There are many ways to come up with a creative idea when it comes to content marketing.

You might reason why we should spend so much of our creative energy for content marketing. The reason is, we are building assets in the form of contents that will get us valuable traffic for many years to come.

So today we will learn the many ways in which you can get creative with content marketing.

1. Turn Your Trade Secrets Into Gold

Create a killer “how-to” guide for your own industry. Reveal all your secrets. And distribute the resource free to your peers. For example if you are in the SEO business, create a “definitive guide to pitching your SEO work for a 5 figure contract”. Tell them your most ingenious ideas. Although, 90% of yours may just use the content and not link to your page, a portion of them will actually mention your name and link your website. That’s equivalent to Gold because your target market and your peers’ target market are the same. Google takes it as authority.

Another great way to do the same thing is, to create a course around your trade secrets. Let’s say “15 days to five figure contract course” is a complete multimedia course you created that gives away the trade secrets of your business. Once you have completed it, give it away to all your peers. Most of them will just download it and learn from your tricks and tips. But you will get some valuable links from the process.

2. Trade A Small Service For A Valuable Link

It could be as simple as offering to redesign a header for a mommy blogger or a quick copy advice for an ecommerce site. If you could personally do the service you are trading, that’s great. Otherwise, you can outsource it for a few dollars at a micro-job site like Fiverr.

3. Solicit Humorous User Generated Content/Reviews

Create a competition giveaway soliciting humorous, original ways your customers have made use of your products. The response you get might be a little exaggerated and unusually funny, but these content gets shared three times as often as a normal review. So post the humorous user generated content on your favorite social media sites.

Do seriously original stuff for every April fool’s day. By that I mean, a hard-to-believe news type content that will get the audience sharing like never before. If you could pull that off without anyone suspecting anything fishy, you will get a tremendous amount of social seo links and some of them might blog about it and link to it.

4. Interview An Expert In Your Field

Now, before you go “I ain’t know no experts”, let me explain. An expert is simply a person that your audience could learn from. If you have a friend or someone else in a better position to explain something that your target audience is interested, then he/she is an expert. Conduct an interview, give the interview away as a free stuff to another well established site in your market. Let them post it on their blog and give you a link. If the expert has a good ranking website/blog, then it can be posted there exclusively.

What would you interview about?

Frequently talk to your market. Ask as many questions as possible and listen to their conversation in blogs, forums etc. You might come up with something they are looking for, but don’t know the answer yourself. That’s an opportunity. Don’t research it yourself, instead look for another authority figure and set up a skype call and ask him all the questions you have about the subject. That’s it. You get to be more knowledgeable and you have acquired a great content that you could trade for links.

The good thing about this, once you upload the interview to an authority site for a link, you get to share the page with your facebook and twitter fans. And your interview partner get to do the same on his/her social media channel.

5. Transform Existing Content From One Form To Another

If you have a very popular existing content in the form of a blog post, transform that content into an infographic or a short video and start promoting the content. Since the post is already well received, chances are that the video or infographic will be well received too provided the topic is current.

Now, there is another strategy to this that many people may categorize as black hat. This is how you do it. Take the most popular blog posts, infographic or pdfs from other authority blogs in your niche and then, convert those into videos or other formats that’s different from the original content.

In both of these content transformation scenarios, it is important to change the title of the content a little so that Google will find it as fresh new content.

To Chapter 7: What You Must Know About Content Marketing