TRAFFIC
THE SMART CONTENT
MARKETER’S TOOL BOX
The power of content is undisputed, but churning it out without any strategy, planning or evaluation
is about as effective as throwing mud at a wall and hoping some of it sticks, writes Nichola Stott
of theMediaFlow, who runs through the best tools to help at each stage of the production and
marketing process.
AS AN AFFILIATE, creating content is
a great way to grow your brand, generate
traffic, social shares and links; but without
strategy, ideas and planning, churning
out post after post is about as effective as
throwing mud at a wall and hoping some
of it sticks. To accelerate the benefits from
your content activity, there are a number of
tools to consider which can help at different
stages of your production cycle.
Figure 2: DataMiner discussion themes
Research & ideation tools
Coming up with creative, useful content
ideas can be really tricky. There’s so much
dross out there, to cut through the noise, we
need to be different and original or take a
good idea and do it better than anyone else.
There’s no perfect formula to understand
what potential players may want or which
ideas will take off, and success is often
informed by trial and error and experience.
Using AdWords data, for example, will
give us some indication of topic areas that
might be of interest, e.g. “betting odds”,
but search volume data lacks context and
Figure 1: Generating seed
terms for DataMiner Chrome
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iGB Affiliate Issue 50 APR/MAY 2015
depth and leaves a lot to our imaginations.
Our first tool helps to fill in those context
gaps and is a scraping tool that is perfect for
helping us find out what interested parties
may really want to understand about our
(operator) products.
● DataMiner Chrome extension
We use the DataMiner Chrome extension
to help identify genuine discussion themes
that can be used to create problem-solving
content. After downloading the extension, we
need to think about where our potential target
audience may congregate online, then to
create some seed terms to start the process.
As an example, if we wanted to produce
some entry level content to attract women
interested in learning poker online or
improving their game, our seed terms
could be “learn poker”, “poker rules”,
“poker terms”. We then think of a site
where a lot of women would go to discuss
their interests, such as Mumsnet. I’d then
try a few combinations of site-specific
advanced Google queries with our seed
terms to explore the discussions taking
place (see Figure 1).
Make sure you set your results preference
to 100 so you can get a good set of data.
Highlight a result, right click, select “Get
Similar DataMiner” and away we go!
You can export the data and identify
themes and discussion topics in ful