In the prior lesson, we established the concept of anchor content, which is content that should be at the core of any campaign. In this lesson, we'll review the various types of content you can use, talk about some of their strengths and weaknesses and how they might apply to your overall content marketing efforts. First up is the notion of videos, just for fun, I'm showing a really famous YouTube video called Double Rainbow, where there's a guy out in the wilderness actually in Yosemite, goofing on a double rainbow that he sees, it got over 42 million views. Now, the reality is that it got a lot of use because it was funny. As I established in the last lesson, emotion evoking or say funny things isn't necessarily thing that's going to feed your content marketing campaign and drive lots of links to your site. But anchor content is the better way to go, but that doesn't mean you can't use videos to promote anchor content. You can actually build a real presence online with that. If you're going to do this, be prepared to invest in the quality of videos, it's really important to have, in my opinion, the right studio and the right environment and the right content that you're bringing to the videos. But if you're successful with this, you can potentially publish the videos on YouTube, leverage YouTube as a search engine because it is a search engine and get traffic off of YouTube itself. Then write a nice blog post about it on your blog and include a transcript and get people to come to your blog to see the content and you can build your own little video channel if you will. This is an interesting way to go. Next up, infographics, also visual, this is another area which has a lot of potential for it. Here I'm showing one that actually got over 31,000 shares on Pinterest about visual hierarchy. As I emphasized early on in the first module of this course, however, makes sure that the infographics are accurate, very high quality and useful information that people will care about. Otherwise, you got to stay away from this but there is certain content that lends itself to being visual. For example, USA Today tends to have little infographics in the bottom right of their newspapers all time, they've been very successful with that. Another concept instructional, this sounds a lot like it could potentially be the same as a regular blog post and it can be, but it's a blog post with an angle to it. I'm calling it a instruction you can also think of it as a how to. This one, how to Build a 20-foot functional geodesic dome PVC. Sounds like a fun project but the idea is people like this advisory information and because it's useful, it's content that has a good chance of drawing links. Then data-driven research studies. Well, I've mentioned this many times, this is actually the first one that I ever published that got really good visibility online. This is a study of Google now versus Siri versus Cortana with their voice search apps in. Just seeing how they perform and what got some pretty good press got written up in Huffington Post, Tech Times, NBC News, many other places. The companion video we did for this got over 152,000 views, which is not bad for a digital marketing space. Interactives, this is a really cool thing that The New York Times did. What it was, is a interactive where you've got an empty chart and it would show you the bottom axis here, parents income level and then the y axis up here on the left is showing the chances that the kid would go to school. You're supposed to draw your own line as to what you think that looks like. You see my line there in red, the actual true line is in blue but I can't tell you how many people wanted to draw the line and see how they did. This thing of engaging people with the content like this can be very powerful because it draws them in, they want to interact with it. But keep in mind again, if the data doesn't have value and people don't care about the answer it gives you what the entity interactive. It won't draw links. You don't want just the interaction, you want both but this piece of content did this very well. I've shown you a few different content opportunities in detail but there really are many others. One of these is images, in the second module, the social media module, I showed you the example of Best Made that created pictorial essays which they publish on Instagram or share on Instagram and get really great engagement with. The reason why these things get links is because they really tell a story and create a sense of connection with the place or Vine videos. I showed again in the social media module example, Zach King with over 3.5 million followers. He's parlayed that into business opportunities for himself. Snapchat might require a bit more creativity because the Snapchat are there and they disappear but think of it as a channel to build connections with people, it can be very powerful for that. Surveys, similar to data driven studies but instead you're surveying groups of people, perhaps talking about their preferences or things that they think about different topics. Interviews I mentioned in the influence or module. Great way to establish relationships with influencers, they share it. Other people when they see that interview in an influencer published out there, they'll want to share it as well. Finally, case studies, people love real-world examples of things in action and case studies are a great way to do that. I hope that gives you some idea that there are many different types of content opportunities. From one perspective, your creativity is the limit but the key to success in your content marketing efforts in picking the right types of content that fit your business needs and goals best. Your content creation capabilities are factor that you can't ignore either. In the next lesson will focus on the power of partnerships and the role that they can play in content marketing.
