With much content floating around the internet, what are the practical steps you can take to come up with original, content ideas?

As you know, content plays an integral part in digital marketing, especially in top-of-funnel activities. If you’re not taking your time in planning out a content strategy, you might end up with low-quality leads and a lack of engagement overall for your brand.

That’s why you must find a way to consistently generate original and highly engaging content that will attract your potential clients.

TO START OFF.. What exactly is content?

According to bizonlinemarketing.com, content is just a collection of media, resources and articles created by a business for its website.

Although, content is not restricted to only a website, as there are other mediums which content can be published on such as social media, brochures, and television. Content is basically media that people can consume. It can offer educational value, inspirational value, and finally entertainment value. I believe these are the core areas which content around the world covers, here they are:

• Education
• Entertainment – music, gaming, celebrity gossip
• Infotainment – combining education and entertainment
• Inspiration
• Selling a product
• Raising awareness for a cause
• Political purposes
• Promoting scientific breakthroughs
• Communication
• Promoting a Corporate Identity
• Creating reports, how-to-guides and case studies
• Books
• And more

I would like to add that I’ve been creating content for over 5 years now at this point, from since my internship with Asian Boss in 2016, to doing my own YouTube channel – Simply Jeet. To working being a social media manager for companies and now a copywriter and consultant for small/mid-sized brands all over the globe. Content has helped me generate over tens-of-thousands of dollars for my own and my client’s businesses. They have helped me secure jobs, find new friends, and form new connections.

This is the power of content as I believe one good piece of content can change someone else’s life. In my perspective, when talking about content, you may think that content is just something you watch on TV, or on YouTube. But you probably underestimate the impact of the messaging, the emotions, the influence that a good piece of content can have on you. A good of piece of content I believe can change your life as good content has the possibility of sparking a change in yourself.

What I’m writing here comes from my experience and the advice given to me by content creators that are far more successful than I am. Anyways I hope you will enjoy this article.

The Key Elements of Content

Content is firstly consumed using your eyes and ears, and usually there’s a visual element of it. I believe that content also consists of three very important components.

Copywriting/ Content writing

Copywriting is simply any words that are in a promotional advertisement. The words you see play a huge role in influencing how you perceive any piece of content. The words in your content dictate the story and the ideas that are presented in your content. This takes training and practice to really master.

Design

The concept of design is very crucial in any piece of content. If it’s a video piece of content, then the design part will be the aesthetic elements and production quality of the video. If it’s just a picture, then the graphics play a part in how the content is designed. Design I believe is what makes the whole piece of content come to life. I’m not a designer so I can’t comment much on this but just know that HOW a content looks and is presented plays a very important role in the success of it.

Photos

Finally, there’s a saying that says that a photo is worth over a thousand words. The photos play a huge part of how a content is perceived. When you create content, make sure that the photos/videos are of high quality. These days you just need a half-decent camera or just film on your iPhone. Film using good angles.

Content in Today’s Fast-Paced, Changing World

It’s my philosophy that content is eternal as long as the internet is here to stay. In fact the bedrock of the internet is created by content. Bill Gates once said the famous iconic quote: “Content is King”, he’s not wrong because everything online is practically content.

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Good content and bad content can be the difference between a business having a successful marketing campaign versus a flop. Good content has to always do this one thing, which is to capture people’s attention. Now that’s easier said than done because there are countless ways of doing this. But the first goal of any good content is to capture and keep attention.

That’s where the term, “infotainment” comes in, the difference in online content, or those that EdTech companies such as Udemy, EDX and Coursera provides versus those in the classroom, are that they are entertaining and easily digestible. The first rule of content is to not be boring.

Once you’re boring, people will switch off, attention is very scarce and precious in the online world because content production can be done now by anyone with a camera or iPhone and a computer. This is the power of the content revolution, because now adays people are able to share their voices. You no longer need a big budget or to be connected to a news network.

The power of content has been the driving force in the Arab Springs revolution which brought down the dicatator regimes in the Middle East. Content has been the driving force in the gofundme campaigns that have raised millions of dollars for cancer patients.

Content is also the reason why international travel and globalism has been such a driving force, because of people showcasing their country through the power of video. People that want to learn about a foreign country do not now need to actually go to that said country, they can use the internet to learn about things first.

If you want to know the first step in making content, the first and foremost is about information, and whoever understands that content is simply a game of information will know how to make content. Whatever content you are producing, you are giving out information, HOW that information will be perceived is up to your skill as a content creator.

This way, you are feeding into a content machine that automatically generates a stream of leads for your business.

Contrary to popular belief, content planning is more of a science than an art as there are specific criteria that need to be fulfilled for content to potentially help you build a loyal following. Here they are:

How To Make Content – The Science and Art

1 – Write down your campaign

Since there are many formats for content: social media, blog posts, and YouTube videos. Planning out your campaign using a pen and paper is the most important, first step that will determine the success of any piece of content.

Some of the things I would recommend writing down are:

· Medium (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter)

· Where does this piece of content fit in your marketing funnel

· Content goals

· Promotional avenues

· Elements of the content i.e. storyboard for video, copy and image for social media posts

· Emotions

· How much content to produce (series or one-off) 

The most important thing about content creation is first, the overall big picture strategy of how it fits into your marketing funnel and then the details of your content, of how you will present it.

2- Research existing content

Research plays a big role in finding out if a piece of content is viable or not. You want to be on the lookout for trends or existing pieces of content that are already doing very well in your niche. A mistake in content creation is that they jump straight into just making content without doing their research.

If a piece of content is doing well, it usually is an indicator that there’s market interest in the type of content that is being produced. Other tools you can use are Google Trends or Ubbersuggest. These tools are used to find out what topics are currently trending as well as the current market leaders. 

Only after you have conducted your research, I would recommend writing down content ideas that are similar to what is currently being produced. Research is there to help you understand what’s out there, it’s also there to help you not reinvent the wheel. The best content that are going viral are not in some far distant land, they are already there for you to pick the best ideas from.

When researching you want to go to the best, find out who is the most successful in the field and then copy the best elements from there. You’re building your content base from things that are working and have known to work instead of trying to come up with new and creative ideas.

Of course, the creativity is very important, but more important is to find out what your customers are interested in, what PEOPLE are already want, then the next step is to give it to them.

3 – Finding your unique angle

I think for every piece of content, you must have a unique angle to help you stand out in the marketplace. A unique angle is something that makes you different and stands out from all the other pieces of content in the marketplace.

It could be your personality, it could be your editing, it could be your quality. But you must find something that makes you stand out.

Other examples of a unique angle are controversy or doing something completely out of the box. The best, viral pieces of content that garnered millions of views were those that did what other people wanted to see, but they also spun it in such a way that the content was unique and original.

In marketing, the unique angle is called a USP. (unique selling point) When you have a unique selling point, you can easily stand out from the crowd. As the name of the game of content is about attention, you really got to think of creative ways in which you can stand out. Every large corporation, especially in the tech field has had a unique angle,.

4 – What’s your story?

Stories are how human beings have connected throughout the beginning of time. Before the internet, the news would spread through gossip and word-of-mouth. If you take a look at all the breaking news currently in the world today, they present some sort of narrative.

So what’s your story?

You must find a way to inject stories into your content. That’s the best way to make your viewers hungry for your next piece of content. Think about your favorite series or TV show, you want to come back for more every single week – why? 

It comes from the story, the drama, and the narratives that you present and that’s what it’ll take to create amazing pieces of content.

The most common story that has the potential to get millions of views in the underdog story, people just love the underdog story. Although this may be contrary to real life where usually the person with the most experience, power wins out – there is the odd occasion where David manages to conquer Goliath. This is the power of the underdog story. Why has the story of David and Goliath been passed on for about a few thousand years? It’s because it has the underdog story.

As content is just a platform of storytelling, telling an underdog story is a good place to start to write your content.

5 – Challenging norms

Challenging the status quo and the norms is something that most marketers have warned against doing because it’ll stir the pot too much which could result in a loss of clicks and viewers.

I’d suggest: thinking again. In 2022 and beyond, challenging norms are now the norm.

Let’s take a look at all the biggest digital marketing trends and conversations that people have been talking about throughout the past year:

• Digital Currencies
• AI technologies like ChatGPT 
• Electric vehicles
• World Economic Forum’s Fourth Industrial Revolution
• Sustainable Development Goals
• Remote working
• Climate change
• 3-D printing
• SpaceX and Tesla

All of these topics that are at the forefront of the world’s minds are inherently challenging of the current norms.

If you are not getting the results you want in your content, perhaps consider that your content may be too boring or not challenging presumptions about things enough.

This is because people are not attracted to the old, it’s inherent in human psychology to be attracted to the new and the novel. Try implementing a message in your marketing that shows a challenge to the status quo.

How?

Ask yourself this question: “What is something you feel in your niche that should be done differently” and brainstorm ideas based on that question.

Ramping Up The Content Machine

Content marketing plays a core role in digital marketing, but getting started takes time and skill to know what to look for. Though, once you get the content machine up and running..there’ll be a snowball effect on your views and engagement which will eventually lead to an increase in revenue for your product purchases.

It all comes from ramping up the content machine and producing high-quality and engaging content.

Ramping up the content machine is all about consistency, all of the best content out there started out as s*** content. I want to share with you the first video I made on YouTube – my channel, simply Jeet. It was just a video of me telling people how important they are in their life. That’s it, recorded on my iPhone, didn’t know what I was talking about half of the time.

But over the months of doing Simply Jeet, my content got better and better, and I eventually achieved my first 1,000 subscribers. This was because I got practice talking to an audience, listening to my subscriber base and then pivoting through the feedback. Content is a cumulative effort, it’s not the first, second or third content that you produce that’s going to give you the viral hit. It’s probably the 10^th, 25^th or 100^th piece of content that will give you the overnight success.

It’s not because of exactly of the 100^th piece of content that you created that was good. It was through of the marketplace feedback and experience you got from going through the content creation process which allows you to refine what you know is good or bad. Keep up the consistency, you want to post often and create often. But also, be consistent in the promotion of your material.

This will have to come from reaching out to people that already have the traffic that you want and asking for shoutouts/partnerships/collaborations.

We would love to hear your comments and opinions on this blog post.

If you need an agency to help you out with your content and online marketing, book your free strategy session at: https://www.jeettancopywriting.com/contact