Whenever I talk to new prospects there are normally 2 things that come up time and time again.
The first thing they like to tell us is that ‘Content doesn't work for my business', come on, we were told for years that content for transport businesses was a waste of time, all whilst we were sucking in leads from businesses every week :-). You just need the right people and the right intention behind your content strategy.
The second thing is they don't have time to plan let alone review their content strategy, the truth is they don't value it as a priority and are happily creating random content that just doesn't work. The truth is, you need to plan and review every time you publish something new because timing is everything and audiences change. The biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make are:
a) They don’t have a content plan
b) They don’t track and test their results
Sometimes it's because they don't know how to plan and track…
A Content Plan
All marketing on the internet is content marketing. Blogging is content, Video/ Vlogging is content, LinkedIn updates are content and Facebooking is content. No matter what you are trying to sell, you need visibility. You can only get visibility if you have a web page with content of some type on it. It could be a post, top tips, embedded video, graphic, Slideshare presentation, and so on. Your content is based on what you know your target audience struggles with and needs more information about.
In addition, it should be keyword-rich. Every single site on the web has a search option. It might not be very good, but they have them. If it is written content on the page, important keywords and phrases, the people in your niche would be likely to search for should be in the title, description, on the page itself, and in the tags. If it is a graphical item, name the file using keywords. Then use keywords in the title, description, and so on. This process is known as search engine optimisation (SEO).
Basic SEO isn't that hard to get to grips with, it's a process rather than a hidden secret nobody knows about, yes effort is required but 15 minutes optimising a page will get you far better results than not bothering and bagging out content that just isn't being found.
Content series are also massively important which is why planning out what you are doing in advance adds a structure to your content that the search engines love and more importantly your readers engage with.
Analytics
Once you have published any piece of content, it is important to look at:
- How visitors looked at the piece of content
- How many of those visitors followed your call to action.
- Who visited and why
- How did they come to find your content, what did they look at, and on what page did they leave?
Your traffic can come from SEO, PPC, and also social media. But how many follow your CTA? Imagine you create a 7-part e-course on Living Your Dream Life. You would create an opt-in page and tell people about it. Then you would track the visitors and the number of subscribers. You would also check the social media response, such as likes, shares, and comments, if you are really clever at tracking the link clicks from each platform
You would then look at the traffic logs of your site, such as Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free. Register for an account and add a small amount of tracking code to your site. You will start to see traffic reports for your site. The Audience tab will tell you how many visitors you had, as well as age, gender, and so on. The Acquisitions tab will show you where they came from – Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Keeping a close eye on the success (or not) of the content you publish is one of the best ways to keep on creating exactly the kind of information that your target audience is most interested in, which should lead to more relevant traffic and greater profits.
What To Do Now?
That's simple, to get you started there are only 2 things you need to do
- Go over HERE and grab your planners and actually USE THEM. planners are a waste of time if they sit there empty, work out your content strategy and plan it out, it's your playbook for getting the right content out at the right time to the right people.
- Get yourself a google analytics account, I mentioned they are FREE, so what's stopping you, if you never know what's happening then you can never do more of what works, once you have your account you connect it to your site and then keep your eye on it, learning, understanding and adapting the way your website visitors interact with you and your content.
Conclusion
the bottom line is you need to plan your content, create and publish then look at what is happening, without any of these steps your road to gaining new clients online is going to be difficult, slow, and rather painful.
Be good to yourself and I guarantee when you do these few steps you will really start to enjoy your content creation and more importantly enjoy the new clients it brings to you.
Recent Comments