Top prospects require top quality content in your marketing blog.

In order for your blog to become a lead magnet you have to make your content useful and unique.

How to produce useful content?

As I’ve stated in the Choosing THE Topic for your marketing blog post from this series, you want your blog to become, overtime, a complete library in the niche you operate in. Evaluating the usefulness of your blog content will always be a subjective matter depending from reader to reader.

Nevertheless there is a tactic that will guarantee your content will be percieved as being useful 90% of the time and that is by presenting the information in more than one tonality and format.

Some of the approaches at your dispossal when discussing your market within your blog can be:

1. Entertainment: this approach gets a positive response in any market you use it. People just want to have fun and enjoy themselves, even when searching for solutions to their problems.

2. Education: this is a very effective for qualifying your readers into future prospects. Identifying the problem and proposing a solution is an effective way of turning your reader’s eyes towards your products and services.

3. Information: providing competent information about a product or topic can boost your credibility and can establish you as a reliable resource and authority in the field. For this to happen, you need to constantly scan your market and keep ahead of your competition as much as possible.

4. News: are a great way of keeping your blog up-to-date even in the moments when you feel stuck initiating viral discussions across your community. Again, can contribute at strenghtening your position as a trusted resource.

5. Community: make clear your intention of buing a like-mided community around your business and products, all tied up with your blog. Bonds between members are of paramount importance to get your blog viral and increase traffic exponentially.

How to make your content indispensable?

You have to constantly be researching the market you operate in. In the research proces you’ll want pay close attention to:

• events with strong impact on your market;
• your prospect’s needs, wants and fears;
• the competition with their strong and weak points – products/services;
• daily up-dates concerning your market’s mechanics such as trends, new players and products;
• the strong and weak assets of the product/service you’re promoting.

Many variations of these criteria can be found throught different markets.

A great way of learning how you can get in the way of your prospects and position your blog as a reliable resource is finding out what do they are typing in the SE’s search bar.

A great tool to use is 103bees.com which tracks how visitors arrive at your blog and identifies questions being asked by your readers in search engines.

How to produce unique content?

Again, this must start with a respectable amount of time invested in researching your competittion. In most cases you’ll observe that the topics discussed and the manner in which discussion are conducted tend to differ little from one blog to another. So what to do?

• You can stick witht the current topics and try to improve the end result by working on your writing tone and style, or even massively importing podcast, video and guest posts, or
• you could tackle a new range of sub-topics which draws a clear distinction between you and your competitors.

I suggest finding your own unique approach, both in tone and topics to discuss, becasue the biggest draw back that you’ll face when trying to write about things already

stamped, is that the readers are already grouped into communities around competitor blogs and it would be very difficult and time consuming to pull them onto your RSS feed or mailing list.

A good place to start researching your competition is Technorati.com.

Other good resources about building effective content can be found on this pages:

Principles of Effective Content,

The Secret to Effective Content Promotion,

The Real Secret to Getting Tons of Blog Subscribers

What did I forget to cover in this post? Are there other things you would like to discuss about in future post reguarding the content factory, so-to-speak for your marketing blog?

Please let me know your needs with a comment in the area below.