What is cornerstone content?
Content that is intended to help build traffic and brand awareness by demonstrating what you can offer is called cornerstone content. content that is very relevant to your business goals helps you become seen as an expert in your industry, and will bring in a flow of website visitors who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer at some point.
You should not expect everyone who visits your content to convert. The primary purpose of cornerstone content is to make a good first impression so that people will have positive associations with your brand. They will be more likely to come to you when they are ready to convert if you do this.
The metaphor of the cornerstone comes to us from masonry. As the folks at Dictionary.com define it, a cornerstone is:
1. A stone that joins two masonry walls at an intersection.
A stone representing the nominal starting place in the construction of a monumental building, usually carved with the date, is laid with appropriate ceremonies.
The foundation of democratic government is a free press.
Your cornerstone content should support the rest of your content and form an essential part of your traffic base.
What are the benefits of a cornerstone content piece?
Cornerstone content has a number of benefits for your business:
- Raises your brand awareness
- Brings in relevant site visitors
- Builds natural links (which help the rest of your site’s SEO)
- Establishes authority, trust, and positive brand sentiment
- Feeds your funnel (helping you build an email list, for example)
How to create great cornerstone content
Now we will demonstrate how to create cornerstone content that is both informative and engaging, as well as how to promote it to your target audience.
1. Do your research
Getting to know your customers and understanding their motivations for buying your product is a crucial aspect of marketing. Who is your target audience? Once you identify them, you can better decide what content to produce.
In order to keep your cornerstone piece relevant, it is important to communicate with your audience. Talk to existing customers, carry out surveys, and then analyze the data.
A great tool to help you with this is Google AdWords. You should also research what people are looking up online using a tool like Google AdWords. When choosing a topic for your blog, you want to find one that is frequently searched for online but does not have a lot of existing content. To improve your position in the search engine results pages, your content must be better than what is already available.
Ask yourself: what are the pain points faced by the target audience? What questions are they asking, and why aren’t they already being answered? The goal is to identify a problem your business can help with, utilizing specialist knowledge or data to provide a unique solution.
Google provides a keyword tool to find out what keywords are being used to search on their site. You need to select the best keywords and phrases for your content that match the search terms people are most likely to use. Only you will be able to provide the answers they are looking for!
It’s important to hang on to the data you’ve gathered once you have it. It will be useful for you to revisit this data at a later date to observe any changes in your target demographic and adapt your content accordingly.
2. Plan your content
You will need to decide whether you will produce all the content yourselves or whether you will outsource it. This largely depends on your current staff and resources. If you have a dedicated marketing team, you can likely handle it internally. If you run a one or two-person business, it might be difficult to find the time and energy to devote to this while also keeping the rest of your business running.
It is possible to do some aspects of the work in-house and to outsource other aspects. You could also hire a contractor to do all the research for your cornerstone content, then have them create a visual asset, like an infographic or video, from that research.
Put some milestones in place
When creating a project, think like a project manager and establish milestones to help keep the project on track. It is important to have a high quality content piece on your website, but it may take some time to create.
You should calculate how much it will cost to create the content you want, and set that amount of money aside to pay for it. The cost of producing content will differ depending on what type of content you are trying to create. Potential costs include:
- Fees for a freelance writer
- Design costs
- Development costs
- Promotion budget
Don’t be afraid to spend some money on this! If you feel like you’re about to back out, go back and read the section on benefits again.
3. Write your masterpiece
Your cornerstone content should be well-planned and superbly-written to ensure that your readers are interested, informed, and inspired. The content you create must be relevant and genuinely helpful to the customer, not only solving their problem but making them want to learn more about you.
Your brand’s reputation is at stake if you’re not accurate. Content on your website should be authoritative and include links to other trustworthy sources. This will help improve your website’s search engine rankings.
Use keywords throughout your writing, but avoid overstuffing them. Software like Hemingway and Grammarly can help improve your writing by making it easier to read and more informative.
The article should provide an explanation of the term “machine learning” and give examples that are easy to understand.
You should also avoid being too pushy. Even though you want visitors, your cornerstone content shouldn’t be about using aggressive sales tactics. A more subtle approach will help potential customers trust you more while addressing their query.
It’s important to have both great visuals and written content to keep the reader engaged. The goal is to make the article so good that readers want to share it or link to it in their own articles.
4. Optimize your content
After creating great content, the next step is to optimize it for maximum views. Your website should be easy to access and navigate on any device, with a special focus on mobile optimization.
The URL and title tag are important for your primary keyword to appear. The headline should be appealing. Google wants to give you the most relevant results possible, so it’s beneficial to have a title that directly answers the question you’re asking.
As well as using keywords in the body text, make sure to use them in subheadings. This will help improve your SEO. This makes it easy for readers to see at a glance what the content is about, and for search engines to recognize its relevance.
Optimizing your visual content can include adding alt text, using relevant keywords in your image file names, and making sure the images load quickly. If you want people to keep coming back to your site, you should always have free content available for them.
5. Promote your content
If you don’t promote your content, it’s a waste of time to create it. You want it to make a splash. It can take some time for new content to show up in organic search results, especially if you are a new business. While you are waiting for that to happen, you should pursue other ways to get your content seen by people.
Email promotion
If you’ve got an email list, use it! You should announce your new content piece in a dedicated email to your database. This type of email is often opened and clicked through at a high rate.
Target your email outreach by writing personalized emails to people you believe would be interested in your new content. The best case scenario is if they share or link to your content.
When you are thinking about how to target your audience, look for popular influencers, as well as content that is already popular. If you find a list of resources for well-dressed, well-groomed men, tell the author that they should add a link to your guide on how to grow a beard.
Social media promotion
Organic social promotion is a no-brainer. Of course you should post your new content to all your social networks, but it’ll take a little more work than that:
- Tailor your text, image, etc. for different social networks . Different content succeeds on different platforms. For example, videos tend to do well on Facebook, so you could make a video version of your content just for FB and then link to the full guide from there.
- Share more than once. Put your content into a rotation so it’s getting regular exposure to more, new, different people.
- Focus on the platforms that work best in your industry. If you’re in the grooming business, you’re going to want to create some beautiful images of bearded men for Instagram and Pinterest.
Organic social promotion might not be enough. Although paid social promotion is affordable, it is still unknown whether or not it is effective. This can help get your content seen by more people, leading to more shares and reads.
- Promote to targeted audiences – don’t just broadcast. For example, on Facebook you could promote your new guide only to men between the ages of 18 and 29. On Twitter, you can promote your post to a certain hashtag.
- Optimize for relevance. Most social platforms have some kind of relevancy algorithm – on Facebook, it’s called Relevance Score. Basically, how it works is that higher engagement rates keep your ad in the rotation and lower the cost you pay per engagement. If you see that a certain headline or image is performing well with your audience, replicate it!
6. Links and sharing
Personalized post-click landing pages are a great way to generate leads. Instead of having suggestions pop up while people are in the middle of reading your content, you could have an exit banner with a special offer just as they’re about to leave. This way, you won’t annoy people, and you might be able to get some business from it.
Your website should have plenty of links to important pages (cornerstone content) so that visitors can easily find new material.
If you want your cornerstone content to be seen by more people, include cross-references and backlinks in other similar posts. Google usually favors websites with a strong internal linking structure. This means that having a lot of links between the pages on your website can help improve your ranking on Google.
Make sure to add social media buttons to your content so that visitors can share it with ease. If you mention well-known figures in your industry in your content, they may be more likely to share it with their large number of followers.
7. Regular maintenance
Fresh and relevant content is loved by search engines. Google uses ‘regular updates’ as a signal that your content is current, which can help improve your positioning in search results.
Updating your cornerstone content regularly helps to ensure that it includes information on the latest trends and statistics. If it mentions specific products, check they’re still available and that the prices are accurate.
Additionally, confirm the website loads quickly and there are no broken links or problems with Slow loading images. The fonts and layouts of pages can start to look outdated after a while, so it is beneficial to change the look of the pages occasionally.
Remote IT support is useful for teams working on content maintenance – they may need quick help to fix a problem before potential customers are discouraged by a slow site or inability to access content.
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