Content marketing is already established to be the new trend for 2014, and it’s not without any reason! Now users are more self-driven to learn more and get as much benefit as they could from the internet and with so much useful content out there you could possibly get information about anything you want without much effort.

I made a small experiment with google trends and found the huge change in how popular content marketing became over the past couple of years, not to mention its SEO benefits! And right now we’re at the right time to invest in this activity, it proved useful for so many businesses then why not yours?

Now that we established the usefulness of this tool comes the big question: What’s next? well you should start creating (or hire someone to do it for you) but this should be done in an organized way in order to get the most out of content creation. I wrote this post to give you some insights on how to create content specifically for a classifieds website.

If you don’t have a clue about content creation I would recommend that you go thought those content creation resources as they are considered a reference for many content marketers out there.

Content ideas for a classifieds website

So how can you use this tool to your benefit and leverage your classifieds website capabilities compared to your competitors? Basically, content creation is all about being useful and providing benefit to your users. So your first look should be at your users, try to think like them and see what needs they may have that you can fulfill with your piece of content. A very good example of such practice is Quikr blog where they post articles with titles like “How To Determine The Correct Value of Used Cars” which might give you an idea of what I mean by following your users interests and fulfilling their needs. Actually I would definitely recommend following Quikr blog and Dubizzle blog for content ideas if you don’t have any original ideas at hand.

Once you started your journey with content creation you will find some topics that are of great interest to your users and some that are not, try focusing as much as you can on the topics that are most popular among your users and the ones that get the largest amount of engagement from users by comments, shares and likes.

Don’t forget about social media

A good piece of content is worth nothing if readers can’t share it, you might end up creating a lot of pieces of content but only one or two of them actually get the attention that you were planning for, but let’s say you forgot to add social media sharing buttons then you will end up destroying the effort you spent on writing that article, designing that infographic or whatever time you spent on the piece of content that you created.

Your users are the pin-pointing laser

Just keep in mind that when your users are happy you’re getting traffic to your website and you’re getting one step closer to your website’s success, so don’t think about writing an article about cars or motors while running a real estate classifieds, you get the point.

Content marketing boom was one of our main reasons to include a blog section and an FAQ section within Open Classifieds software so you can have easy access to the tools that could let you start your way through content creation. Both of those features are included with the free version of Open Classifieds and you just need a compatible hosting to start your journey.

I hope this was useful for you and let me know if you have any feedback in the comment section below, also if you have any requests for me to write on some in-depth topics feel free to ask for that also in the comment section below.