There is life outside of your company blog. Traditional content is great, but you must embrace content in many different forms to be successful. While not every type of content work may work for your company, there is typically at least one way to branch out and offer your audience something new. Let’s take a look at how you can expand your content and improve your online presence.
Other Content Options and Quick Tips to Getting Started
Back in April I wrote a post here about creating content besides blog posts, where I discussed white papers, e-books, training courses, and infographics. There are quite a few other types of content out there, and I thought it was important to keep the conversation going.
Start by analyzing your audience so you have an idea of the type of content they might like, then it’s time to give it a try and do a bit of testing. The more options you can find that work, the better off you’ll be now and in the future.
Below is an extension of that article and discusses the other types of content including podcasts, video tutorials, webinars, and product reviews:
Podcasts
SEJ Articles to Visit: Podcasting as a Business Marketing Strategy
- Promote your podcast on your website and blog to help get discussions going. It’s a good idea to publish your podcast on your blog along with a transcript to help improve your SEO and give the bots something to crawl.
- Use a quality microphone and program to create your Podcast. Sound quality is incredibly important, but it’s actually quite easy if you use a good recording program.
- Keep your podcast around 20 min in length. People generally will listen a podcast driving to work or traveling, so you don’t want anything too long. This of course depends on your audience, but 20 minutes is generally a good average length.
- Try to stay consistent. Generally podcasts are on a schedule because people like to listen to podcasts at the same time each day (driving to work, eating lunch, etc.). Try to have a set time and frequency to broadcast a podcast.
- Keep it interesting with different voices. Podcasts get boring if you just have one voice explaining a topic. Bring others in for interviews and as co-hosts to help keep your podcast interesting.
Video Tutorials
SEJ Articles to Visit: The Why and How of Video for Content Marketing; Back to the Basics: How to Craft Your Video Marketing Strategy
- Practice makes perfect. Always make sure to practice your tutorial first and make sure you know what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. Have a few people watch the tutorial so you can fill in any gaps.
- Use a quality microphone and video equipment to make it happen. You don’t need to get too high-tech here, and there are quite a few free options online, but definitely invest in a quality microphone.
- Consider uploading your tutorial onto YouTube and then publishing that video on your own site. You can host the video on your site, but generally YouTube is your best bet for views and rankings on Google.
- Use extra YouTube features to promote your channel. Tutorials are very popular on YouTube and show up in Google results quite often. If people navigate to your video, you want to make sure they stay on your channel and watch more of your videos. Do this by using things like YouTube annotations to spruce up the video. Check out this article I wrote for more details.
Webinars
SEJ Articles to Visit: The Art of the Webinar: The 5 Most Important Aspects of Successful Webinar Planning
- Have a plan for how things will run. Don’t simply invite people to talk about a general subject and see where it goes. Have a structure ready to go just in case with questions, possible extra topics, etc.
- Have text to accompany the presenter. If your webinar is going to work as more of a presenter-type situation, potentially explaining different slides, have the information available for those watching the webinar in case they want to follow along (and give it to them before the webinar begins). Keep this content very to the point.
- Choose a web conferencing tool that you can practice with beforehand. One of the most popular ways to host a webinar has become Google+ Hangouts. I highly recommend doing a test run first so that you can check your audio and visuals along with any recording processes you may be using to turn the webinar into a video.
- Limit webinars to 60 minutes. Longer webinars do work in certain situations, but one hour is a good cutoff point before recollecting and hosting another.
Product Reviews
- Always give your recommendation. At the end of any good product review you should have some sort of verdict. You want to lay out all of the points, both good and bad, but ultimately readers want to know what you think after reviewing.
- Video is a great option if you’re reviewing a physical product.Not only is this easier to create than writing a piece of text, but it can show others how your experience went. Publish the transcript under the video and you have yourself a review worth publishing.
- Review complimentary products/companies as opposed to those in direct competition to you. This will make the review more authentic and credible and it won’t backfire by bringing attention to your competition.
The Overlap Between These Different Types of Content
As you can see, there are quite a few overlaps when it comes to video tutorials, podcasts, and webinars. All require good microphones and software to record, you need to rehearse and have a game plan before recording, and you need to have some sort of content to accompany each.
Nonetheless, despite all of the similarities each type of content has quite a few differences. Webinars involve an audience and sometimes participants, podcasts are all about audio, and video tutorials are about the video and presentation. In short, the tips for these may seem similar, but you always should consider the platform and your audience.
Again, we haven’t even scratched the surface on all of the different options you have to get creative with content, but these are some of the most popular. If you have any tips or tricks to developing these types of content or can’t wait to share another approach you’ve been using, let us know in the comment section below.
Image Credit
Featured Image: ouh_desire via Shutterstock
Image #1: Andrey_Popov via Shutterstock
