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The 7 Biggest Content Marketing Mistakes

Is your content marketing working? Are you getting the results you want?

If not, then you may be committing one (or more) of the 7 biggest content marketing mistakes.

Mistake #1: Not understanding your market

When it comes to marketing your material, you must know who your intended audience is. This will be a determining factor in the success of your material.

Once you know your market you can begin creating content that they want. Of course, you may know that they need one thing, but they may not know that. Meet them where they are and create content that helps them solve the problems they believe they have – then, only then, can you give them what they need.

Understanding your market also allows you to post your content in locations that are visible to them. This means that your content will be extremely focused and drive the most engaged potential customers to your site or product.

Once you have a good understanding of your market and their needs and desires, you’ll find it easier to come up with a constant stream of content ideas that will genuinely help your market.

Mistake #2: Creating content with no real plan in place

Creating content is great, but do you know what you want each specific piece of content to do or what action you want your customers or clients to take? Many business owners know that they need content, so they begin creating content and posting it.

Unfortunately, there is much more to creating content. When you create content with a purpose, your company will receive more benefits from it. It is important for your business – and your sanity – to create content with a plan.

Having a plan allows you to know what type of information to include – or not include – in your content. An article created for your website that is intended to direct your clients to a download or sales page is going to be much different than an article created to help walk them step-by-step through a process.

Mistake #3: Not being yourself

Another of the most common content marketing mistakes is simply not being yourself.

You need to be yourself – it’s that simple. How many times have you thought the person you were working with was one way and later discovered what you though you knew wasn’t true at all?

You do not want to leave your customers and clients in this situation. People trust those who are trustworthy and honest. One way to show this is to be yourself. If you are a jokester, it is okay to add some humour. Let your quirkiness shine and set you apart from everyone else.

The best part about this is you can stop trying to be perfect.
🙂

Nobody is perfect and by accepting that and being yourself, you’ll usually find the “right” customers are more likely to be attracted to your business. Those who don’t connect with your personality will probably go elsewhere and that’s quite okay. You most likely weren’t a good match for each other.

Mistake #4: Doing what everyone else is doing

There are so many techniques for the perfect marketing strategy. Everywhere you look, you see and hear something that “you must” do to improve your marketing and grow your business.

Most small business owners do not have the funds or time to do everything. Therefore, it is important that you find what works best for you and do that. It may be a combination of what others are doing, or a strategy all your own.

Doing what everyone else is doing, is not always the best strategy. One of the quickest ways to get into the front of your niche is to do something different.

Mistake #5: Creating wishy-washy, boring content

The internet has made it possible for anyone to post anything. How much of that content is high-quality content? Not very much.

It is important that you create high-quality content that gives value to your customers. Filling your blogs, videos, and tweets with “filler” content is not going to give you the results you desire. People will look for people they can trust to give them content that has value to them.

Remember that value doesn’t have to be boring. You need to keep your potential clients interested while giving them information they can use.

Mistake #6: Not promoting content

Writing and publishing great content are only two of the steps in your content marketing pan. Many small business owners believe their content fails because it lacks quality – this isn’t necessarily true. Most of them time it is because they forget to promote it.

Promoting your content can seem scary when you only think of it as selling. Promoting your content simply means that you’re sharing it with your potential clients on purpose.

It is important that you use all your resources to promote your content. You can use social media platforms, blogs (yours and other bloggers), website owners, paid ads and other business owners to help promote your content.

Mistake #7: Not tracking the results

A successful content marketing strategy can lead to strong relationships and a sense of community with your customers and clients. It allows you to become an authority and thought leader within your industry.

A strategic step in content marketing is tracking your results. You need to track your content from creation to distribution to ensure you have the correct plan in place. Tracking your results enables you to see where you are succeeding and where you may need to make a few changes.

If you’re making any of these 7 content marketing mistakes, make a commitment to change that … beginning from right now. You’ll soon start to see a great improvement in your content’s engagement and the results its getting, among other things, and the extra effort to get this process right will soon be well worth it.

How to Use Content To Build Your Brand

Content can take you and your brand from an unknown nobody to a credible expert, that people trust and buy from to better themselves or their business. So it’s important that you correctly use your content to shine the best light on you and your business. Your content can truly make you or break you and your business.

Content is how you share your experience and knowledge with the world.

So, how exactly do you use content to build your brand?

There are various methods, techniques, and strategies for using content to build your brand. These can be simplified into three steps: creating, distributing, and tracking your content.

Using these three steps properly will help your content to build your brand for you.

Step One: Create

There’s an enormous variety of content that you can create. The goal with this step is to determine which type you want to create, the purpose for creating it, and who is going to receive it. It’s essential here to understand who your ideal customer is.

What content are they looking for?

In what format do they want that content?

Types of content you can create include:

• How-to – This is most often a systematic process that you share with your audience, giving instructions on how to do something.
• Q & A – Use this type of content if you have a list of questions commonly asked by your audience. Answer the questions once and share with everyone.
• Case Study – Share how you or your team, products or services have helped a client. Use anecdotes and statistics.
• Testimonial – Let you clients tell your potential clients how you have helped them.
• Company News – Share information from behind the scenes to show how you operate. Prove that you are not just in it for the quick money.
• Why – Let your audience know why you believe a certain way, or why they should choose you and your business to help their needs.

The Purpose

Your purpose will help you determine which type of content you want to create. It will also help you determine how you want to deliver the content. Ask yourself, “What action do I want my audience to take afterward?”

Who is your Audience?

Depending on your audience, you may decide a specific type of content is better suited. If they are beginners, a step-by-step process may be best. If they have purchased from you before, letting them know why the next product may help them go even further and how it may benefit them.

Step Two: Distribute

Once you know what type of content you are creating, how are you going to distribute that content? The answer to this question will determine which type of media you use and again, who your audience is.

Types of Distribution Media include:

• Video – Choose between live-streaming or pre-recorded video platforms and devices.
• Audio – This is great for podcasts or sharing information with your audience through a teleconference.
• White paper – If you are sharing technical information, this is a perfect format.
• Blog – Share general information with the public. This is the ideal platform to use to share content in various formats.
• Newsletter – Hard copy or email.
• Article – This can be used in many forms, from advertising to detailed blog posts.
• Infographic – This is a great way to show statistics in a highly visual format.
• Guides – Dive into detail about a topic that your audience wants to know more about.
• Worksheets – Use these if your clients need something they can use for their own clients or as fill-in-the-blanks for learning.
• Checklists – Great for easy to follow systematic directions for a desired outcome.
• Templates – Combines information for creating worksheets, guides, and checklists to walk your clients through a process that works.
• Posters – This classic media form allows your client to have something tangible.

The type of distribution media you use requires that you know your audience well and that you are clear about what you want to share with them.

You may even decide that you can share the same thing three or more ways to connect with even more potential clients.

As a generalisation, if your content is directed towards millennials, you may want to use more videos and audios. However, if you are targeting the baby boomers, a whitepaper delivered in the mail often works well. Although this is something you may want to test as it can vary greatly from one market to the next.

Step Three: Tracking

In this example, the goal of using content is to build your brand – this means that you need to know how your business is growing.

Whether you like to crunch numbers or not, you will need some form of tracking to see how effective each type of content and distribution method is for you.

It will take time to generate useful data, but don’t let that dissuade you from trying something new.

There are many free analytic tools available to you. (Google Analytics is a good place to start). You can also hire someone to do the tracking for you. Whichever route you take, you need to know your end goal. You will need to determine what it is that you want your audience to know or do once they consume your information.

At first, the idea of creating, distributing and tracking content may seem overwhelming, so much so that it doesn’t get done. But once you get started – in even the most simplest way possible – you’ll soon start to get a better understand of what your audience is looking for and how to give this to them, without your content marketing taking up all your time and money.

Why Use WordPress To Build Your Website?

If you’re wondering if WordPress is a suitable software to use to build your website, you are not alone. In fact, many business owners find it a huge struggle to find the best website builder.  Many business owners either:

1)      know their business needs a website, but they don’t have the time or the money to create one (or research it more and find someone to build it for them), or

2)      they already have a website, but it’s not what they want it to be and they constantly find themselves making excuses for it.

So if you can relate to this, like I said, you are not alone in this.  The best solution to both problems is to begin using WordPress as your website builder.

When considering the right builder for your website you usually must decide whether you want flexibility and functionality in the system, or if you want it to be user friendly.  The good news is that you do not have to sacrifice either factor with WordPress.

WordPress gives you all the flexibility and functionality you need while it remains user friendly.  Anyone, with only a few hours to dedicate to learning how to build their website can begin using WordPress immediately.

WordPress Makes Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Easy

WordPress is high on the search engine friendliness scale.  As a business owner, you want your website to rank high in search results.  Using WordPress as your website builder will help you do this.

There are several useful built-in features that do most of the work for you.  Options such as using headings, meta-tags, and other plug-ins (add-ons) as locations to insert your keywords will help you rank higher on search engines. I recommend adding the Yoast SEO plug-in to make it easy to optimize each of your site’s pages and posts for the search engines.

Mobile Responsive Themes

The advancement of mobile technology makes this a high priority for any business owner who wishes to succeed in business. Plus, it’s also something the search engines are looking for in a good website.

You need a website that is easily viewed on all mobile devices (mobile responsive) as well as desktops and laptops.  Increasingly people are beginning to check websites on the go from their cellphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.

If you are concerned about whether or not your website is mobile responsive, you do not have to do much more work than to find a theme on WordPress that is already mobile responsive.  You will save time and money trying to code mobile responsiveness into your website or create a second website.

Also, you can use Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test to check if your site is mobile friendly. (Click here to access this free tool).

Synchronize Other Resources to Your WordPress Website

There are thousands upon thousands of plug-ins that you can add to your website that will give it additional features and functions.

One of the most important is that you can easily add plug-ins that connect to other online software such as autoresponder programs to automatically add all website subscribers to your mailing lists.

Also, you will find that there are options for plug-ins from most of the socially active companies that easily integrate into WordPress.

WordPress also allows you to connect all your social media platforms to your site without wasting time learning to code it in.

Ability to Schedule Posts for More Efficient Use of Your Time

You can write multiple posts at one time and schedule them to be published on a certain date and time.  This allows you to manage your time better if you want to block off a certain chunk of your time to write posts instead of having to make sure you write them so that they can go out in time.

For example, you can set aside one day each month – or every two to three months – to write and schedule all of the blog posts you’d like to share over that coming period. They won’t be visible to your blog’s readers until the scheduled date and time.

Upkeep and Management of Your Website is Easy

WordPress includes a updates feature which will allow you to update your plug-ins and themes quickly and easily. This can be done from within your dashboard.  It will also send you notifications about these updates so that you do not have to search for the update schedule.  Plus, you have the added ability to schedule automatic backups of your site.

Safe and Secure

Although the internet is an uncertain place, WordPress is created with security a top priority.  It is built to be safe and secure for all websites. There are also some great security plug-ins you can add to boost your site’s protection further.

Just be sure to keep your WordPress software, themes and plug-ins up-to-date. As an added safe-guard, schedule regular back-ups of your site.

WordPress is Free

This could be listed as your number one reason.  It is highly affordable for any business.  You can download, install, and modify it for free.  You just need your own domain name and hosting account to store your WordPress website’s files. Using your self-hosting site of choice, you can freely create any type of website.

These are only a few of the popular reasons why WordPress is highly recommended for any business, large or small.  It will become an extremely valuable resource for your business.  WordPress is affordable, while still allowing you the ability to create what you want using its wide range of themes, features, and plug-ins.

WordPress is a top content management system.  You can keep your website up to date, rank high in search engines, backup your website, and much more from its easy to use dashboard.