Six Steps To Running A Content Garden

I've been thinking a lot about building content gardens recently, and it appears most of the industry is jumping into (content marketing, brand journalism, and content gardens), here are six steps to setting up a content garden.

Step 1: Determine major content themes.

Step 2: Conduct keyword research on those themes.

Step 3: Use those keywords to find influencers within the respective social communities. As you find the influencers and communities, track the influencers, and the communities. Find additional keywords as you explore the community and read influencer's content.

Step 4: Based on the influencers, topic themes and communities decide the best strategy for engaging influencers. i.e. website (content garden) facebook, twitter, linkedin.

Step 5: Develop editorial strategy based on keywords, the resources to hand, and how you want to target influencers. In addition to content strategy, consider developing an engagement calendar for influencers.

Step 6: Hand out content and engagement assignments to writers and community managers. We need many writers, who only have to write one a week, or two weeks, but we also need an editor to check the articles going through the site. The editor might optimize the sites, but also give some training in seo writing to writers. (see my attached check list; more for developers but you will get the idea)

Step 7: Develop Social Media Optimization resource, someone to optimize content for Twitter, linkedin, social book marking sites like stumbleupon etc.