Start With Your Goals

Your content creation purpose requires you to establish your goals before you begin scheduling dates and ideas. Your content creation purpose includes raising business awareness, building audience engagement, generating sales, and developing thought leadership. Your content direction and purpose become clear when you define your goals, which leads to meaningful content publication. Your content strategy for brand awareness should focus on introducing your business to new potential customers. Your content strategy for sales promotion should emphasize specific products and services that solve particular customer problems.

Know Your Audience

Content that connects with audience needs and interests and addresses their specific challenges will achieve the highest level of success. You need to determine what matters most to your target audience. You can develop buyer personas that describe audience characteristics and online activities or conduct surveys and polls to discover what your followers want to see more of. Your understanding of your audience will help you develop content that attracts and retains their interest.

Add Variety With Content Types

A well-designed content calendar requires different types of content to achieve success. Your content feed will become monotonous when you post the same kind of content repeatedly, so you need to mix things up. Social media posts function well for brief updates and behind-the-scenes content, yet blog posts enable you to create in-depth content about subjects your audience finds important. The content format of videos allows businesses to present their products, teach tutorials, and showcase customer success stories. The combination of infographics helps simplify complicated data, while email newsletters enable enterprises to build stronger relationships with their audience. Your content reach will expand when you work with experts and other businesses operating within your industry.

Choose the Right Platforms

Your target audience determines which platforms you should focus on instead of trying to maintain a presence across all social media networks. The professional content and thought leadership material perform best on LinkedIn, yet Instagram suits visual content and lifestyle content, and Facebook maintains its position for community interaction. YouTube provides the best platform for educational content and extended videos, but X (formerly Twitter) functions best for fast updates and immediate dialogue. Your content distribution should focus on platforms that align with your business objectives and audience preferences.

Set a Realistic Frequency

The key to consistency in content marketing lies in maintaining a posting schedule that you can sustainably follow. Three to five social media posts each week represent an optimal posting frequency. A blog needs one to two new posts each month to maintain freshness without creating overwhelming work. Your email newsletter schedule should run once or twice per month, while video content distribution should happen once or twice per month based on your available resources. Starting with achievable goals that you can maintain will prove more effective than attempting ambitious targets that lead to quick exhaustion.

Build Around Content Pillars

Content pillars represent fundamental subjects that you regularly revisit to maintain focus and maintain your core message. A veteran-owned business should organize its content around four main pillars, which include entrepreneurship guidance, community backing, product knowledge, and veteran life content. The pillar system enables you to generate continuous content ideas through subtopics, which maintain your focus on the main subject. The method helps you create unified content while delivering diverse material.

Create Your Calendar

You can create your calendar without needing advanced tools because a basic spreadsheet serves the purpose, or you can use Trello, Notion, or CoSchedule for additional features. Your content calendar needs to include the publication date, topic title, platform, format, and status information, which should be marked as draft, scheduled, or published. The content calendar should contain specific actions for each piece of content, which direct readers to comment, subscribe to newsletters, or buy products.

Stay Flexible Approach

The calendar planning process remains effective even when unexpected changes occur. The appearance of new trends and unexpected business opportunities requires you to adjust your content strategy. Your content calendar should function as a directional tool instead of an unyielding set of rules.

Track and Adjust

A content calendar serves two purposes beyond scheduled posting because it helps you understand which content performs well. Monitor how your content performs through engagement metrics, track clicks, conversions, and website traffic. Analyze your performance data to improve your content strategy through successful content amplification and unsuccessful content revision. The continuous improvement process transforms your calendar into an effective tool that maintains organization while producing measurable outcomes.

Turning Strategy Into Success

A content calendar delivers its value through its ability to maintain consistent content delivery. Your ability to create content regularly without panic will emerge from setting goals, understanding your audience, using different formats, and planning your content. Your business growth and brand strength depend on building trust through consistent delivery, which establishes strong relationships with your audience.

Your Website Should Be an Asset You Own

When your website lives under another organization’s control, you may not truly own one of your most important business assets.

That means you may not have full access to:

• Your website login
• Your domain name
• Your donor or customer data
• Your analytics
• Your SEO history
• Your content
• Your images and videos
• Your forms and submissions
• Your ability to make updates quickly

This can create major problems when leadership changes, partnerships shift, campaigns grow, or you need to move quickly.

Your website should work for you, not hold you hostage.

You Lose Control of Your Message

Every organization needs to be able to tell its own story clearly and consistently.

When someone else controls your website, they may also control how your mission, services, sponsors, partners, events, or impact are presented. Even small changes in wording, placement, branding, or calls to action can affect public perception.

For nonprofits and mission-driven organizations, this is especially important. Donors, sponsors, volunteers, and media partners need a clear, official source of truth. If your information is scattered across pages you do not control, confusion grows quickly.

Your message should come directly from your team, your leadership, and your approved strategy.

You Can Be Delayed When Speed Matters

There are moments when updates need to happen immediately:

• A campaign launches.
• A sponsor is added.
• A registration deadline changes.
• A media opportunity comes in.
• A donation push needs to go live.
• A key announcement needs to be corrected.

If another organization controls your website, you may have to wait for approval, access, or technical support just to make a simple update.

That delay can cost you visibility, donations, registrations, sales, and credibility.

In today’s digital world, speed matters. Your team needs the ability to update your own website when the moment requires it.

Your Data May Not Fully Belong to You

Your website collects valuable information.

That may include leads, donors, volunteers, event registrations, email sign-ups, customer inquiries, partner interest, and campaign performance.

If that data is captured through a platform controlled by someone else, you may not have full ownership or access to it. You may not be able to export it, analyze it, retarget those audiences, or build long-term relationships from it.

Data is one of the most valuable assets your organization has. It should never be locked inside a system you do not control.

It Can Hurt Your SEO and Long-Term Visibility

Search engines reward consistency, authority, and ownership.

When your organization’s information is housed on another group’s website, you may be building SEO value for them instead of yourself. Their domain gains the traffic. Their website gains the authority. Their platform benefits from the search history.

Meanwhile, your own website may remain weak, outdated, or difficult to find.

If people are searching for your organization, event, program, or services, your official website should be the page that appears first. That only happens when you consistently build content, authority, and traffic on a domain you own.

It Creates Risk During Relationship Changes

Partnerships are valuable, but they can also change. Boards change. Vendors change. Leadership changes. Sponsors change. Agreements change. Priorities change.

If your website is controlled by another party, a simple transition can become complicated. You may have to fight for access, rebuild content, recover assets, or redirect traffic. In some cases, organizations are forced to start over completely because they never owned the foundation in the first place.

That is an avoidable risk.

Your Website Should Support Your Growth

A strong website should connect to everything you are building:

• Email marketing
• Social media
• Media coverage
• Advertising
• Search engine optimization
• Donor campaigns
• Sales funnels
• Partner outreach
• Video content
• Lead generation
• Event registration
• Reporting and analytics

When your website is under your control, it becomes the hub of your entire digital ecosystem.

When it is controlled by another organization, it can become a bottleneck.

You should never build your digital presence on land you do not own.

Your website should be controlled by your organization, managed by trusted partners, and built with long-term ownership in mind. Outside partners can absolutely support strategy, design, hosting, content, SEO, and management, but the core access, data, domain, and decision-making authority should always remain with you.

Your website is your voice. Your platform. Your data. Your credibility. Your digital home.

Make sure you own it.

By writing blog posts that are optimized for specific keywords and phrases, you can also increase the chances that your website will rank for those terms, which can drive more targeted traffic to your site. Blogging can also help you build credibility and authority in your industry, as you can use your blog to share valuable information and insights with your audience.

Blogging for SEO for any industry

Blogging and its importance for better search engine ranking is industry-agnostic. The search engines are all crawling the web and “spidering” your site in the same way as everyone else’s site to deliver what is most useful to the person searching.

If you’re in a highly technical industry, you may want to focus on writing blog posts that cover technical topics in detail, using specific technical terms and phrases as keywords. If you’re in a more general consumer industry, it may be more advantageous to write blog posts that cover broader, more general topics, and to use more common, everyday terms as keywords.

Think about what’s important to your target audience: What are their wants and needs? Strive to write blog posts that are relevant and valuable to them. This can increase the chances that your blog will be read and shared by your audience, which can further help improve your website’s visibility and enhance your brand.

SEO is just one aspect of a successful digital marketing strategy, of course, and it’s important to consider other factors, such as what other mediums and platforms your target audience uses. Email and social media, for example, are integral to good SEO strategy as people will come to your website via links you push out on these other platforms.

How often to publish a blog 

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the ideal frequency for publishing blog posts will depend on a number of factors, such as your industry, the goals of your blog, and the resources you have available for creating and promoting your content. There’s no sense in trying to keep up with five blog posts a week if you don’t have the resources to crank out that much content.

What’s more important is to aim for a consistent publishing schedule rather than publishing all of your blog posts in a short period of time and then going long periods without posting anything. Consistency can help keep your audience engaged and also signal to search engines that your website is active, which again can be beneficial for SEO.

Regardless of what the “experts” say, there is no magic number when it comes to how often you should publish blog posts. Some businesses may find that publishing a new blog post once or twice a week works well for them, while others may choose to publish a new post every day or even multiple times a day. (For many smaller companies, it’s impossible to generate this much content, this frequently. Don’t worry! You can still be effective at blogging for SEO without driving yourself crazy keeping up with it.)

Just stick to a publishing schedule that works for your business and allows you to consistently create and publish high-quality content.

Blog frequency and better search engine rankings

Pushing out new content on a regular basis can help keep your website fresh and up to date, which can be appealing to users as well as search engines.

By posting new content you also have more opportunities to use keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business and that you want to rank for in search results. With every blog post optimized for specific keywords, you can increase the chances that your website will rank for those terms, which can drive more targeted traffic to your site.

Regular blog posts also help promote your website and attract links from other websites, which can help improve your search engine rankings. You can take this a step further by sharing your content on social media, reaching out to other websites and bloggers in your industry, and participating in online communities related to your business, to increase the chances that other websites will link to your content. Earning backlinks from other trustworthy websites can boost your search engine rankings.

Need help with blogging for better search engine results?

Put our Creative Pod system to work for you. Helping businesses of $10M to $300M go to the next level. Get in touch.

What is a call to action on a website?

A call to action is an invitation to a website visitor to do something. A call to action is often a button link but can also be a text link. A call to action should be written in a way that entices the user to want to take another action, to be engaged enough to stay a little longer on your site.

Calls to action are used to get people to:

• Fill out forms
• Register for events
• Download whitepapers
• Watch videos
• Follow on social media

Filling out forms, such as for newsletter subscriptions, downloads, or registrations, are among the most common reasons to have a powerful call to action on your website.

Once you have user information from a form, you have their permission to contact them via email with other types of information. They’re now in the “top of the funnel” in terms of marketing. You can now cultivate a relationship with them and hopefully move them further down the funnel towards a transaction.

On the other hand, some users may never become customers, but will become long-term subscribers to your newsletter. Perhaps they’ll be word-of-mouth for your business or they just like what you have to say.

Either way, the call to action is what drives the user to provide you with their precious contact information.

When creating a call to action, get creative

The standard call-to-action language we’re all used to seeing is sign up, register, get started, subscribe—that kind of thing.

Depending on what kind of business you have, whether conservative or a bit more playful, you may need to stick with straightforward language when it comes to creating a call to action.

But if you have the creative freedom, use it!

Want people to subscribe to your fascinating newsletter? Try words and phrases like I’m In, Sign Me Up, or Keep Me Posted in the call-to-action button.

Inviting people to register for a webinar or another type of event? Try using language like Count Me In, I’ll Be There, or RSVP Yes in the CTA.

You can also use sub-text to entice people to move to the next action. Perhaps you want them to download a report. You could put the main CTA in bold language followed by supporting language in sub-text that further tells the user the value they’ll get in the download.

For example:

Download the Report

to boost your ROI today

Call for a Consultation

to start your health journey

Whatever your call to action is, be sure it is specific and clear so the user understands what will happen next. And make sure whatever happens next is consistent with what you indicated in the call to action.

Need help creating a call to action?

Let our creative content team develop strategic content that gets results. Get in touch to see what we can do for you.

The importance of images on a web page to support your brand

The images you use on your website should be consistent with the personality of your company—and the images should have a consistent feel across all pages and platforms. This means your website and all your social media channels should share a similar vibe when it comes to stock photography, if stock photos are being used.

Most brands, large and small, use stock photos in their digital marketing but there are often many creative cooks in the pot. Here are some questions for consideration:

• Do the images used have a similar brand personality?
• Is the lighting consistent?
• Are the people in the photos looking at the camera or away from it?
• Do you have design standards in place so that everyone who works on creative can follow the same rules for your brand?

Imagine how jarring it would be for a prospective customer to experience a super quirky playful image on one platform when in fact your brand is more conservative and your website images are usually more neutral in color and portrayal of people?

Having a digital marketing firm or a digital marketing expert on your team to oversee the use of images on your website is an important aspect of brand management.

Using web page images to support content

Using images on a web page is integral to web content strategy. Many content developers suggest using an image every 100 words or so to help break up words on the page. This helps address the issue of lack of attention (less than 2-3 seconds in the digital era, according to some) as well as gives the eyes a break as most people now scan the internet on their mobile devices.

Images also have the power to conjure emotion and communicate or exemplify further what the words on the page are saying. You should use images selectively and strategically to help support your message.

Stock photography is useful because it gives us access to so many scenarios that can help support our messaging. But it’s important to choose photos that:

• Show diversity
• Illustrate in a meaningful way
• Are unique enough to represent your brand
• Are filtered consistently if you’re using filters
• Aren’t showing geographic locations inconsistent with your country / culture

On this last point, many stock images come from Europe and there may be background imagery that clearly shows a monument or type of building or street scene that is European. Unless your business has a European presence, be careful to choose images that have universal geographic appeal.

Another critical aspect of using images on web pages is photo sizing. When you download images from the web, you can download at a certain size and resolution or you can resize the images later. There are best practices for web page images depending on how you’re using the image. The most important thing is to ensure your image is compressed so that it loads quickly for web. Slow page load is one of the main reasons people leave websites and never come back. You can use a tool such as tinypng to easily compress any image for website or digital use.

Using images in the mobile era also requires an eye on responsive design. This means that when a user looks at your website, the web pages and images adjust comfortably to the new “view” of the mobile browser without losing usability or functionality. Keep in mind that an image on a desktop won’t always look the same—or appear in the same order—on a mobile device. Be sure to check your work in various mobile views before publishing a live page.

How to use images to guide user experience and lead generation

Images can also be used to grab attention, create energy, and draw users into to lead-generation forms. Think about using people photos to help perk up your brand’s personality. Decide what your brand’s “image” is: Approachable yet professional? Fun, playful, a little but nutty? Make sure your images tell a similar story and support the content.

Images can further help users take the next action you want them to take by having a call-to-action (CTA) button embedded in the image. Want someone to subscribe, sign up, register, or get the report? Pair the CTA with an engaging image to increase clickworthiness.

Images can also help facilitate the way readers follow content on the page. Wherever graphics are, the eye will always go first. If you want users to remember something important, consider creating an infographic, for example. An infographic is a combination of graphic elements and words to help articulate facts, statistics, and other helpful information in one convenient graphic that can be easily downloaded or shared.

Does your website need an image overhaul?

Or maybe you just need to ask some questions and explore your options. Either way, we offer free assessments and consultations. Let’s talk at (941) 220-7469‬ or use our online form to get in touch.

The value of new content for search engines

New content means the search engine “spiders” will come “crawl” your page after you’ve put out new content, then evaluate your content and serve it up on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Frequently publishing new content shows the search engines that your business is active, that you have expertise to offer, and that your site is worth coming back to.

If you don’t have a blog, it’s easy for a business website to become stale quickly. Think about the kinds of content that goes on a standard business site. You have a list of services and maybe individual service pages for each. You may have some client testimonials or case studies and an about page with team or partner information. There may be additional navigation unique to your company or industry. Other than that, most websites don’t have new content on a regular basis unless you’re introducing a new product or service.

Publishing a blog once a week can bring freshness to your website and invite search engine crawls on a regular basis, which can help your blog pages—and indirectly, your other web pages—rank higher on the SERPs.

The brand-building power of blogs

Brand building is another way blogging works as a marketing tool. Think about the way you consume content on the web. You search for information on a topic, you find a blog post with some easy to skim and read information. Sometimes it’s posted on a site that you’re familiar with, sometimes it’s a site that’s new to you. Then when you go to search up similar information and that site comes up again, you become more acquainted with the name of that website.

Perhaps you decide to sign up for the newsletter on that website because you like the reliable, useful information they provide. The blog itself is helping to build the company brand because of the trustworthiness of the content. You may not ever become a customer of that brand, but you like the information they provide.

So how does that help the brand?

Because you have returned to the website multiple times and consumed the blog content, the search engines recognize this behavior and reward the website by improving its page rankings in the SERPs.

Not every blog reader is a customer, but every blog reader is valuable, nonetheless.

Blogging as top-of-funnel marketing strategy

Top-of-funnel is what most users are who come to your website for the first time. Rarely does someone convert to being a customer right away. Instead, they hear about you because of a social media post or a YouTube video or a paid ad. They happen to check out your website. Maybe they come back a few times and decide to sign up for your email updates. Eventually they move down through the funnel and decide to call for a consultation.

As a top-of-funnel strategy, blogging can be an excellent marketing tool. It draws readers in by providing them with information on topics they’re interested in. It allows you to show off your expertise in certain areas. It also drives relevant traffic to your website, which gets the attention of search engines.

Search engines notice whether people are finding your content useful and coming back for more. The search engines reward your blog content by ranking it higher on the search result pages. Your blog content indirectly helps your other web pages perform better and your overall website gains greater credibility and trustworthiness as a go-to, reliable source of information people are searching.

But what if blogging is beyond your marketing capabilities?

Understandably, businesses need to focus on what’s sustainable when it comes to marketing efforts. Not every business has the staff or content writing capability to develop and post blogs on a regular basis. Consistency is key when it comes to creating an editorial calendar and delivering content because after all, if you start putting it out there for people to consume, they’ll come to expect it!

If you need help with blogging on your industry topics and areas of expertise, let us know. We have expert content creators who can help you develop strategic blog content that speaks your business. Talk to us.