Four Tips To Get Started In Content Marketing
Content Marketing. It requires you to write. Scary? To some people, yes. To others it brings a level of excitement that can only be compared to a woman in a shoe store where every pair is a dollar and comes in her size. Dogs and peanut butter. Have you ever seen anyone happier than a dog with a spoonful of peanut butter? It’s kind of like that.
OK. But for those of you who may lean to the scary side of the fence, there are very good reasons you need to write. Just start writing and see what happens. Because without content, you are going to run out of things to talk about regarding your business.
Content helps propel your business to the next level and it gives you the opportunity to market yourself without being that really sleazy salesperson that we all know and, well, hate.
Content Marketing isn’t a fad and it’s not going away any time soon. It’s a way to attract customers to you and if you change your thoughts on writing, you will be very successful in your marketing efforts.
Follow these tips to make sure your content strategy goes in the right direction.
1. Write to One Person
You don’t have to be liked by everyone. It will never ever happen anyway. So, when you start out writing your content such as a blog post, have a particular customer in mind and pretend you’re writing to that one person. You’ll come across sounding more like a real person and you’ll hit the people you need to right in the feels.
Whether you’re a realtor, dentist, or own a fashion boutique or restaurant, strategize about what you’re writing about. The entire goal of writing content is to become the authority in your industry. If you’re giving tips or insider knowledge about your industry and your competition isn’t…who do you think is going to win in the search engines?
If you write about your field regularly and publish it to your website, this will do a few things for you:
– Google loves when you update your website with original articles. Their crawlers will creep on your website more often because it’s a signal to them that you’re an active business.
– The more URLs (blog posts, videos, etc.) that you have indexed with Google, the more chances you have to show up in the search engine results page (SERP). You can literally fill up the age with your URLs and kick out the competition. Out of sight, out of mind.
– If your website has 50 articles on all sorts of questions that your customers might be asking, you become the authority. They have no reason to go anywhere else if you’re supplying them with all the answers they crave.
2. Build Relationships
If you’re supplying all the answers, then why would anyone need to go anywhere else? Now that you’ve established yourself as the authority and guru of your industry, trust will be built between you and your readers.
Think about the leaders in your industry where you get your knowledge.
Most likely they’ve branded themselves and have proven that they’re the best. You can do that as well. It may be on a smaller scale, perhaps in your own town, but nonetheless, you can become the local expert.
Think of this; McDonald’s doesn’t stop advertising just because we all know they sell Big Macs. They keep going, they publish, they remind people they exist and keep putting out marketing to lure us in. Do the same and it will build up an unbreakable bond.
Put out great content and you may get asked to contribute your content to another blog or website. This will increase your reach and publicity. Don’t only build relationships with your target audience but stay social with every follower you gain along the way. With the power of social media and promoting awesome content, you never know who will find you.
3. Watch the “Yours” and “You’res”
Write how you speak. Unless you’re writing for a medical or law journal, you can keep your content fairly casual. But yes, the grammar police are watching. You will be judged on your grammar. There are apps that you can use to help you out like this one.
Now that I’ve probably got you stressed out about your grammar, don’t be scared off completely just yet. You don’t have to follow proper sentence structure. I break up my sentences. All. The. Time.
Keep your paragraphs short. Anything longer than 3-4 sentences will lose readers. We humans sometimes have the attention span of a goldfish. Content should be easy to scan enabling readers to pick up bits and pieces throughout without reading the entire post.
4. Stay Stubborn
My dad called me the most stubborn child he ever met. I used to tell him that I wasn’t stubborn but determined. Jeez. I couldn’t even accept the term stubborn and had to fight him on it. Stubbornness or determination, whatever you want to call it, is going to be your best friend. Keep publishing articles. Your first article won’t get read. That’s ok! Your second, third, maybe the fourth will not get read. Trust me. That’s ok too!
Keep building your content library. Which means, every time you add another URL to your website, Google is going to pick that up and it helps with your SEO. Your website will start ranking higher and higher for certain keywords in your posts.
Building a content library also helps to give you material to market. For example, if you have a Twitter account, you’ve probably noticed how quickly the newsfeed flies by. Tweets posted an hour ago are gone from sight.
Post the same content more than once!
Now that you’ve got maybe a dozen blog posts under your belt, schedule one every few weeks and keep them going in rotation. Every single one of your followers did not see your first attempt in sharing. They may not have seen the second. And so what if they did??? Repetition is key in marketing. More about that here.
There you have it! Keep publishing and stay stubborn. There is no magical spell I can place on your website to make anything you publish go viral. However, I am a content marketer creating content for my own content marketing strategy and I can honestly tell you it works.
I even wrote a blog post about how I got my first quality lead within 2 weeks of starting my marketing firm in Kelowna, British Columbia. Hang in there and if you ever need an extra cheerleader or some friendly advice, don’t hesitate to contact me