Content Strategy and Cornerstone Posts

What sort of strategy do you deploy when creating content?  Do you have a publishing schedule with a thought-out plan?  Do you carry out keyword research and think of the readers when you are considering your topic? Or do you just shoot from the hip and write whatever fancies you?

Source 

I used a bit of content strategy here on steem.  When I started out, I posted about Excel, as I learned about the audience, I changed my content type to suit the audience.  I wrote posts to draw attention and I had some success.  I'm sure there are people here that remember :-)

On The Excel Club I have been rather strategic in some of the posts that I have been doing.  With high hopes for traffic targets, getting the right type of traffic is important.

I had noticed that many of the blogs that were doing rather well, were posts that covered more advanced tricks and skills. These posts rank well with Google, and some have been circulating some time.   The audience that would seek out such tutorials would have the skills to learn what the need from Google searches and don’t tend to go on and purchase courses.

So I needed a post that would rank well in Google and attract the less skilled Excel user.  If I can get them at an early stage in their learning, I can take the up the full path.  The lifetime value of a user like that is much greater than the lifetime value of a more experienced user.

With that in mind, I authored and Published Excel 101 – Getting Started with Excel 365 as a cornerstone piece.  It looks like finally last week, Google put it on the map as the search traffic had a nice little up and I also passed 100 shares on Facebook alone.  The other day I was found on steemhunt.  Let's hope that continues because I have been doing the work to promote the post, I just need a few new strong linkbacks.

The next cornerstone post I authored was only published today.  Again, addressing a problem, or weakness in my traffic.  I have these learn and earn steem activities on my posts, however getting people to engage is really hard. I know many have now signed up for steem accounts. I have set up and delegated to over 20 myself and  I know over 100 users have click thought to https://signup.steemit.com/.  But I am still really struggling to get people to engage in the posts.  Its funny how hard it is to give money away lol.  

My solution – target a niche audience.  Target people that are already familiar with cryptocurrency instead of the general Excel user.  So today I published Excel and Coinmarketcap – live cryptocurrency dashboard.  It’s a rather detailed article with a video tutorial and a learn and earn activity.   I published via steempress and with their awesome new comments section, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.  You can vote on the post and leave a comment with your steem account, or without a steem account,  right there on my wordpress blog.   I also got to use some of the different tribe tags.  

On Wednesday I will be doing my normal post promotion.  Sending out my newsletters, sharing on social media, sharing it with existing students & try to build strong linkbacks. But I think this time I am also going to do some paid promoting.  Probably on Google and Reddit.  But before that, I am going to promote the post with bots here on steem to boost the post as social proof to the nonsteem users. hehehe feel free to prevote before I send in the bots.

It would be interesting to hear from those that use Steem bounty and would this be a good marketing strategy I should consider?

Do you have a content strategy?  Do you think mine is naff?  I would love to hear your comments and feedback below