No matter what business you are in, if you’re paying attention to current marketing trends, you know you need to create content—interesting, relevant, consistent content for your Internet marketing to be effective. But knowing and doing are two very different things.

Why You Need a Road Map for Content Creation

Does staring at a blank page or canvas make you nervous? Now what if someone carved up the blank page and said “Put something about “A” here, put something “blue” in that corner over there and something that relates to “C” at the bottom. Feel a little better? A little direction takes away much of the ambiguity that makes starting so stressful and inhibiting.

So why do so many of us marketers start content plans without the same kind of upfront direction? See if this sounds familiar: You are in a company meeting, talking about driving more traffic to your website. Someone says, “hey we should set up a blog. I hear that brings traffic.” Someone else says, “yeah, we could have a monthly e-newsletter too. I hear Super Company across town is having a lot of success doing that.”

Next a few dates are set for launching the blog or setting up the e-newsletter. Then what happens? The blog is ready for content but your organization isn’t ready to create that content. The email template is ready but the date for sending it out keeps getting pushed because no one has time to figure out what to put in the first email, or the second or third for that matter.

Why does this happen? Because there is no road map, no upfront direction that says “on this date we will release content about A, on this date, content about B, etc” It’s the blank slate staring everyone in the face, making us act like we’re all deers caught in the headlights.

How to Roll out Consistent Content for Results

Here are a few steps to help you get over that blank page “hump” and generate content on a consistent basis. Generating content once in awhile is not enough. You have to do it consistently to achieve any real marketing value from it.

Step 1: assess your abilities

Ask yourself (and your organization) the following questions:

1. Who can realistically be in charge of content creation for our organization? Who has the time available, the tenacity to follow a content calendar and the ability to manage themself and others to get it done.

2. Do we have  in house people who can write reasonably well on a regular basis or should we consider hiring an outside resource or two to help. You don’t need Pulitzer Prize winning writers; with the death of newspapers, there are plenty of great writers out there that can churn out short articles quickly for very reasonable rates.

3. Do we have the minimal equipment and talent to do video? If not, are we willing to hire someone to help? Again, videos don’t need to be something Steven Spielberg would be proud of, but there is a basic level of lighting and audio that makes a video watchable on YouTube. It’s that basic level you need to be sure you can handle or get help with.

4. Are we, as an organization, committed to creating content on a regular basis? Do we all know why we need to do this? What is the goal for creating the content? Website traffic? Higher search rankings? Increase your subscriber base? Whatever the goal is, make sure it’s front and center and everyone understands and is committed to it.

Step 2: brainstorm

Write down every possible idea you have ever had that you (or someone on your team can write about). Don’t edit yourself or others. Just get all the ideas down. Here are just a few high level thoughts to get you started:

• Solution to a problem that your customer/prospects face. Think in terms of “pain points” Here is a great list of for small business pain points
• Review a new tool/report/idea in your industry
• Curate (and annotate) a list of resources valuable to your customers/prospects
• Any content where you can have a title that starts with the “Top 5 ways to…” or the “10 best ways to …”
• Interview or highlight new or top customers
• Any theme that you can build a series of blog posts or videos around

Step 3: quantify + plan

Most of our clients start with a blog or newsletter. It’s best to start with one type of media, get it rolling and then branch out into something else. You can always re-purpose a piece of content posted in a blog for the newsletter or vice-versa.

So off the top of your head…how many blog posts per week can your organization really commit to (based on answers in step 1) or how often can you send out a newsletter (again based on answers in step 1.) Don’t only think in terms of actual work hours, but consider peoples’ “brain space”—what they can realistically focus on.

Now how much time is really needed to accomplish “x” number of blog posts or a monthly newsletter? Remember to include time for more brainstorming and for letting others know about your content. In fact, you should schedule time for brainstorming and researching on a regular basis.

Then outline a monthly and weekly plan, like the one below, to accomplish that quantity.

Click to Download Full Plan

This is an actual plan we gave to a client just beginning with content creation so it is very conservative in the amount of content created and shared.

Step 4: editorial calendar(s)

“Editorial calendar” is a term borrowed from the magazine/newspaper industry. The publications would use an editorial calendar to plan well in advance what their big stories or features would be. At a minimum, in the editorial calendar you match up specific pieces of content with a release date.

How detailed your own calendar is or is not will depend on your needs. You could do one for your blog and a separate one for a monthly newsletter.

Here are a few examples:

Newsletter Editorial Calendar

This is our own Juicy Results editorial calendar that we use to plan out our monthly e-newsletter. Download it and alter the format to your liking. (You can use Excel, Google Docs, Numbers, any application that will open a .csv spreadsheet.)  It’s not fancy, just functional. Of course you will probably have different content sections that you want to use.

Blog Editorial Calendar

This is a format we use for own blog. All data in the cells are fake, but you’ll get the idea. Note that we include all days of the week but we don’t plan copy for each day. When assessing our abilities (see step 1), we knew that would never happen. But we still leave the slots there so we can easily move items around, add something on the fly or simply be aware of special dates.

In the End…

Establish a schedule for your content output. Having the structure will make creating the content easier to accomplish and/or delegate.

Did you know that 5% of time online is spent on YouTube?

It’s true. Or, at least that’s what YouTube claims. That’s not a figure you can ignore as an Internet marketer or small business looking to grow your website traffic.

I know a fair amount or small business owners don’t consider YouTube a business tool because their interaction with the site has been limited to high school kids spoofing TV shows and double rainbows sightings. In reality, a large number of people use YouTube to learn things and to discover new artists and trends. These people can be extremely receptive to targeted advertising while in this state.

For example, if I am searching for movies with “how to make pizza dough,” I might be very interested in your Italian cooking classes. If I’m watching videos about how to take a company public, maybe I’m ripe for your auditing services.

You can chuckle, but there are actually a number videos on that last topic on YouTube!

There are a few ways to use YouTube for advertising your business—two of which, we will cover here.

Promoted Videos

Your company can create the how-to and educational videos that your target audience would find compelling. This allows your prospective customer to grow familiar with you, your point of view and your products in a high-fidelity way without requiring a lot of your time.

With Promoted videos, you can bid on keywords and categories, similar to the way Google Ad Words works. If you have compelling video content that will spread your message, use Promoted Videos to increase your video’s audience.

This will cause them to appear high in search results, and appear at the top of the page when a user is viewing a relevant category. You pay each time someone clicks on your video and watches it in a promoted position (you don’t pay anything when they share it or come back and watch it multiple times!).

Even if your company doesn’t have videos to send users to, you can still take advantage of YouTube advertising with in-video ads.

YouTube Video Targeting Tool and In Video Ads

As a marketer, you likely has some insight into who your target audience is and can make some assumptions about the types of videos they may be watching. Remember the example of the pizza dough video? Use the Video Targeting Tool to find videos that you think your audience will be watching. You can search for videos by keyword and country, or search for videos being watched by your audience.

Once you find the videos and channels that you want to market in, you can place graphic or text ads right in the videos. Below is an example of each:

You can place text or banner ads in Videos on YouTube

In Video Ads are a bit of a throw back to traditional TV advertising, but more targeted and more accessible to small businesses, given your ability to test with limited ad dollars.

Spend a little time thinking about what videos your target customers may already be watching and explore the available content on YouTube. Just don’t blame me when you realize three hours have gone by and you’re still watching videos at work. Of course, then you’ll understand why so much time is spent on YouTube.

Advertisers haven’t arrived in mass yet, so the advertising rates can be more attractive than straight pay-per-click advertising on Google. I encourage you to consider the medium when planning your small business marketing.

Below are some resources to help you get to know YouTube advertising.

• An advertiser’s guide to YouTube
• Bubble: the best of advertising on YouTube
• YouTube advertising overview

Content syndication on the web is defined as the mass publication of a single article, podcast or video (content assets) across many outlets. In a nutshell: Write once, spread everywhere.

Syndicating your content has obvious benefits—expose more people to your message—but it also plays a vital part in search engine optimization. As the search engines see more of your message online, pointing back to your website, they give more weight to your site. This is one of the most natural and powerful ways to build links to your website. But, the real bonus is that these articles, videos and podcasts are being found in places with far more traffic than your website, such as YouTube, iTunes and Squidoo, and some of those people are clicking through to your site.

Content syndication is a key element to traffic building, and it helps with both article marketing and search engine optimization. I’m always a fan of leveraging a little bit of work into a whole lot of results, and that’s what good content asset and some content syndication can do for you!

Icons used in the info graphic courtesy of Icon Drawer.

A content asset is really just some piece of content that you can use as a business tool, either by monetizing it directly (purchasable book) or using it to attract new customers (free article). Often, this content asset is repackaged and distributed in numerous formats and mediums. Think about how a movie is first released on the big screen, broken down into small parts for trailers and web previews, then taken to DVD, then presented on TV. Each time the asset is used, it’s just a variation of the original working in some other way.

On the web, content assets are typically articles, e-books, podcasts or videos. These anchor content assets can be broken up into smaller chunks and used as blog posts, tweets, You Tube shorts, email blasts and even search engine ads. The point is, you develop it once, and if it’s a valuable tool to generate new business, you’re going to want to break it up and use it across as many mediums and channels as you think you can without diminishing its value.

The above examples show how large content assets can be divided and distributed. Additionally, content assets can be aggregated and then distributed. There have been numerous books published recently that are simply large collections of blog posts edited and assembled in a thematic or chronological way.

if you’re involved in search engine optimization, what you’re optimizing are your content assets. If you’re involved in social media marketing, you’re likely using bite size ideas that come from a larger article or white paper, which are also content assets. And, if you’re creating a podcast or You Tube videos, those too can be used in an array of ways on the web to generate more business.

Inventory your site or file server and see what kind content assets you have in your inventory that can be taken advantage of to generate new business. Think: create once, reuse many times.