Momcilo

Posted on May 17

Content Hub: Complete guide to a centralized source

“Hello. I want to read a book about the Content Hub.”

“Just a moment”, said the librarian, then plunged into the library's depths, her steps echoing down to the neglected lower tiers where chaos reigned. Books were randomly stacked with labels like "C" buried beneath layers of misplaced "A"s and "B"s. She sifted through the clutter, her frustration mounting as minutes turned into hours. ( not only hers, she was making so much noise that nobody was able to do their work. ).

After searching all the shelves with titles starting with the letter "C", the librarian returns and tries to check whether someone has already taken the book:

“You know what, don’t bother. I will come back some other time. Goodbye.”

This is a short and sweet story about the fact that you need to learn how to manage content or if you have outdated content management you’ll be left without people who want to consume content, no matter how high-quality, interesting, or necessary it is.

Okay, it's not sweet, it's more of a bittersweet story, but the good thing is that it doesn't have to be yours. How come?

Because I took the book about Content Hubs, it was not difficult for me to write everything necessary, summarize, and explain with examples why it is time to adopt this concept. What will you learn today:

Content table:

What is a content hub?
Why are content hubs important?
Types of content hubs
How to create a content hub

and so much more. Look, I don't want to waste time like a librarian from the story, so let's begin.

What is a content hub?

If I take the library from the story and compare it to the content hub, I can freely conclude that both are focused on collecting, organizing, and disseminating information. Since we all know how the library works, let's see how the content hub manages content.

A content hub is a centralized digital space where an organization stores, organizes, and shares all its content. Its main purpose is to arrange the content so it's easy to find and use, helping the whole team to access and interact with the information they need.

Also, with permission and roles within the content hub, organizations can get control over the content. For example, the librarian from the story would be able to figure out what is happening with the book requested in no time. And maybe to suggest substitution or find a list of authors that wrote about the specific topic.

Why are content hubs important?

Besides helping its team to stay cohesive and productive, an organization may improve consumers' learning about a product, service, or other subject they are interested in by organizing topic-specific content into a hub.

Planning and structuring your content into topic-specific clusters may lead to:

Better navigation and accessibility experience: Content is clustered by topic, making it easier for team members to find information quickly. Searching for documents becomes easier and more efficient as a result.
Collaboration: With content organized by topics, team members can more easily collaborate on specific areas. This fosters better teamwork and ensures everyone is on the same page.
Content management: Topic-specific clusters allow for more efficient content management. Teams can update, archive, or delete content more effectively, ensuring that information remains current and relevant.
Content discovery: Exploration of additional content within the hub, increasing exposure for various topics and articles.
Content reuse and recycling: Efficient content management by enabling updates, repurposing, and transformation of existing materials.

Ultimately, organizations rely on content hubs to leverage information to their fullest potential, contributing to their overall success.

Content hub types

Content hubs vary in structure and purpose, each uniquely organizing and presenting information. Here are some common setups:

Classic Hub and Spoke

This model centers around a main topic, much like blogs, but arranges content more structured. A main page (the hub) focuses on a pillar topic, and every new piece of content (the spokes) links back to this main page, supporting the central theme. Typically, this includes a main page with multiple subpages connected to it.

Hub & Spoke examples

Moz Blog

Topic: SEO and inbound marketing
Description: Moz uses a central hub for SEO resources, which links to detailed articles on sub-topics like link building, keyword research, and SEO tools. Each article (spoke) supports and enriches the central theme, directing readers back to the hub or other related spokes.

Zapier’s Learn Guides

Topic: Remote work
Description: Zapier uses this model to talk about remote work opportunities. The main page on Zapier's website consists of a collection of guides, which serve as an introduction to various remote work topics. Each guide is detailed and addresses a specific use case.

Airbnb’s Neighborhoods Guide

Topic: Travel activities and services
Description: Airbnb helps its visitors plan their trip, by giving them insights about activities about locations that they plan to visit. Zapier uses this model to talk about remote work opportunities.

Content library

In a content library, you organize content using a main page that acts as a repository or "pillar" for all related content. Subpages branching off this pillar explore various subtopics, each linking to detailed individual articles that address specific questions or aspects of the main topic.

Content library examples

TED Talks

Focus: Inspirational and educational talks on a wide range of topics
Description: TED's content library features thousands of talks, searchable by topic, language, duration, and even mood. This rich resource provides insights and ideas from experts in various fields, making it a valuable educational tool.

National Geographic

Focus: Science, exploration, and storytelling
Description: National Geographic’s content library includes articles, videos, and photography about natural science, history, and culture. The site is well-organized, making it easy for users to explore content related to their interests.

Topic gateway

This model merges elements from the first two types, offering a thorough entry point to explore a subject deeply. It's designed to handle detailed and niche topics, structured around long-tail keywords, blending broad content libraries with focused articles.

Topic gateway examples

IMDb

Focus: Film and television
Description: IMDb serves as a comprehensive resource for movie, TV, and celebrity content. It provides detailed information about film and television shows, including cast, crew, trivia, and ratings, making it a central hub for entertainment information.

Stack Overflow

Focus: Programming and software development
Description: Stack Overflow provides a topic gateway for developers seeking answers to coding questions, programming solutions, and peer advice. It’s an essential resource for troubleshooting and learning from the vast community of developers.

Content Database

This setup creates a vast archive of all published content, organized in a searchable format by keywords, location, or date. It suits situations where there's a large volume of content that users might want to access randomly or through specific searches during their browsing.

These structures each provide a different way to manage and present content, meeting various user needs and browsing behaviors.

Content Database examples

Internet Archive

Focus: Digital content and historical archives
Description: The Internet Archive provides free access to a massive repository of digital content, including websites, software applications, games, music, millions of books, and videos. It serves as a historical archive of the Internet and digital culture.

LemList’s Cold Email Templates

Focus: Cold email marketing
Description: A collection of articles discussing how cold email outreach templates work and the reasons for their success.

Topic Matrix

A topic matrix organizes content on subpages, categorizing them by broader topics which then break down into more specific categories. This structure works well for sites with extensive information and frequent updates, such as news portals or real estate websites.

After all this, I can't stop thinking about the librarian in the story and how much easier a job she would have. Knowing all this, she could have chosen the model that still fits the best and everyone would think she is a genius who knows where all her books are.

How to create a content hub (with headless CMS)

Creating a content hub using a headless CMS involves a couple of steps, from creating topic ideas, and conducting keyword research to leveraging the CMS to manage and store content independently from how it is displayed or delivered. This approach provides flexibility, allowing you to serve the same content across multiple platforms and devices.

3 steps before going headless:

Step 1: Choose a topic

Start by selecting a topic that aligns with your brand but isn't extensively covered on your site. This ensures that your content remains relevant and that you can effectively guide visitors deeper into your site with relevant calls to action. Choose a topic that people are actively searching for to ensure there is enough interest and potential content to develop.

Step 2: Research keywords

With your topic selected, use tools like SEMRush, AHRefs, and AnswerthePublic to generate a list of relevant keywords. Check which keywords your site already ranks for and what your competitors are ranking for.

Step 3: Organize keywords by search intent

After gathering all your keywords, analyze them to understand how people search for your topic. This analysis helps you see common queries and needs and tailor your content to meet those specific interests and questions. This step is crucial for creating a content hub that truly resonates with and serves your audience. After these 3 steps, it’s time to go headless so you can continue.

Step 4: Go headless

You need a CMS that can be customized to fit your specific needs and that supports integrations with other tools and platforms. The reasons for that lie in the fact that you can integrate your content hub with various platforms, reuse, and publish from one source of truth.

When you plan the architecture of your content hub, you need a CMS that can support:

Content modeling: So you can define the structure of your content types (e.g., articles, videos, podcasts) in the CMS. Determine the fields and relationships between different types of content.

Learn how to do that: Reusable structured content - everything you need to know
API-first approach: CMS needs to offer robust API support for delivering content to various front ends (websites, mobile apps, kiosks, etc.).

There are many more features that CMS can offer, so if you have doubts when choosing CMS, here are the top 22 CMS features to look for that can help you make an informed decision.

Step 5: Develop a content strategy

Content audit and inventory: Review existing content to identify what can be reused or repurposed.
Content gap analysis: Identify new content needs and plan how to address them.

Step 6: Implement the Content Hub

Setup CMS: Configure the headless CMS according to your content models and requirements.
Content creation and migration: Populate the CMS with new content and migrate existing content if necessary.
API Integration: Develop or configure front-end applications to consume the APIs provided by the headless CMS.

Step 7: Optimize content for SEO

SEO best practices: Apply SEO strategies such as keyword optimization, meta tags, and structured data to content within the CMS.
Performance optimization: Ensure that content delivery is fast and efficient, as this impacts both SEO and user experience.

Step 8: Go live

Launch new content pieces, goes through these 3 phases:

Testing: Thoroughly test the content delivery across all platforms to ensure everything works as expected.
Soft Launch: Start with a soft launch to collect initial user feedback and make necessary adjustments.
Promotion: Utilize social media, email marketing, and other channels to drive traffic to your new content hub.

Use case: BCMS’s content hub template for content strategy

Finally, what could be better than showing how we at BCMS created a content hub for a specific topic?

What did we do?

The development team at BCMS developed 8 open-source code starters for three popular frameworks: Next, Nuxt, and Gatsby.

Next, what about it now?

The content strategy consisted of the following mindset: We have free starters that we want people to hear about and use. How?

So we will explain a few things to them:

Why BCMS starters?
Why use a headless CMS with Next, Nuxt, and Gatsby?
How to use BCMS with Next, Nuxt, and Gatsby?

How did we do it?

We chose a mix of the content library model and the topic gateway. The structure of the hub looks like this:

1. Landing pages

Creating special landing pages for each framework:

2. Defining content types

Our main communication platform is the BCMS blog page. Our philosophy is quality over quantity. We believe that we have created a good and useful thing for the community, and that's why we wanted to create useful content. So we break our content into the following pieces:

Blog articles

For blog articles, we decided to have different kinds of blogs:

Guides:

Guides are 101 texts about each framework and its integration with headless CMS.

Inspirational and how-to blog articles:

The idea of these texts is to be inspiring and show countless possibilities when it comes to integrating headless CMS with front-end frameworks.

Technical tutorials:

Technical tutorials are texts in which there is a step-by-step process of building a site with the help of BCMS and a specific framework. With explained procedures, lines of code, and website launch.

Announcing texts:

Announcing texts are the texts with which we took the readers to the GitHub code and which enabled us to invite people to try something for free and how to do it after all the guides, how-to texts, and tutorials.

3. What is the outcome of this content strategy?

Greater visibility and traffic
BCMS website got new keywords that rank such as Next headless CMS, Nuxt CMS, CMS for Gatsby
Bigger authority- visitors and Google recognized BCMS as an expert in these topics
Increased lead generation that results in higher revenue
GitHub stars increased by almost 100%, which means that people are using starters (and that was our goal).

Create and manage your content hub with BCMS

This article shows how creating content hubs can increase engagement, inform your user base, and nurture leads. To maximize the efficiency of your content strategy, you need a headless CMS that can unify content in a single hub. Considering the use case used in this article, BCMS as a hub can be a powerful tool for your brand. With analytics, marketing automation, and thought leadership, it offers a refined content experience. You can engage your audience meaningfully by creating relevant content that connects with their interests.

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