Hi Boox Popular Magazine 2024
If content creation was simple – everybody would be doing it. To get to the finished product, the idea must go and develop through a set of steps. And today, we’re going to talk about those steps.
Since there’s a lot of ground to uncover, we’re not going to waste any more of your time, and we’re going to jump straight into business. Let’s get started!
1. Idea
Idea, inspiration… Call it any way you want. It all begins with this one seed. How these ones come about – it’s hard to tell. Some come about naturally, and for some, you need to work for. And, since we wouldn’t want you to wait for inspiration for too long, we suggest looking for one. How do you do that? Well, just ask yourself this question – what would my audience like to see? If you can answer that question, the idea will just pop right into your head!
2. Revisit Some Old Work
Revisiting your old content might give you a great idea of what to write next. But, some of your old creations might just become your new ones. There’s nothing wrong with recycling and rewriting some old content. Hell, if moviemakers can film Ghostbusters a million times – you can rewrite an old post. Just make sure you update it with some new, updated information – or at least make it better than it was before.
3. Talk To Your Audience
If you’re a content creator, you must have an audience of some kind. No matter how big or small, your audience is directly responsible for your content because if they don’t engage with it – who will? Therefore, drop an Instagram story, Facebook status or post a simple tweet and engage with your audience on your new idea. If it generates some buzz – you’re on the right path. If it doesn’t, well, you might want to go back to step one.
4. Research Your Topic
Regardless of the topic of your new content, you want to arm yourself with true and useful information. It’s not enough to just be interesting and thought-provoking. You have to have some information or knowledge to back up your claims or whatever it is that you’re trying to make in your new post. How do you do that? Well, you do your due diligence, and you do thorough research on the topic that you’re interested in.
To be fair, research can be dull and boring, which is why most content creators never actually make it to the top. However, here’s something you might need to hear – research is only boring if you make it boring. You can easily spice up your research by implementing some interesting visual tools and aids, like mind maps, for instance.
If you learn more about how mind maps can help make your research interesting, feel free to visit https://www.zenmindmap.com/ for more info.
5. Research The Keywords
There are two things to focus on here – search volume and difficulty.
While most people obsess over search volume, that’s not actually something you should be doing. The number you’re seeing is only related to the exact phrase, and we all know that you’re not ranking on just one phrase. So, don’t worry about it.
On the other hand, the difficulty might be something to spend a little bit more time focusing on because if you don’t even have a chance in ranking – you’re kind of wasting your time on your post. You might not want to hear it, but targeting a phrase that you can’t reach is utterly useless.
6. Set Up The Structure
Now that you’re done with research, it’s time to finish out the prepping phase. One final piece of preparation before you begin creating is setting up a structure for your upcoming piece. Why would you do that?
Well, first, it’s always better to start with something. Blank paper is the killer of creativity. Also, an article should be built to perform, and that’s kind of hard to do without a proper structure.
Finally, setting up the structure allows you to have a uniform look between all your posts. So, it would probably be wise to create several templates that you can reuse for your future posts.
7. Start Writing
Finally, it’s time to start writing! After all the prep work you’ve done, you should be more than ready to begin the “creation” portion of the creation process.
Prepare yourself – this could take a while. Just like everything else – take it one step at a time. Write the summary of the article in a single sentence, write a hook, and just keep it going. Check things off, one by one, until you’re finally “done”.
8. Format
Just because you’re done writing doesn’t mean you’re finished. Now comes the “fun” part – formatting. If there’s one thing, creators dislike it’s the formatting. It’s long and boring, and it always seems like there’s something else to do.
Although to be fair, formatting should get easier and faster with time, once you find your style and so on, but still – it’ll take some take time. Also, once you get into the groove and you get used to a certain style of formatting, you’ll be able to do a good portion of it as you write, so that’s something.
9. Add Visuals
If you’ve written a long post – you absolutely need to add some images, otherwise, no one’s going to stay there and read the whole thing. You need images to get your visitors to stay, so whatever you do – don’t forget about those.
10. Optimize
Once that everything’s “done”, it’s time for some SEO optimization. You’ll need an SEO tool of some kind for this part, but essentially, what you’ll do here is check if there are some missed opportunities. You’ll check to see how many times did you use a certain phrase and how many times did your competitors use that same phrase, but also, you’ll check to see if you’ve missed something that your competitors didn’t. Once you resolve all that, you’re ready to…
11. Publish
Congratulations – you’re (almost) done. All that’s left to do now is share your creation with the world. Naturally, you will have the urge to go back and maybe rehash some things, but if you’ve done everything right – you probably don’t have to. You’re good to go!
Conclusion
There you have it. In our own opinion, those were the 11 essential steps of content creation. We hope you’ve found them helpful.
