If content is king, how do you become a king maker? It’s a simple question that unfortunately comes with a whole lot of “it depends” attached.

Richard Neville, 16th century Earl of Warwick, England was nicknamed, The Kingmaker

While it is rare that there is ever any one simple answer to complex online marketing questions, there are thankfully a few handy guidelines that we use to focus our client’s Online Content Strategy.

Think like a customer.

The obvious answer here is to simply create entertaining content around your most frequently asked questions. In fact, the FAQ is often something that you will find on a lot of websites, and is a veritable gold mine of content possibilities. It really doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to slowly turn your most asked questions into graphics or video.

Say you run a Hair Salon: Do people keep asking what the best hair care product you sell is? Make a video of a stylist “answering” this question from a person in the chair. Lots of cutaways, establishing shots and closeups can create a sense of intimacy, serves to personalize your answers, as well as showcase your salon and an exceptional client experience.

If you haven’t got a list of FAQ’s, just sit down and try to think about all the questions your friends and family ask when you tell them what you do. Just don’t venture too far from highlighting your Unique Selling Proposition and why your customers do business with you in the first place.

Use Google tools like Analytics and AdWords.

Google wants to provide a better search experience to it’s customers. In other words, Google would like the first item on your Search Results Page to be exactly what you are looking for. So let’s make it easy for poor old Google and take some advice right from the horses’ mouth.

Installing and using Google Analytics (or some other Analytics software) is 100% necessary. Google’s package is free, so there is absolutely no excuse. If you don’t have Analytics installed on your site, go do it right now after you’re done reading…

The Adwords keyword tool, and quality rankings will give you the knowledge of what people are looking for within your market. If your quality is low, yet searches around that subject are high – it is a pretty good indication that you need to develop some better quality content.

Analytics will tell you whether people who actually make it to your site found your content to be of any use. Examining the visitor flow charts will show you where you are loosing thier interest and perhaps their business. Nobody seems to get past the first page? Guess what, you need to engage these people by providing your best most relevant content up front.

Taking these two systems together will tell you exactly the type of content you should be developing and give you a baseline measurement to improve against.

Ride the coattails of popular trends.

Pop open twitter and take a look at the trending hashtags. Are any of them related to your business? Is there any way that you could make them relate? The trick here is to do it quickly. Get on top of the trend, add your two cents and then move on.

Think of the long tail.

This is the area that will pay dividends in the long run. A simple way to come up with Long Tail content is to conduct various searches around your business topic and look for top rated links that are more than three years old. You may think the Original Poster (OP) has said everything that needs to be said, but hey, a lot has happened in the past several years and there is always follow up information that could be added.

Long tail content is often highly specialized and usually very specific. Highlighting technical aspects of your business or discussing possible ideas for multiple systems integration may seem boring and unsexy, but guaranteed with over a billion people on the internet, someone (lots of people) will share your enthusiasm.

The most important lesson

In the end, the important lesson here is to just start creating content. You will post things online that seem to fall flat and you will start to get discouraged, just ignore it and keep posting. Nobody produces great content every single time they put something on the internet. It takes patience and luck.

Don’t sit around trying to predict the future, it makes more sense to simply look at what people are doing right now, and put your own unique spin on it.

If you are still stuck trying to come up with content ideas give us a call or drop us an email and we can talk about some of these approaches and how they will work for your business. Because hey, it’s good to be king.

A.