According to Larry Page, Co-Founder of Google.com – “In Every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt”

That means what took them from the dawn of time to 2003 to produce in terms of content, is what we produce now in 2 days.

This is an interesting statistic, primarily for two reasons.

1. We do not have a problem with the production of content as a society, infact we are overproducing content.
2. The fact that we are producing a lot of content doesn’t necessarily mean we are producing a lot of quality content.

So there’s a lot of content out there, and it’s very important that as an afrocentric brand, that you stand out among the sea of content that’s produced.

How do you go about doing this? We have listed the necessary guidelines you can follow to fulfil this objective, they include:

Know the most pressing questions of your customers

If you want to produce relevant content it all comes down to understanding the most pressing questions your customers are dying to ask. There are various ways we can go about fishing out these content from your audience, which includes:

• Ask your audience: If you have an email list, you can enquire from them their most pressing questions, issues and what challenges they are facing. This way, you have no worries, because you know whatever content you produce will be relevant to them.
• Keep a black book: this involves keeping a score of every single challenge or issue that spills out of your customers. It’s important to keep records of the issues your audience have with your brand and service, These are all incredible ideas for content creation and improving engagement.
• Make sure your customer care copies (CC) you in every email that deals with customer complaints, this way you have a front row seat on the issues most customers are facing, which are all great for content generation ideas.
• Maximize the potential of your contact us form by scanning through all queries that involve your brand, product or service, these are all great ideas for generating content and ensuring you don’t run out of relevant things to write.

Combine all of these data into one central location like an excel sheet where all your content ideas go to, this way you’re never running out on content.

Provide value while asking questions

When creating valuable content, make sure you cross check against the following points:

1. Content is king: when you are creating content that is valuable ensure it is also informative, remember these words, your content is a solution to people’s problems. You are not trying to write out what you feel or what you enjoy, when you create content you are writing to solve someone’s problem.

2. Entertaining Content: Your content has to be stimulating to the minds of your readers, like a 3 series fiction love story, it has to be encapsulating and also educative, do not bore your readers to death with just information, ensure you present your content with some flair and quality.

Create content for people

When you create content that is engaging and interactive with people you move up the search engines. If you want to excel at SEO and google ranking, then learn how to create content that people engage with and at the end of their engagement they go on to share your content with their friends and followers.

Stop producing boring posts like a highschool grammarian, use pictures, videos, and also invest in resources that will make your content pop out in class and flair.

Start creating answers

Stop creating content and start creating answers. People have questions, deep pressing questions and they need the answers. I dare say that if people aren’t asking questions about your product, service or industry then what you have isn’t valuable.

Someone who wants to buy a shoe today will ask, what size is it? what is the colour? how comfortable is it? is it durable? can it withstand rain? people have questions. when you create content your number one ultimate goal is to ensure you answer the questions of your audience in a clear manner that drives them towards a call to action.

To summarize we have listed, here are some bullet points to ensure your content is always exceptional, they include:

• They’re focused on one specific problem
• They provide social proof with social share count buttons
• They include great visuals & video
• They break it down step-by-step
• They showcase real-life examples, storytelling to boost reader understanding
• They’re informative and entertaining, not one or the other
• They’re serialized to keep audiences in a state of anticipation
• They follow a format that resonates, but with new content each time
• They’re timely, deep resources
• They make a big promise in the title, and actually deliver in the content.