As the landscape changes so must your campaigns. Covid-19 changed the way many businesses, well, do business. It also changed how people advertised, how the behaviors of your readers affected their growth or decline. So how do you stay ahead of the curb?
Competition
The first thing you should do is keep apprised of what your competition is doing (or NOT doing). When your competition is shying away from marketing that’s when you aggressively market your niche. When your competition is not going for it full throttle, that’s your cue to jump in and secure your spot (hopefully their old spot!).
Research Your Niche
There are many ways to research your niche market, in fact, it’s the simplest thing you have to do! Researching is simply becoming the customer/reader you’re targeting. Pretend you don’t know anything and start a search as your reader would. What kinds of things would you be looking for? What kind of keywords would you search to retrieve the content your readers are also looking for? How would that content look? How would it read?
Back to Basics
There are many questions to ask but the best thing to do is go back to basics and work your way up, taking note of the nuances, the basic things your audience needs to know, both before reading your article (do they need a piece of information to comprehend your articles angle or information? For example) and after.
You have to think both inside your content’s boarders (limit of available data) and outside the box (in relation to your content, what would make it whole?). Many people write content without taking the time to realize it’s written from their (the writer) angle, based on what the writer knows.
Write for the Reader
The reader, however, may not have all the background information that would give them insight into the concepts in yours. You must make sure to cover as much as possible about what would allow a new reader on the topic to catch up.
There ensues the beauty of how the web and search work. You don’t necessarily have to write a huge 50k word article to preclude all potentially missing information. If they are landing on your highly informative article but don’t know what a term or concept is, you’re giving them some good keywords within the context that you know will (in a Google search for example) bring them adequate basics to catch them up.
Another way to do it is to write content that interlinks with other content you wrote or other great content that will help them. You can help the reader by adding links to this other content, include some name dropping of where to find any missing data i.e. link them to a Wikipedia page explaining SEO if the article is about search engine optimization.
Interlinking and Off-Site Linking
You can also go a step further and link them to both the Wikipedia page and the Google guidelines (called E-A-T) within the context. If you’re talking a lot about the quality of how your page is written, formatted, or made to fit within those guidelines, then you can simply tell them where to look for THOSE guidelines, and let the article give them some ideas to process before they go look at them. In other words primer them with your data but be sure to let those that don’t know, where to go to find the potentially missing or needed insight.
Formatting
How you format your article will determine if it even gets read. People looking to scan the page to find out if the data they’re looking for is there will skip over a page that doesn’t give them easy access to clues. Standard formatting is simply to add subtitles that are potently summarizing the paragraph below it. Using bullet points, bold print, italics, and properly condensed and potent paragraphs with roughly 100 words will do the trick. In a way the formatting of your article allows the reader to get a movie trailer (so to speak) of your entire article.
formatting vs. Movie Trailer Concepts
Much like a movie trailer, they try to give you the main gist of what’s being shown/explained in the end product (content), and it helps you not waste time if everything in the content is already known by the reader (they are looking for more information they don’t know). Although one reader will want a general overview of the topic being discussed, some researchers are (like writers writing content for example) looking for specifically NEW information, angles, or intellectual components they haven’t seen.
Ahead of the Curve
Staying ahead of the curve is all about constantly paying attention to what’s coming and being able to predict what your readers need. The good news is, if you’re a writer, this is integrated in what you do in the first place. As a writer, you’re always looking for new information to enhance other content you already wrote.
Once you’ve acquired a set of articles about the same thing (but different angles or concepts depending on needs) you can simply connect the various articles together within each other article (interlinking them). This helps you to compartmentalize your niche topics, giving your readers access to all the available information and variables no matter where they start reading.
Evolving Topics and Content Networking
If they are looking for information on building a group on Facebook, they may land on your how-to article, but once satiated with answers about the basics of getting started, they can visit your deeper pages in the structure of group posts, frequency of posting, or an article on how all these components that are separate but synergized fit together.
They may land on your consolatory article about getting started and can go deeper about any one part by clicking your link to the other content. That content can be on different sites or part of a single blog.
Overall the main benefits of outsourcing to professionals are both the time and quality of your initial efforts and overall reaching the goal with more ease. You can bank on the networking synergies without knowing much about it- because they know everything about it!
Good Luck!
