• by Nathan Lump , June 13, 2011

Since content became "king," brands across a wide variety of categories have become believers in its power to drive engagement and relevance. Content gets used these days to mean almost every element of a brand's communications, but the "king" content is editorial, even journalistic: blog posts, information-rich videos, and the like. It's designed not so much to push messages, as in public relations or traditional advertising, but rather to provide genuine utility or entertainment to an audience.

This is great stuff for brands to make, but to get maximum ROI on it, you've got to help it find an audience-working under the very safe assumption that it won't magically "go viral."

Traditionally, if a marketer is focused on content distribution and amplification at all, they'll rush to a content seeding or SEO/SEM practitioner and use dollars to drive eyeballs. Sometimes this is a fine thing to do, but this practice often leads marketers to forget about the variety of organic (read: free!) things you can do to help your content find an audience-and build or shift perception of your brand.

These things are especially important because they don't just apply to how you publish and distribute content, but also to what you make in the first place.

Here are seven key areas to master:

1. Relevancy Filters

Pure and simple: the more relevant the content is to your audience, the more people will link to it, comment on it, share it--all of which expand exposure and boost search ranking. And not all relevance is the same. There's immediate relevance, which is all about how the content dovetails with today's conversations and news developments And then there's long-tail relevance, created by content that addresses a gap in people's lives. Content creation should attempt to have one or, ideally, both types of relevance.

2. Point of View

For different brands, establishing a POV can mean different things, but what's important is that the content itself feel differentiated from other material on the same or similar topics. Are you demonstrating thought leadership by saying something no one else is saying? Are you providing reader service via helpful, useful information? Are you in the news business-sharing new information? And does it all feel authentic and credible? The most successful content marries something the audience really wants with something the brand can legitimately provide, based on its expertise and identity.

3. Tagging

Having a strong metadata strategy in place is a critical part of SEO--the Web's a big place, and the metadata you use can have a direct impact on your content's ability to be discovered. Two often overlooked points: think about tagging before content creation begins and build content over time around the keywords you most want to be associated with. Be sure to think about the power of tagging not just in your own channels but on third-party destinations like YouTube, Digg, Reddit and SlideShare. (You are putting your appropriate content there too, right?)

4. Headlining

As is par for the course for any publisher, brands need to apply best practices in headline writing to grab users' attention. The best headlines not only grab the user by telegraphing relevance but also grab the search engine by telegraphing the nature of the content itself. Striking the right balance can be tricky: search-engine-friendly headlines are often flat and dull; clever or humorous ones are often not content-rich. That's why listicles (10 Best Burgers in NYC, 5 Investment Secrets to Use Now), how-tos, and their ilk do so well-they fill both functions.

5. Images Using images either to support text-driven material or as the primary storytelling vehicle doesn't just provide a better user experience. Images also give users another way into your content through, say, a Google image search. Without them, you've only got text search to spread the word.

6. Tools

It is amazing, given the significance of social media in content consumption, how many brands still do not give users the tools to share and create dialogue around their content. All material should be optimized for linkability (don't forget about a short-link option!) and modular so that discrete pieces can be shared individually. If you're comfortable with commenting, go for it (just be prepared to manage it). Either way, ensure that sharing tools are available and usable for every piece of material you make.

7. Media Partnerships

Good media partnerships aren't free, but they do provide brands with an easy and more organic way to leverage the existing audiences and PageRank of established publishers. In the JWT Brand Journalism practice, we've had great success with this strategy in our work for Microsoft.

A couple of goals to reach for in your partnership: 1) You want to be in the publisher's content well, not in the advertising sections of the web page; 2) Your content should be leveraging the publisher's own distribution ecosystem. If the publisher is posting its content on Twitter and BuzzFeed, request that yours be posted there, too. If Google News is crawling your publisher's site, look for ways to get your content crawled as well. Obviously, the key to this is providing the publisher with content that is at the same level of quality and utility as their own material.

If you build it, they will come, right? Not necessarily. So make sure what you make--and how you publish and distribute it--is designed to attract users. And don't spend a dime on paid search or content seeding until you've done it.