There was a day where content was king. What happened next was 27million+ content pieces being created and shared everyday. Now content is just flash on your Twitter feed. Let’s leave that phrase in the past.

Focused Content Should Always Be a Focus

When you create content for the purpose of gaining rankings for a researched keyword, then it can still be relevant and valuable. The key to having these pages though is growing them over time with internal linking, backlinking and always making them better.

This type of content is considered your evergreen content. People are always going to be searching for certain terms and you don’t need to create 100 different articles focusing on that term, just one good one that catches the main phrase as well as the long-tail keywords.

Google is focusing less and less on ‘specific’ keywords and becoming topic driven. Make sure that whatever type of content you’re creating is completely covering the topic and solving the problem for the user. We often hear about the sweet spot of 1000 words for an article but, in reality your content should be as long as it needs to be to completely cover and answer the searchers search.

D.R.E.A.M

Distribution rules everything around me.

Now that everyone is on the content train, the next step is getting a solid distribution strategy. Getting a solid distribution strategy in place will help you drive targeted traffic for every piece of content that you ever create. The keys to setting this up are:

• Super-niche local communities with your target audience – Every zip code has some type of Facebook group where local community members talk. Find out where this is and contribute to it. Also check other places for these type of communities, they’re everywhere online.
• Write about stuff that is sharable – Real estate mortgage rates might be informational but, they aren’t exactly sexy for someone to share on their Facebook page. Can you write about some local events and relate it to real estate some how? Make your content shareable to generate a network effect.
• Get influencers involved – The key to this is building a relationship first. Asking someone to do something for you like share an article when they don’t know you is always a big ask. Provide some value to them first.
• Try New Things: These are just general ideas on what to do, there are still content syndication networks to try, forums and new methods that will only be relevant to you that you need to discover through trial and error. Check your Google analytics referrals and see what’s working, whatever is – double down on that.

Keep testing new content distribution strategies and evolve what’s working overtime.

Consistency is Still Key

You should have different type of content for different purposes.
Blogging consistently without keywords in mind is still a great way to deliver value to potential prospects on a daily basis. The idea here is to get them to fall in love with your brand overtime by producing great content while executing on your distribution system you’ve grown over time.

Is content still a valuable tool for lead generation ? Yes. It’s just evolving. Distribution is just the next step.