Nine content marketing tips to help your personal brand

Proper content Marketing for your brand is vital to your targeted audience. It all begins with having the right topic.

1. What do you want to write about? Plan and research your content widely. In the line of research, use Google Keyword Planner. This will help you find the right keywords to use that will pop up once someone searches for topics related to your content.
2. Still on Google, search to know more about other pages that are ranking with that keyword. Twitter is a great social media platform to know what’s trending, which topic is getting a lot of retweets and likes. Use this opportunity to your advantage.
3. When it comes to writing your content, the spacing of paragraphs and flow of content is very important. Do not have long paragraphs as that will reduce the attention span of the reader. You want to keep them short and straight to the point. The paragraphs should space up after every 3-4 lines or every 75-100 words.
4. If possible, have subheaders. Subheaders help to break down ideas making it easy to read and understand. In some instances, it also makes it easy for scanning. Have an attractive headline. By attractive I mean catchy. Let it be short, a maximum of 55 characters. When listing down items, have bullets. They help in simplifying the understanding of your content.
5. Be open to the idea of having images in your content. Preferably after 300 words. The image should coincide with the content. Make sure the image is optimized to look good on Facebook Link Preview for optimal click-through rates. To play it safe you can have an image that acts as a breakdown of what you are talking about as man tends to remember pictorial content more than mere words. Lastly, have related links to the article, from valuable resources or your previous posts where relevant.
6. In optimizing your content, have an SEO keyword as part of your title.This helps in your topic being picked up and ranked on Google. Have your SEO keyword in at least one of the headers too. Place the SEO keywords at the start of your title and H2 header for great results. On SEO, aim for a minimum of 500 words for an article and 1000-1500 words for a blog post as that’s the set standard by Google.
7. Most of the works are widely shared through the use of social media. Make your content shareable. By this, I mean to transform the content to suit different platforms that will also help in building traffic to your brand. Use Click to Tweet to have tweetable quotes. You will tweet those quotes and below have the link to your article.
8. Create an attractive, custom graphic that clearly displays the title. This increases chances of shares on Pinterest and Instagram. If possible, create Slide share presentations or a video of you talking about the article. Make the video short and very easy to understand. Also, in the video, mention the link to your article and other platforms where they can get your product.
9. To promote your content further, look for niche Facebook groups and Google+ communities to share your post by starting up a discussion on it. Use Facebook ads or LinkedIn Sponsored Updates to run targeted ads to promote your content. In platforms such as LinkedIn and Google+, startup discussions around your topic and include the link to your post as a reference. You can also share your post as a status update on LinkedIn on your personal profile.

Article by Daniel Maithya, Founder and CEO of RoyalTrendia