In order to make your online content shine like the sun, focus on verbiage preparation instead of tossing in random blog posts, tweets and how-to articles. A well-planned method of attack for content involves six steps, all achievable with online marketing tools. Create content using planning, creation, optimization, management, distribution and performance steps to ensure your content is king.

Planning

At this stage, you need to whip out your editorial calendar and decide when, where, why, what and how you want to create content. Choose your goals for your content, as well as your writers.

Creation

This is the most important step. If you want to have high powered content, you may need to hire professionals. The goal is to produce content that is well written, valuable to your audience and on point with the message you are portraying with your content plan.

Optimization

Writing beautiful lines is one thing. Making them work for the web is an entirely different beast. You want to include search engine optimization aka keywords and high quality outbound links. Also your content needs to be broken down into the format expected for the type of content at hand. A blog post does not look like a press release, which should stand out from a basic article.

Management

Sorting through the six stages of content creation takes organization skills. If you aren’t managing your content in terms of who is doing what and where the content is being shared, then you’ve dropped the ball. If time is of the essence for you, consider hiring a content management team to take care of this step.

Distribution

Getting your content in front of your readers is essential. After all, that is the main purpose of having content. Give your readers some assistance by making every effort to push your content across all platforms, i.e. social media channels and your business pages. Distribute regularly and across all applicable markets.

Performance

How can you tell if your content is doing what you want? Evaluate it to determine whether or not your readers are utilizing your content. If you find your content is not performing at the level you demand, then it’s time to start back over at step one to restructure your content plan.

Thanks to the bevy of content-centric tools on the web, you do not have to be an expert in any of these six steps. Gain the basic understanding of what you need for content development. Then hire the experts or purchase the best tools out there to help you achieve your content dreams. One place where you’ll find all of the top tools for content development is at the Tool Talk Event at the Content Marketing Conference to be held in Las Vegas on May 13, 2015. Give your content its shine as you discover the best content marketing tools and methods at this high powered session.