A big barrier to getting sales is not consistently creating enough of the right content to help your target audience understand why they should hire you.
Content marketing has been proven to be one of the most effective methods for increasing audience engagement, building your brand presence, and driving sales.
Why is content marketing important?
When you don’t share content regularly, your audience may forget about you or trust you, or both.
According to Hubspot.com…
“Content marketing is important because it answers the questions of your audience. With content marketing, you can build trust with your audience, improve conversions, connect with your customers, and generate leads. Plus, in today’s era, customers expect consistent, high-quality content from their favorite brands… Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts audience decision-making more than any other technique.“
Content is the way to do that, and many trainers lack the focus to strategically create and plan content.
Content marketing is absolutely vital, but if you don’t have a system to create it, you’re wasting your time. So here is something that may help—nine steps on how to create content for your business.
Step 1: Commit to creating regular content: You must commit to creating content regularly. That’s because, if you want to be seen as an expert, you have to show up like clockwork. Also because search engines like to see content produced on a regular basis. Therefore, consistently produced content is key.
But, to do that, you’ll first need to decide what types and forms of content you want to create, based on the needs of your target market.
Step 2- List your promotions: Decide what you will launch and/or promote in the next 6-12 months, and when you will promote them, so you can plan for the big events first. Space them out so it doesn’t look like you’re promoting too often or back-to-back. Then add smaller promotions, such as existing products/programs, other people’s affiliate products, and lead magnets.
Step 3- Market Research: In order to be found through search engines, your content always needs to use keywords that pertain to your niche. Find out what your target market is looking for using common sense. What keywords and phrases your search to find your? Then create a list of these keywords and phrases to use in your content. You can also take those keywords and plug them into a keyword or search tool to find other keywords and related phrases that people are using. Google, for example, does this at the bottom of its search pages, under the heading “People also ask…”.
Other market research to find out what content your audience is engaging with includes looking at: trends in your industry, popular blog posts, best-selling videos, podcasts, and related books, on your niche topics. You can also visit online forums and groups based on your topic to see what people are discussing about your topic and what words they are using.
Step 4- Create a bank of ideas: From your research, you’ll have a better idea of which topics will be most interesting and compelling to your audience. Now you can collect your ideas in an “idea bank”. This can act as a repository for content ideas that you can mine in the future. But, since the content creation is ongoing, the replenishment of your idea bank should be ongoing as well. Some of your ideas may come from the topics discussed in the forums, the questions people ask, the keyword phrases they use, and excerpts from your own products.
Step 5- Choose a calendar: Find a calendar that fits your needs (there are many free ones online). Use it to designate which themes you will use for the next 6-12 months. This may seem like the easiest step, but it can actually be the most difficult. This is because you need to integrate content themes with your projected events, launches, and promotions while also keeping in mind what will get the best return on your investment in terms of using your content to build your audience and perform. sales. .
Step 6- Time to create the schedule: Now that you have your content themes, the next step is to schedule time in your task calendar to create the content. Designate regular blocks of time to write your content. The frequency and time per block will depend on whether you want to do it weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
For example, let’s say you decide to publish one piece of content per month, and you want to do the work on a quarterly basis. You know from experience that it takes about 2 hours to create one piece of content (monthly). Then, every 90 days, you’ll need to schedule 6 hours of time to create your content for that quarter. You might be the type who wants to schedule to do it all at once, like one day or a weekend, or maybe in two hour blocks, 3 days in a row. Or, you may feel more comfortable extending it further. Whatever works for you!
Step 7- Produce your content– Use your scheduled time to produce your content for at least the next 30-90 days. By keeping the goals (and mission) of your business in mind when writing content, you will be able to create the most relevant content for your audience and the most lucrative for you. Use different formats for your content. For example, you can write a blog post for your monthly newsletter and then turn it into a video or podcast to distribute later in the month.
Step 8- Optimize: Once this is done, make sure that your content:
You have the right balance of serving (80%) and selling (20%) – value vs. dirty pitch
· It is optimized with relevant keywords and phrases.
Balance the different types of content you share, such as educational, entertaining, inspirational, and promotional.
Balance is key to content effectiveness. Perhaps the biggest advantage of your content calendar is that it gives you an overview. You can see if you are following the “80/20 rule” of free content vs. promotional content, used by the most successful marketers. And, because you can see the “what and when” plan for all of your content, you can ensure that you have a good balance of various types of content, and therefore be able to create a professional impression for visitors to all of your resources on line.
Optimize every blog post, social media post, and video with relevant keywords and blog meta descriptions.
Step 9- Create a standard operating procedure (SOP): Once you’ve gone through the process of creating your content, now is the time to write down the steps you took to do so. Make a separate list of instructions for each form and content platform, even if the steps are very similar. This checklist helps you create a consistent look and feel and ensures that you follow all the necessary steps each time you post.
And, as your business grows, your SOP will be essential in reducing the amount of time it takes to train a new team member.
Those are the 9 steps to basic content creation.. If these steps are enough, that’s great, go for it! But in case you need more help finding the time, coming up with topics, and/or creating a plan for distributing your content, check out “The Ultimate Content Creation Toolkit.”
It’s a comprehensive training package that helps you learn how to plan and create basic 6-12 month content such as blog posts, podcasts, videos, and emails that your audience will find valuable and will also increase your search engine rankings. search.
Just go to: www.ContentCreationToolkit.com
