As we roll into the content marketing episodes of this season of Creative Freedom, you're going to see that there are many different elements that help you create a strong online presence for your business. From your website’s design to your use of social media, your marketing strategy includes a variety of tactics and elements that work in harmony to increase your visibility and build your credibility. As we hone in on your content marketing strategy, you'll hear me talk about a couple of important considerations.
Consistency matters when it comes to your online presence. If you add three blog posts to your website one week and then you go AWOL for a month, your readers will lose interest and forget about you.
That said, consistency and frequency are not the same thing. Rather than post three articles in a single week, it's better to stock pile them and schedule them to go out once a week, or even every other week, in order to have a more consistent presence. Same amount of work, but MUCH better consistency from your reader's perspective.
Consistency is about helping your audience know what to expect. As I've said MANY times before: You train people how to treat you, based on what they've come to expect from you and what you've come to accept from them. If you train them to expect you to post every day and then you disappear for a couple of months, they're not going to know what hit them.
To be clear: taking a creative hiatus is cool, so long as you set the expectation with your audience. Don't leave them hanging.
There's a time and a place for curating the voices and work of others, but if all you never create anything original, that makes it hard for your audience to build that all important Know, Like, and Trust Factor with you.
I know: it's not always easy to create original content. Sometimes it feels like it's all been done before! However, you are the only YOU in the world, and that means you can always cover a topic and give it your own fresh angle. That's actually how I got started building my credibility online. I'd critique or provide my own commentary on someone else's work to give more depth, a different viewpoint, or add something they may have missed.
That's a fair approach if you're a writer, but what about musicians, artists, and other creative types? Remix! Take something that's been done before and put your own unique spin on it! That's what I do every time I record a cover tune for one of my albums. No one had popularized a jazz/blues version of Aerosmith's Dream On, so I did. Same song, and yet, completely different.
Creating fresh, unique, and engaging content is imperative if you want to make sure that your business stands out from the competition for all of the right reasons. You don't have to create EPIC content all the time, but you do need to be unique.
Don't underestimate the power of SEO on any content you share. Here's a checklist of SEO best practices to help guide you. Some of these only apply to writing, but hash tags, captions, and content descriptions also have SEO value that helps get your content found.
You don't need to go overboard, spending hours obsessing over your keywords. If you're writing about a particular topic, make sure you're using those topic words more than once in your posts. As an example, this post is about content and content marketing, and those words appear several times in this post!
Finding the right keywords and adding links correctly can be tricky. We recommend that you look at using a professional SEO agency to help you here and guarantee that you don’t accidentally end up slipping into some blackhat tactics.
Also, if you're blogging - or any place where you can include hyperlinks, remember that the use of both internal links (links to other pages within your site) and external links (links to OTHER credible websites) can also help boost your site authority, which helps your content get found.
Sure, there are a lot of different elements that need to be considered when it comes to putting together the perfect content strategy for your business. It takes effort to ensure that you are using content effectively, but when you're benefitting from all that visibility, it somehow makes it worth it.
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