Let’s talk content strategy

Strategy is a great word. It’s one of those mid-weight ones that can effortlessly be thrown into discussions to take it up just that notch or two.

But dig a little deeper and it soon becomes apparent that there is a lot of uncertainty around what strategy, and content strategy in particular, really means.

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Tips for getting your work featured by a blogger

On Thursday, 14 April 2016, Shopstar hosted prolific blogger Lana Kenney of Lanalou Style at their monthly Echat, held at Truth Coffee at Prestwich Memorial in Cape Town.  

Lana’s been blogging since 2009, having grown her lifestyle blog into one of the biggest of its kind in South Africa. At this intimate event she shared tips with online shop owners for how to get their work noticed and featured by bloggers.

Here are some of the key takeouts she shared:

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Why a content calendar is a good plan

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential”, Winston Churchill once said.

These wise words are especially relevant to content calendars. The content calendar itself is not as important as it is to use it for guiding your content production and dissemination.

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SEO: content and beyond – part two (the critical bit)

In Part One of this post, we went over the basic SEO boxes your website needs to tick. Think of these as the bare minimum your website must do methodically and consistently in order for Google to rank your site. Ironically, many so-called “SEO specialists” stop here, and a basic website build often (alarmingly) may not even include all of them.

But to leapfrog from SEO circa the 2000s to SEO today, the “bare minimum” is not enough.

So once you’ve ticked your boxes there are a few more magic ingredients, and it starts with this:

Content marketing is the future of SEO

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Taking the bland out of boring

As brands are increasingly waking up to the importance of content as a fundamental building block of their marketing strategy, the question for many remains: “What should my content be about?”

As the Content Strategist rightly pointed out in this article, it is easy if you’re Nike or GoPro or some other inherently cool brand. But what if your business is banking or insurance… or washing powder?

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