In the past 4 years, I have built the content for an arts and crafts company and through observation of successes and failures, I have learned a thing or two about content strategy. In this post, I will talk about some of the key points I have learned about keeping a calendar, managing an artist team, brainstorming themes and topics, promotions, and managing social media.

Publish Often

This might seem like a given but it is quite hard to do. If you get going on publishing every day it can feel inspiring at first. After a while, it is not as inspiring. It is the case that you simply run out of things to post.. or do you? This commitment to publishing causes the marketing team or business owner to use a creative muscle that they may not realize that they had. It also prompts effective research. Start going after specific keywords and honing in on the best quality content. Three keyword tools I use are Ubbersuggest, Google Trends, and KeywordTool.io

Get a Team of Writers or Content Producers

To publish often, it can prompt you to reach out for help. This is a little tough because it depends on what the product is — are you a Solopreneur or running a company? Building a team can help with seeing the product in new ways and build a dynamic in the brand to live up to. For example, say you run a real estate agency, building a content team that deals with finances, design, home improvement, and trends would be a powerful approach. One writer can be the financial expert who writes on the topic of how to save for a down payment and how to clean up a bad credit score. Another person can write about how to keep the home up-to-date in trends, essential cleaning, and maintenance issues. This overall approach helps the business create a knowledge base in home buying which presents your brand as very in tune with the diverse customer's needs.

Shoot for Quality and Interesting SEO

One of the unexpected outcomes about content is that a good article — one really good article — can most of the heavy work in drawing people into your website. What people need is sometimes a mystery. The article could be on a topic that you may not think is important but other people do. This is kind of an expert self-esteem problem. Understand people are coming to you because they DON’T know what you know. 

One example of quality content from the arts and crafts company I work for is a popular wedding invitation tutorial on Youtube. A lot of people are inexperienced at making handmade cards and a wedding (quality content) is an important event for a bride and her family. This subject hits on an emotional impact type of quality. Weddings are the most important events in a person’s life. And everyone one involved the bride, the mother, the soon-to-be mother-in-law are all charged up with the intention on making the event special. Serve your customer (the wedding party) with information to help them and they will reward you for it.

 When the artist on our team made the card, she had no intention of it being a top performer for 2 years in a row with more than 50K views total. She was just making a card. To her it was normal, but to YouTube viewers, it was in high demand because it helped them research and learn for the Big Day!

Think Long Term

If you have a good article that connects with people you would be surprised in how long it will gain attention. With the example above, because the simple wedding card had continuous views over time it was cream that floats to the top in the search algorithm on YouTube. The high number of views and positive comments works on the psychology of a viewers. They see the video has been watched by several thousand others and they trust the content more. This compounding effect builds over time. It is also called Evergreen content. Think of content being like a tree, some trees loose their leaves in the fall and other stay green year round. Shoot for content that is going to stay green year round. Surprisingly, weddings happen in the summer, but wedding planning is excellent evergreen content because the planning process starts way in advance to the wedding date.

Starting a strong content strategy is not as hard as it seems. Following through and doing the work of writing and research is actually the work that takes time and can be a bit grueling.

If you think I can help with your content and SEO then reach out to me for an initial inspection! I work with the Fiverr platform.