Conquer Prerequisites
I love it when 10-pages in, a book directs me to other books; but I know some don’t share that unique passion of mine. Thankfully, we can learn a lot from this text without familiarizing ourselves with the recommendations below. However, implementing this book’s strategy to its fullest requires each skill (or employing someone who possesses it).
Some believe that the cornerstone of a great content strategy is writing, and to a large degree they are correct. Writing forms the backbone of all content, but without the proper tools to analyze and track the content’s performance, this strategy is half-baked. That is why writing finds its place at the top of this list, but equally important skills are hot on its heels.
1. Writing
How often do we consider our own writing? Is it fast and loose? Error-free? Littered with grammatical mischief? Regardless of our writing’s condition, it can improve. I was an amateur writer myself until my previous role forced me to focus on pencraft. From sentence structure to word choice, how we write impacts the quality and staying-power of our content. Remember this famous quote?
“Like, don’t ask your country what it can do for you, man. But think real hard about what you might be able to do for it, you know…?”
“…Thanks.”
– John F. Kennedy
I don’t remember that either because the 35th president of the United States never uttered that drivel. If JFK eked out that clunky mess of a sentence instead of his eloquent phrasing, history would have crumpled that speech up and tossed it into the cultural scrap heap. Luckily for us, Kennedy had top speech writers.
- Suggested Tools
- Grammarly
- Hemingway Editor
- Suggested Reading
- On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White
- Bare Minimum
- To develop their style and enhance their vocabulary, great writers read the works of great authors. At the least, content marketers should read one piece of classic literature per year.
2. Spreadsheets
The invention of the spreadsheet revolutionized the finance industry and according to Steve Jobs, spreadsheets, “[were] what propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved.” Spreadsheets gave people a reason to buy the world’s first computers. 40 years later the spreadsheet remains a central piece in the relationship between man and machine. What I’m trying to say is, if we plan to utilize computers (and this strategy) to its fullest, we must understand spreadsheets.
This strategy uses spreadsheets to track planned content, individual content pieces, their performance, and more. While this information is often stored within the tools we use to gather it (SEMRush, AdWords Keyword Planner, Search Console, others), spreadsheets provide an easy-to-share, no-cost method to access important data without leaving it trapped in a 3rd party database.
- Suggested Tools
- Google Sheets
- Microsoft Excel
- OpenOffice Calc
- Suggested Free Resources
- Sheets — Google Learning Center
- Excel Help Center
- Suggested Coursework
- Master Google Sheets
- Excel Quick Start Tutorial: 36 Minutes to Learn the Basics
- Bare Minimum
- Learn how a spreadsheet tracks data by row and column. Generally, each row acts as an ‘entry’ and each column a data point found on that entry. If one can recreate a shopping list in a spreadsheet, they can take full advantage of this text.
- As a bonus, one should learn to import a Comma-Separated Values (CSV)? file into a spreadsheet.
3. Web Analytics
At the heart of a successful online business beats the drum of analytics. Analytics helps site owners track usage behavior, sales funnels, conversion rates, and more. For content strategies, analytics calculates the success of a strategy or piece of content and whether it contributes to the bottom line. Without an underlying analytics platform, publishing a piece of content is shooting in the dark.
- Suggested Tool
- Google Analytics
- Suggested Free Resource
- Analytics Academy
- Suggested Reading
- Learning Google AdWords and Google Analytics by Benjamin Mangold
- Google Analytics Breakthrough: From Zero to Business Impact by Feras Alhlou
- Suggested Coursework
- Google Analytics Training Course for Beginners
- Bare Minimum
- One should learn to create a Google Analytics web property, connect it to their website (possible HTML editing required), create Goals?, and navigate predefined Reports?.
4. Webmaster Tools
The world’s major search engines, Google and Bing, provide site owners with critical traffic information. Using these tools, we can learn how people find our site, how often they click, where we rank among key search terms, and more. Without this data we struggle to bolster our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. Thankfully, these tools are relatively easy to incorporate and learn.
- Required Tools
- Google Search Console
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Suggested Free Resources
- How to use Google and Bing webmaster tools for beginners
- Getting Started Checklist - Bing Webmaster Tools
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
- Suggested Coursework
- Onsite SEO Using Google Search Console-Webmaster Tools
- Bare Minimum
- Readers should claim their website on both tools (DNS editing required) and understand how to gather Page Rank data—discussed later.
5. Working With Websites
We needn’t understand how to setup servers, manage a shopping cart, design a beautiful layout, and code every page by hand—even I wouldn’t do all that. But I recommend that we understand how to modify the internal workings of our website. The skills required to do so depend on how our site is built, assuming we already have one.
If we don’t have a site, free and affordable Content Management Systems (CMS)? like Squarespace and WordPress are great places to start.
- Suggested Tools
- HTML5?
- JavaScript?
- Squarespace
- WordPress
- Suggested Free Resources
- W3 Schools
- Getting Started with Squarespace
- Tutorials and Courses for Beginners – Learn WordPress
- Suggested Reading
- HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites by Jon Duckett
- Suggested Coursework
- Codecademy
- Complete WordPress Training For Beginners
- Bare Minimum
- Content marketers must have access to edit the navigational elements (top-level) pages of their website both on mobile and desktop. They must also be capable of editing the URLs, titles, descriptions, and contents of all pages. More on those later.
6. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a broad topic that incorporates all three subjects that precede it, so we’ve placed it last. In this book we cover fundamental SEO topics such as keywords, ranking factors, and meta data—the remainder is an overwhelming swamp obsessed with minutiae. SEO professionals see themselves as Gods among men capable of reversing the course of doomed ventures with link building and Black Hat? tactics; as reputable business people, we ignore their duplicitous promises.
Take note, no single person at Google understands how their search engine works, so how can anyone else expect to? Understanding a bit past the basics will get us 80% of the way there, and that’s more than enough.
- Suggested Tools
- SEMRush
- SEOMoz
- Suggested Free Resource
- SEO Training Course by Moz
- Suggested Reading
- SEO 2018: Learn search engine optimization with smart internet marketing strategies by Adam Clarke
- SEO Fitness Workbook: 2018 Edition: The Seven Steps to Search Engine Optimization Success on Google by Jason McDonald
- Bare Minimum
- As this book will detail, the content of each web page signals its purpose to search engines. Content marketers must understand that a page’s ranking among those with similar purpose is strongly based on the quality of that content, the level to which it satisfies the visitor, the number of trustworthy websites pointing to that page, and the internal structure of the page (often managed by our CMS).