If you are tired of hearing you must produce content to compete in the world of marketing today, Below are the complete system for turning content into leads.

Here’s the system in 3 steps

• Create a list of just 6 of the most useful content ideas for your ideal customer
• Build a lead generating content upgrade for each piece
• Start promoting each piece in advertising and social media

That’s it – execute on this over the next six months, and you’ll start generating leads.

Step 1 – What content should you produce?

Total-Content System. This is simply an approach that allows you to plan, delegate, curate, create, collaborate, repurpose and get far more out of every piece of content you produce. Once your system is in place, it will build momentum with each passing month and begin to multiply in value to your organization.

This is the approach we are going to take to develop your key content.

Through your knowledge and by using keyword tools like Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker, develop a list of core content topics and assign one to each month for the next six months.

Each theme should be a substantial topic related to your business or industry and represent an important keyword search term. It might be helpful to think about it as a book. Each month might represent a chapter in what will ultimately make up an important body of work by the end of this year.

You can also designate terms that you know you would like to rank higher for, but currently, have little or no content that leads people online or off to you.

Step 2: Create Some Content Upgrades

The notion of getting someone to your website, landing page or content of some sort and enticing them to exchange their email address and other contact information to get something they are looking for is pretty much standard marketing fare these days.

The idea of bait for lead capture has certainly evolved, though. There was a time when all you needed was a lead capture form and message that asked people to sign up to capture an email, but then people got very tired of all the email this generated.

Smart marketers realized that they needed to offer something valuable in exchange – an ebook, webinar or free trial of some sort.

Even so, visitors started getting harder to convert as more and more sites featured pop-up, slide in and scrolling calls to sign up and download.

Today, and who knows how long really, marketers have tapped the seemingly insatiable hunger for useful, actionable, educational content and are employing highly targeted “content upgrades” to effectively convert visiting traffic to lead funnels like never before.

The basic idea behind a content upgrade is this – Write a really great, useful blog post and then when people show up to read it offer them an “upgrade” to the content in the form of a checklist, video, or case study relevant to the topic in exchange for content details.

Step 3: Developing content upgrades

One of the quickest ways to identify great candidates for immediate content upgrade opportunities is to look through your analytics and find your most popular content today and consider ways to personalize a content upgrade for these posts.

Another great ploy is to use a tool like BuzzSumo to identify some of the most shared content online based on the keyword phrases that relate to your business or ideal client.

My guess is you can easily identify a post that is getting tons of shares that you might be able to both up the game on and create a content upgrade for.