Thursday, April 18th, 2024
You’ve most likely encountered the term content marketing numerous times, to become a Wealthy Affiliate. So much so that it may of become a generic overused phrase to you. But know that it’s an extremely important one, when it comes to your efforts on making money on the Internet.
Precise content is required for the context, this because there are now literally billions of blogs and websites on the Internet, all vying and competing for your readers attention.
So standing out from the crowd and being noticed, is becoming harder and more complicated than ever before.
You can either spend plenty of money on advertising, to get your brand and your products in front of your targeted audience, or you can create a solid content marketing strategy.
The majority of content marketing, can be perfected in exchange for sweat and persistence, at minimal cost.
The trade-off for not spending ad money upfront, is the need for you to invest a lot of time to improve on your results.
If you’re willing to put in the time and hours in front of your computer, then this guide is for you!
Why Content Marketing
Before going through the various stages of developing a great content marketing strategy, what needs to be noted are the major benefits of implementing a plan for your blogging business:
• You’ll Establish A Strong Brand Identity
Brand identity is important for bloggers of all sizes. It doesn’t matter what industry you?re in, if you?re a solopreneur or you work for a multinational corporation.
How people perceive your brand is essential to your success. With content marketing, you can inject your personality into your material, and make it unique and stand out.
Once you’ve establish in your readers mind who you are, and what your brand can do for them, it then becomes easier to persuade them to follow your calls to action.
• You’ll Build Trust With Your Audience
Trusting random brands on the Internet is hard. How often do you trust unknown brands? Unless they establish themselves as some sort of an authority, chances are you?re not going to notice them.
That’s where content marketing shines.
Once you implement your content marketing strategy correctly, people will start to see you as an authority. Then eventually, you?ll be getting people to trust you.
• It’s Great For Website SEO
Content is the cornerstone of a successful online marketing strategy.
People are always on the lookout for excellent content. If they like it, they?re going to share and link to it, which tells the search engines that your content is great!
Great content is virtual gold, the “bread and butter” of search engines, which means, it?s what they serve to their users.
The more valuable and helpful that your content is, the more that the search engines are going to love your content, and reward you with ranking your post high on their search results pages.
• Develop Relationships With Your Audience
You don?t want to create massive amounts of content just to have people view it once, and then bounce off your site forever. What you want instead, is people to keep coming back to your blog.
One of the best ways to do so, is by capturing your visitors email addresses via an opt-in form on your site.
If you build a mailing list of interested people, then you can direct them to visit your site or sales page every time you publish some new content!
• Content Generates Highly Qualified Leads
There are a variety of ways on how you can generate leads. What content marketing has proven over time, is it’s one of the best methods to get high ROI (return on investment) once done correctly.
This is because those who find you on the search engines, are those who are actually interested in what you have to say or offer. You’re not interrupting them with your ads.
People who find you on the search engines, are those who wants to reach out to you.
They are the ones who could benefit the most from your products or service. The more specific and helpful that your content is, the more qualified your leads become.
It All Begins With Great Content
A good content marketing strategy, will help you organize your plan of execution, to make sure that everything works together.
You can then steer your brand towards achieving your ultimate goal, whatever that may be.
What’s important to note, is that not all blogs are created equal, so feel free to adjust your daily tasks as you see fit.
You can also if you choose, outsource the work to a freelancer, or assign various tasks to your team to help you out.
What’s vital, is that you familiarize yourself with the ins-and-outs of content marketing.
Define Your Content Marketing Goals
The success of your content marketing goals, will depend on how well you plan it.
You can?t just throw some words together to run up your word count, and expect it to be a smashing success.
Sure, you could get lucky, but do you really want to leave your business success to luck or chance? Hopefully not.
Success for your blog is all about getting in the trenches. It?s all about working out every single detail of your plan.
So before you define your reasons why you want to have a functional content marketing strategy in place, you need to understand what a marketing funnel is.
A simple funnel looks something like this:
As you can see in the image, a content marketing funnel has 3 stages:
• At the top of the funnel (TOFU), you want your target audience to become aware of your product, brand or company.
Since content marketing is a numbers game, you want to get is as many people as possible to enter the TOFU stage, and become your prospects.
• In the middle of your funnel (MOFU), your prospects begin to engage further with your content and your brand, as they become leads at this stage.
At this point, they are trying to evaluate if your business is right for their needs.
• Lastly, when your leads are ready to make a purchasing decision, they enter the bottom of your funnel (BOFU).
Your content at this stage, will basically provide them with all the information that they need, to become your buying customers.
Keep this funnel in mind, when you plan your content marketing goals.
Ideally, you want everyone in your target audience to reach the BOFU stage, but as you probably know, that hardly happens in real life.
Only a small percentage of your initial readers will become paying customers. This is why you need to get your content in front of as many people as possible!
Define Your Content Marketing Goals
• Do you want to get more leads for your blog?
• Do you want to increase your visitor traffic, so you can make more money off ads on your site?
• Do you want to get more affiliate income from people clicking and buying from your affiliate links?
• Do you want to use content to convert potential leads into paying customers?
• Do you want to build brand awareness and get people to visit your site time and time again?
Of course you do! You should want all of the above.
Whatever your content marketing goals are, you need to know it by heart.
This because everything that you?re going to do in your content marketing plan, you need to align with the goals that you?ve set for your business.
Researching And Understanding Your Ideal Audience
Knowing who to target is essential, to your content marketing strategy?s success.
If you have no idea who your target audience is, then you could be wasting your time writing endless content after content, that’s pointed to no one in particular.
That could mean weeks or even months of effort towards content creation, down the drain.
You can spend time creating and promoting your content, only to find out you’ve been targeting the wrong demographic.
Know Who Your Target Audience Is
When you know who your ideal audience is, you can easily tailor your content to hit them where it matters.
You can discuss problems that they can relate to, and they would appreciate your insights and your solutions.
You’ll become a hero in their eyes. They’ll trust you and your brand.
And once they do, then you can easily convince them to move along to the next stage of your content marketing funnel!
Knowing who your target audience is, becomes easier if you already have some existing data.
For instance, if you’ve got a database of your past and current customers, then you can easily determine the common factors among them.
Or if you’ve got Google Analytics installed on your blog, you can quickly see the demographics of your site visitors.
You can then see which groups of people, are converting the best.
Researching Your Target Audience
If you’re just starting out and you don?t have the luxury of having existing audience data, then you need to get a bit creative.
While you may already have a general or preliminary idea on who your target audience is, it?s best to actually get some concrete proof from the real world.
Here Are A Few Suggestions:
• Conduct Surveys – You can either do offline or online surveys. For offline surveys, you will need to go out into the real world and face your prospects. For online surveys, you can use a tool like “Survey Monkey” and get people to answer your questions. The thing is, not a lot of people will probably volunteer to answer your questions, so you need to offer some sort of incentive that will make them want to take your survey.
• Competitor Research – Know the type of people your competitors are targeting. Check out their blog or their case studies, if they have any. Or you can search their blog for info, as some will state their customer demographics upfront.
• Monitor Social Media Channels In Your Industry – Keep your ear to the ground and listen to what people on social media are saying. You?ll learn which topics people want to read about, plus you can check out their profiles, and come up with an idea of who your ideal audience is.
Creating Your Ideal Audience Profile
Now that you’ve identified who your potential target audience is, it?s time to create an audience profile.
Basically, an audience profile is a fictional person who represents your ideal customer or client the best. They are a composite of your ideal audience’s characteristics.
The more information that you can gather on who your ideal buyer profile is, the better it will be for your content marketing campaigns.
This is because you can then easily create content, that your ideal audience will be able to relate to.
Here’s a template that you can use, when creating your ideal audience persona:
It’s best to fill out all the details in the template, to make your profile as realistic as possible. If you can add a picture, that will be great as well.
Putting a face to a name, will help you a lot during the content creation process.
It will make you care about the type of content that you?re creating, because now you know people like “John” or “Jane” is going to benefit a lot from your content.
So you’re wondering, how am I going to get the background info on my ideal audience profile? Do I just make it up as I go along?
Since you’ve come this far, and you’ve done a lot of research into who your audience is, then it?s best to make your profile as representative and as accurate as possible, of who they are.
Profiling Your Best Visitor
You can check your site analytics for demographic information. You can research on social media, you can do some research into the people who are active on your blog, to get a general idea.
You can just go and ask your audience, to tell you more about themselves.
Profiles are useful only when they?re accurate. If they?re not, then you?re essentially wasting your time, and you?d feel like you?re fishing in the dark.
You’ll then wonder why no one?s coming to your blog, or if you do get visitors, why they leave right away.
It’s most likely because, you?re not targeting the right person or the right audience.
It may take you a few days to create the perfect profile, but realize that it’s a mandatory step to do.
Keep in mind that this is an important phase of the process.
Your content marketing success, will depend greatly on how well you precisely profile your ideal visitor and buyer.
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