When dealing with clients who want to start a blog  I ask a lot of content creation questions . Because far too often, they choose to blog not because they’re convinced that blogging is a good fit for them, but because their peers are doing it (and it works for them). However, there’s a lot of strategy behind blogs that attract readers on a continuous basis.

The overlap between asking the right content creation questions and good content strategy

I feel like Blog Tyrant put it best when articulating what content strategy is really about:

Most people post, tweet and promote blindly – throwing a bunch of things at the wall to see what sticks. But, by making a few targeted changes you can grow your blog in big ways, much quicker than you thought.

This approach is about being deliberate and strategic about every step of the process, from:

• Coming up with ideas and writing new content
• To how you promote your content over the long-term.

However, my content creation questions are about helping you focus exclusively on content that your audience is actually interested in. This is extremely important for one particular reason:

When you have other aspects of your business to worry about as well, creating content just to fill a page is tempting. But it’s not exactly practical.

1) One of the most important content creation questions: does this sound like you, or like someone else?

Perhaps you’re familiar with the ProBlogger job board, but if you’re not that’s okay. In a nutshell, it’s a crowded job board for professional bloggers/ writers seeking new clients. Businesses in every niche you can imagine plus more post about their desire to hire writers, along with instructions on how to apply.

However, because it’s so popular the quality is mixed in terms of how good and bad these opportunities are. For instance, I once found a  local client on Problogger who was a member of the same co-working space as me (but at a different location).

Although they hired someone else for the position I applied for, I was the consultant that played a crucial role in the content marketing brainstorming process pre-launch. Then, they became valuable professional contact over the long-term.

But not all my ProBlogger experiences were equally as good

One time, someone I found out about through ProBlogger asked me if I could write like influencer and businessman, Neil Patel. It was unclear why they wanted to mimic Neil Patel.

When I googled my prospective client, Neil Patel had nothing in common with the following:

• The client’s industry and target audience
• And the immediate impression I have of their brand.

Calmly, I tried to explain the value of consistent brand messaging. I wish them well. I do, but I was unable to work with them. Since I couldn’t convince them to pick a look, feel, and tone that feels right for them, there wasn’t much I could do.

But what does that look like? And why does it matter?

I think Felicia C. Sullivan put it best when she discussed what “good” branding is about:

Wouldn’t it be odd to connect with a super familiar, warm voice on Instagram and then visit a site that’s cold and impersonal? Your customer would be confused by that kind of bait and switch, and confusion drives brand abandonment.

To explore how truthful that is, you simply have to put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer. To do that, let’s go back to the prospective client who wanted a blog that resembled Neil Patel’s blog for just a second.

If they successfully pulled that off, but all their other brand messaging had a different tone than what you saw on the blog would you buy something from them? Probably not, because this overlooks an important ingredient of successful brand messaging: establishing trust.

2) Content creation questions worth asking when in doubt: does this help people understand your process and way of doing things?

Speaking of trust, here’s an underrated tool for establishing and maintaining it: content that allows people to peek behind the scenes at your way of doing things.

Companies like Buffer have found that being transparent about what’s happening internally, helps consumers decide which brands to support while elevating employee happiness.

In my own business, there was a shift in who I attracted when I started to:

• Do interviews on blogs and podcasts that gave people a more intimate outlook on everything from my business’s backstory to my daily routine
• Publish content on this blog and also my Medium Digest page that shared my process and things that influence my process.

Because the number of people who chose me, not just out of necessity and convenience, but also out of respect for my way of doing things increased.

3) Can it be reshared and redistributed months after it’s published?

In the content marketing world, we call this “evergreen” content. So what exactly does that mean? Here’s a definition from Si Quon Ong, who does marketing for Ahrefs:

Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date. It revolves around a topic that’s always relevant to readers, regardless of the current news cycle or season.

Prioritizing evergreen content, and finding ways to reuse and redistribute it on other platforms over the long-term is a great way to make the content you’ve already created even better.

Since this is an approach that Google loves (and the average person appreciates), it will also increase your chances of ranking on popular search engines over the long-term.

4) How can you convert this into something your target audience would search for on a popular search engine?

SEO can intimidate the crap out of people for one simple reason: from the outside looking in, it looks like an extremely mathematical and technical process. Because there are all these rules about how many times a keyword “should” appear.

The good news about that though is that there are tools that can help you get the mathematical and technical parts of SEO just right. I use Yoast SEO, for instance. Yet there are other options too, such as the Moz SEO tools and the SEO framework.

At the same time though, one of the most overlooked parts of SEO is the human element.

In a nutshell, the human element is about context and how people talk. Currently, this element is more essential than ever. Because 2019 was the year of Google’s BERT update. Here’s a quick definition from Search Engine Land, which explains what this update means for future search engine results:

BERT trains language models based on the entire set of words within a sentence or query, allowing those language models to learn word context based on surrounding words; not just the words that precede or follow a given word.

Within the context of search, BERT helps Google understand longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like ‘for’ and ‘to’ matter a lot to the meaning.

So, you also have to consider how someone in your target audience would ask Google a question about the topic you’re writing about as well. Why would they be interested in the subject matter? And how would they phrase their search? For example, would they know industry buzzwords? And what title would convince them that they found what they’re looking for?

Internally, Google is also evolving to put quality and original reporting first, according to the VP of news at Google. Algorithms are programmed to reward well-researched content, original reporting, and authoritative source material.

That’s exactly why I would argue that producing quality content is now closely linked with the search engine optimization process. But it still needs content to be well-optimized and promoted for it to make an impact.

I think we focus too much on blogging as a place to write and express opinions…

But none of that matters if we don’t keep the bigger picture in mind, from how we promote ourselves on social media and our email lists, to what we’re doing to show up in search engine results.

This is an approach that I do my best to replicate with my work as well and hope to do even more of in 2020. If this sounds good to you, feel free to check out my consulting website for more info about what I offer.

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Please add a comment below if you'd like to discuss this topic. – Rosie