Content Creation Course
Tutorials to Help You create Digital Content That Ranks and Converts
Creating exceptional content for your site is quite important. It’s the single biggest differentiator of quality which you have direct control over.
Because of this, I recommend you put some effort in the content creation part of your WordPress website.
Don’t rush it, especially in the beginning when you’re still green at writing content. Take your time to learn and familiarize yourself with the process. Do the research required.
In other words. Do it right!
In this section and the tutorials that follow, I will explain the process I use to write my content. The process can be broken down in 5 distinct parts:
- Preparing a Content Plan;
- Doing the research for each article;
- Planning the article
- Writing the article
- Editing and Publishing
What is Content?
Most people think of content in terms of the written word, however there are distinct types of content that can be found on the internet.
In a WordPress website you can use all types of content but the most common content you will find on the internet websites are
- Written Content
- Images
- Videos
Let’s go through these different website content types.
Website Content Types
Written Content
The type of content you create will depend on the type of website you have.
If you created a news or blog website, like a journal or newspaper themed site, then your content will be mostly informational content, such as news stories, guides, how-to articles etc.
On the other hand, if you have created a digital marketing affiliate website, meaning a site that reviews and compares products and recommends the best option for visitors, then you will have to create 2 types of content, the review articles, and the informational articles.
If it’s the first time you are creating content then, you will need some practice under your belt. For this purpose, Informational content is a good start.
Don’t worry if the content is not particularly good at first. Remember any page you create is not fixed in stone. You can always go back and update it at a later stage.
Actually, it’s a good SEO signal if you go back and update your content regularly, because this sends a signal to google that your content is fresh.
Image Content
Content for a website is not just limited to the written word. Images and Videos also form part of your website’s content creation process.
For images, the more unique these are, the better.
However, don’t fret. If you do not have the resources or the time to take your own photos, there are plenty of alternatives out there on the web.
Stock Photos site are websites that contain a library of different photos that users can download and use for personal needs.
These usually have a freemium subscription model, meaning that you get a limited number of free photos that you can download. Then if you subscribe for the paid membership, you get access to a much bigger library of images to choose from.
I personally subscribe to Canva because you get both an image library and a design tool in one. So it’s super convenient to choose and edit any images seamlessly on within the same system
There are plenty of free photos out there, however you need to make sure that the T&C associated with these free or paid photos allow you to use that image publicly.
Some photos may be restricted for personal/private use only, while other are free to use in any way you want.
Video Content
Video content can also be a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization.
Including videos within an article on your website will help with SEO, as you are offering a complete content experience to users.
The good news is that you can get videos directly from YouTube. These are free to embed in your website and it’s as simple as adding the URL from YouTube to your WordPress content editor.
Also, most stock photo sites will carry a library of videos that you can use.
Preparing a Content Calendar for your Website
When it comes to creating the content for your website, it doesn’t make sense to just start writing whatever comes to mind. A proper content plan needs to be set-up beforehand.
The content plan identifies the topics and articles you intend to write on within the next month, 3 months, 6 months or more. Depending on how forward looking you like to be in your planning.
Now from this guide onwards I will be using one of my favorite Content and SEO tools, which is AHrefs. This is a paid tool which is not the cheapest out there, however it is one of the, if not, the best keyword research tool out there (by popular opinion).
There are cheaper alternatives out there which you can use, such as accuranker and ubersuggest, but in my opinion they just do not compare in quality to AHRefs.
Just to give you an understanding on how much I like this product, I have lifetime subscriptions to both Accuranker and Ubersuggest, yet I still pay a monthly fee to use AHRefs instead.
One of the best features of AHrefs is the very handy AHRefs Extension for Google Chrome Browser. This extension gives me the most important stats directly on Google search results, so I can see the stats for each result that come up on google.
Anyway, I wanted to mention this here because in the next few guides I will be referring to AHRefs tool often when doing my keyword research and content planning. You could get the same results using one of the other tools, however in my guides I will be showing you how to do certain steps using AHRefs.
If you feel that it is out of your planned budget, you can try and use it for a month or two and then unsubscribe. Like that, you only need to pay for a couple of months. You can do most of your content planning for the year in one month, to be honest.
How do you go about preparing a Content Plan?
As mentioned, to plan your content you will need to invest in a Keyword Tool such as AHrefs.
I will be creating a detailed guide on this topic in the coming months, however in the meantime I am going to refer you to this blog post by AHrefs which covers the topic very well.
Starting Your Website Content Creation Journey
To help you out with your web content creation, I have prepared a number of tutorials specific to content creation.
In the following tutorials I document the process I use on my WordPress sites to create unique, well researched content that helps me rank on search engines and also helps my visitors get reliable and complete information to their queries.
I suggest you follow the tutorials below in the sequence they are listed since I document my complete process to ensure you get all essential aspects of the content creation procedure.
These tutorials are meant to give a guide to content writing for beginners, but I can assure you that even if you have some experience in writing digital content, you will still find a few golden nuggets within these guides that you can benefit from.
So, are you ready to start generating some content for your website?