We hear it time and time again – create good content.

But what is good content?

The biggest misconception around content is that it has to be great.

This is wrong because it forces you to believe everything you create needs to be an opus, which prevents many of us from saying anything.

While I hate to say it, you just need to be a little better than the average business in your niche. If you’re focused on learning, it’s easy to rise to the top and provide real value to your customers.

Here are 9 rules to creating good content that will help you rise above the noise.

Using keywords can be confusing, but it shouldn’t be.

Sometimes as marketers we go over the top naming things, which can make them seem more complicated than they are.

Keywords are simply the words and phrases you type into Google when you’re looking for something. They can be anything.

So, why should you care about them? 

If you understand what your customers are searching for, you can figure out what type of content to create (like blog posts, ebooks and videos) to capture their attention and answer their questions by providing value. You can read more about keywords here. 

But we’re not perfect. Here are 5 common mistakes using keywords in your blog that you should avoid.

1. You break the “1 keyword/post rule”

While you’re trying to rank for multiple keywords, each post should focus on one.

Your goal is to optimize each post, so you have the highest chance of being found in Google for that keyword. 

If you put too many keywords in a post (aka the same phrase of certain words over and over again), you won’t optimize for anything, your post will sound fake, and worst, your blog will get lost among the sea of 150,000,000 blogs that are online today.

Solution: One post, one keyword.

You track the obvious using Twitter: how many followers you have, how many times you’re getting retweeted and how many of your tweets are being favourited.

But it’s easy to get distracted by vanity metrics, which are highly visible metrics that are easy to track but don’t indicate real value.

Community isn’t about size – it’s about the strength of the tribe.

Here are 4 things every small business owner should track using Twitter to avoid vanity and grow a strong community.

What’s Vine?

It’s Twitters new social network that makes it easy to create and share social videos on the go.

Twitter is obsessed with limitations (because they breed creativity), so just like we only have 140 characters in a tweet, we only have 6 seconds to shoot a Vine.

Vine was released on February 4, 2013 and within 7 days of launching, over 100,000 Vines had been shared. Which makes you think…

Is your blog traffic growing slower than you want, or not at all?

Everyone says you should spend as much time promoting your posts as you do writing them. But sometimes you just don’t have time. So, what else can you do?

Here are 10 obvious ways to increase your readership that you might not be doing.

1. Start with your offline relationships

Starting a blog can be overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to build a social following to increase your reach. But you’re not starting from scratch.

The easiest way to increase your readership is to start with the relationships you’ve built offline. Move those relationships online to kickstart your growth. Invite them to read your blog, comment on it and let you know what they think.

Even if you’ve been blogging for 6 months, how many of your customers, business partners, colleagues and other people you know in the industry have heard about your blog? How many have read it?

This may seem small, chances are you only have 20, 50 or 100 people you can invite. That’s enough. The goal isn’t to make them customers, the goal is:

1. To get used to building relationships online so it becomes natural.

2. To get honest feedback from people you know, which will help you create posts that people want to read.

The last month has been pretty exciting for Spokal. 

We wanted to take a minute and share some of the highlights with you, and more importantly, thank you for joining us as we continue to empower small businesses to grow online.

Are you new here? You might want to check out some of our favourite posts: The Complete Guide of How Often to Post, Tweet + Facebook for Your Small Business, Top 11 Most Powerful Content Marketing Examples By Small Businesses or Should you pay for search ads on Google? Here’s how you can decide.

Highlights from the last 30 days…

We were invited to present at the BCTIA Demo Day with 11 other companies on March 12, 2013. It was a great chance to meet local entrepreneurs and share the stage with some of the best emerging tech companies in BC. 

Check out the presentation that won us the Investor’s Choice Award below, and feel free to read about our experience behind the scenes in this guest post on BCTIA’s blog.

On March 15 we hit another milestone – our first time being on TV! ShawTV did an interview with us and one of our customers, Collin Stewart (founder of VoltageCRM), who shared what his experience has been like as a Spokal customer. 

Curious what Collin said? Check out the 2 min interview below.