By skyforbes 
3 steps to creating useful content for your audience
Not sure what the heck to blog, vlog, post, or podcast about?
1. Think about who your ideal audience is.
2. Think of the questions they are likely to be asking about your niche topic (and therefore are going to be typing into Google, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.)
3. Answer those questions in a legit helpful way. (The answers you would want if you went searching for that thing.)
Stuck on the first one? Check out: Do this one thing to ensure your website will appeal to your ideal clients for help finding out what that person looks like.
Let’s use travel blogging as an example of how to get this right!
If you’re a travel blogger, your people are obviously dreaming about traveling. Travel is still a pretty broad topic, so you’d want to get more specific about which traveling hopefuls you are targeting.
Do they want to live it up in the hottest (literally and figuratively) tourist destinations and find the most Instagrammable attractions, then call it a day?
Or do they want to be fully immersed in a culture, taking in the rich history of different countries, experiencing all the sights, sounds, and most importantly food of the local natives?
Then, once you know who your ideal audience is, think of the questions and how you can use your content to provide real answers to them.
Educational content vs entertainment
If all you do is blog about how fabulous your life is and how much you’ve got it made sitting in the shade in *insert FOMO inducing location here,* it’s not super useful.
And while people may truly enjoy reading about your travels and are aspiring to the kind of life you have, you haven’t really given any answers as to how to get there.
This kind of content really only serves to build brand loyalty with the people you already have.
But since the goal is to increase site traffic from new visitors (a.k.a new potential customers of however it is you monetize your business) then, a much more useful post might be something like “A 3-day itinerary for your trip to .”
Or “What to pack in your carry on for .”
No matter what you are creating, you always want to think about things from the searcher’s perspective and ask yourself:
‘How can I create a piece that is actually helpful for them?’
(without spending a cent on expensive ad campaigns)
Not convinced this strategy will work for you as a small business that nobody knows about (yet)?
Let me take you back to the beginning of my business to show you why organic SEO and consistent content matters.
I had a big fat 0 subscribers, 0 paying clients, 0 networking connections or hook-ups (I was living in a country I didn’t even speak the language for), and less than 0 dollars to spend on my new venture.
And yet…
During the first few years of my business, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales (without spending a single cent on ads.)
All thanks to consistent content marketing.
It’s really only recently that I started testing out a few Facebook Ads here and there.
But if I had to ballpark/guesstimate, I’d say 95% of my sales are still generated as a result of my content marketing and SEO efforts.
(Read: I’m still making bank on work I did 3 years ago.)
And all it cost me was my time.
So yeah, pretty sick profit margins to be had with organic SEO.
Oh, and the other good news is that by picking one thing and doing it well/consistently, we honestly haven’t had to rely too much on other platforms to bring us traffic.
I actually took a whole year off Insta, and loved it so dang much that I never really went back to it in full force.
(You can read about my break-up with social media here if ya like! 👉 Honesty hour: What a year without Instagram did to my business)
So my #1 tip for anyone hoping to explode their business is to get consistent with sharing (useful) content and answer the questions other people are afraid to give away for free.
Pick a frequency for publishing that feels doable for you and stick with it.