Content creation is the process of identifying the topic you want to write about, the format in which you want the content to be presented, the strategies you use to produce the content – for example, keyword research, customer requirements, etc – and then actually producing the content. In addition, the content creation process also involves several rounds of appraising and editing the content, and this can be an on-going and evolving process.

Content can take many forms – such as blog posts, podcasts, videos, Infographics and e-books – therefore content creation is a sophisticated process and involves study of consumer habits and expectations, and if done properly, can have a great impact on your business.

Content creation involves the following process:

Brainstorming

The first step is to initiate the flow of ideas around a particular topic. You can start this process by consulting with your team, listening to customer feedback or studying your product and its features and benefits. You can write about a product from multiple angles depending upon your target audience.

Keyword research is a great way of finding out what the audience is talking about your product or service. This gives you new ideas around which you can create your content.

Soliciting your customers for feedback about your product can provide ideas around which you can build your content. They may have questions about your product and creating content that answers these questions will directly and powerfully impact your customers and increase business.

Understanding your customer is the first responsibility of a marketer. Visiting forums, special interest groups and Q&A sites like Quora can help you understand how the market is engaging with your domain of expertise and the kind of relationship your customer has with your service. You can then craft content aimed at clarifying and throwing more light on your domain.

Studying your competition’s content strategy will help you to understand what they are writing about in your domain space. Understanding how they approach your customers will help you to differentiate and uniquely position your content, brand image and yourself in front of your customers. Knowing the gaps in their content will further help you to stand out and attract more sales.

Planning

The next step is deciding how to deploy the content. Some content is best represented visually through videos, images or Infographics. Other types of content perform best when presented textually – articles, blog posts or e-books.

Google search results for a given keyword can tell you about the type of content that is trending – whether it is video, images or Infographics – and based on that you can decide the format of your content.

Next, you need to decide on content volume. This will depend on the size of the market, the type of product and the level of customer expectations. If your product is a very niche one, just a few blog posts and videos will suffice. But if your product has multiple uses and the customer demographic is a broad one, and the domain in which you operate is large, then you will need plenty of videos and blog posts to cover.

A good content writer has everything planned and knows how his content looks like even before it is deployed.

Deploying Content

Once the content is created based on the aforesaid requirements, it is time to release it on the web. You can fine tune this process, allocating different content types to different parts of the web such as blogs, forum posts, social media and authority sites. You need to continually track and refine your content based on its performance, the audience’s engagement with it and the final results in terms of sales it produces.

Thus content creation, distribution, promotion and re-creation is a never-ending process which requires your full attention.

SEO is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic from the major search engines by ensuring that your website or a webpage figures high in the search engine results. This involves editing existing content, adding content, modifying HTML and other coding to increase page relevance with respect to specific keywords and key phrases and also enabling smooth search engine indexing activity.

An important optimization strategy involves increasing backlinks or inbound links to your website or webpage. Since mobile search has surpassed desktop search, an important aspect of SEO involves optimizing your page for mobile devices both in terms of user experience and search engine friendliness.

SEO involves understanding the algorithm that the Search Engines use to index and rank the pages, identify all the parameters such as keyword density, backlinks, anchor links that play a role in determining the rank of a webpage, and then creating a website or webpage that fulfills all these parameters for a given keyword or phrase to ensure that it appears high in the search engine results page.

SEO can also involve off-page optimizations, such as link building, writing for publications and social bookmarking.