Content Marketing in 11 Steps. Now Go by Kevin Cain

Content Marketing in 11 Steps. Now Go.     

Here's how to create and manage content that will turn browsers into buyers.

 

As a content marketer who works for a venture capital firm, one of the most interesting aspects of my job is helping our more than 20 portfolio companies develop and refine their content strategies and build their own in-house content factories.

Content marketing is the best way to go to market, and you can be successful at it if you follow these basic guidelines.

1.    Get focused Zero in on just one customer segment to start. Then do everything you can to understand your target buyers in that segment and the buyer journey they are on. Doing so will give you a framework for designing the content your buyers need to help them through that journey.

2.    Hire a managing editor Every content factory needs its own CEO. That role is typically filled by a managing editor with the skills and experience to develop your strategy and manage your content creation and delivery. Content marketing cannot be an add-on responsibility to someone’s existing role.

3.    Build a content creation community Your content factory should extend far beyond the marketing team. Create a real-life community of freelancers, industry influencers, and co-workers to support your efforts, as well as a virtual community of fans, followers, and subscribers.

4.    Create high-impact content Every piece of content you create presents an opportunity to make meaningful contact with your target buyers and to get them to move through their buying journey. Take full advantage of that opportunity by creating high-impact content that is optimized for search, reflects a deep understanding of your buyers, demonstrates your brand aspirations, drives conversions, and promotes engagement and virality.

5.    Repurpose, repackage, and recycle Find ways to re-use every piece of content you create so that you are maximizing your return on investment. Make sure that smaller pieces of content (such as blog posts, podcasts, and articles) get recycled into larger assets (think eBooks, webinars, and reports). Conversely, make sure any large assets are broken down into smaller pieces of content.

6.    Focus on conversions Make sure that every piece of content you create has a clear call to action that directs your target audience to take an action designed to help move them through the sales funnel. Remember that each sale will be the result of many much smaller conversions throughout the buying process.

7.    Amplify your content through multiple points of contact Create a plan for delivering your content to your buyers through all of the best distribution channels available. This includes your website and other sites that you can control, as well as social media, direct marketing, influencer marketing, campaigns, and more.

8.    Establish a rhythm Get into a regular and consistent publication schedule. That will help you create momentum, build a community, and ensure that your content factory drives real business results.

9.    Institutionalize your content factory Experiment to find the best processes for creating and delivering your content, refining them over time. Document best practices so that they can easily be replicated and transferred to others, and to help ensure consistency.

10.    Measure what you do The only way to understand what’s working and what isn’t is to track and analyze key metrics. If your content factory isn’t underpinned by a robust analytics dashboard, it will be impossible to glean the insights you need to make improvements.

11.    Hold frequent retrospectives Your content team needs to meet on a daily, weekly, quarterly, and annual basis to set strategic goals and priorities, assess progress, and to analyze results. Then you can adjust your strategy as needed for each piece of content.

While there’s no magic formula for success when it comes to content marketing, following the guidelines above will help ensure that you build a focused program that yields meaningful results.

Courtesy of www.inc.com

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4 Current SEO Copywriting Tips to Help You Improve Rankings and Conversions by Lynn Terry

If you experienced a drop in rankings, traffic or earnings this past year then you're likely searching everywhere for the latest greatest "SEO tricks" to regain your rankings.

There have always been tricks, loopholes, products, programs, etc that promise you quick success in the search engines. Some of them even work - temporarily.

Many of them can ultimately tank your site in the search results though, or at the very least leave you scrambling for the next best "trick" to try when that one no longer works.

Ironically, those "fast results" options eat up much more of your time & resources than simply writing and optimizing naturally. This has always been the case, but it's especially important now with the search engines becoming more intuitive...

Karon Thackston has been teaching these very methods (that work!) for years in her Step-by-Step Copywriting Course. She takes you through all the steps of writing copy that will rank high in the major search engines, and convert better - so that you get more leads and more sales from your content marketing. 

Her SEO Copywriting course is very practical - easy to understand and apply - and is broken into 10 video modules so you don't have to set aside an entire hour or more to learn each of the steps. Ideally you will learn and implement as you go, one step at a time, and this course is set up perfectly for that!

Given the effects of Google's Panda and Penguin updates that so many online business owners experienced over the last year, Karon has been busily educating her readers on some of the current issues - and how to implement necessary changes to keep your pages ranking AND converting at their best.

I've been following Karon's updates, and so I'll share a few highlights with you as a sort of checklist to make sure you're on the right track with the current issues:

Stop Over-Optimization!

Over-optimizing your web pages is a real concern with current search algorithms. Google spokesperson, Matt Cutts says, "People can overdo it to the point that we consider it keyword stuffing and it hurts. I would just make sure you do it in natural ways where regular people aren’t going to find it stiff/artificial. That tends to be what works best."

Smart Use of Synonyms

Google started incorporating synonyms into their algorithms several years ago. Synonyms are words with the same or similar meanings, and are used naturally in conversation so that you don't sound redundant when you're speaking. The same rule should be applied to your writing. 

The goal is to target a keyword phrase and use it 1-3 times in your copy, but to otherwise simply stay relevant to your topic in a very natural way.

Quality Rules

“Never sacrifice the quality of your copy for the sake of the search engines.”
-Karon Thackston

What may have worked in the past for "quick rankings" is no longer relevant. Quality pages, quality people and quality offers will rise to the top in the new search results - and even more so with future updates. Google is getting more and more intuitive about what "quality" really is, based not just on SEO strategies alone but on votes and responses by their searchers - and by your market's peers.

Better Targeting = Higher Conversion Rate

People are more savvy (and more skeptical!) than ever. You can't just guess who your target market is and use "standard copy" in your content. You have to understand exactly who you're writing to, what they need or want, and their preferred communication style (and/or lingo) in order to create content that compels visitors to read your copy and take a specific action.

Consider these four SEO copywriting tips carefully.

While they may seem obvious, old habits die hard and you may be hurting your rankings and conversions without even realizing it.

There are many people banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out why their content won't rank or convert. It's frustrating and confusing, especially if prior methods were working just fine before. Karon's practical in-depth copywriting course not only tells you why, but shows you how to fix the problems.

 

* This post was sponsored by Karon Thackston and written by Lynn Terry. There are no affiliate links in this post, but I will say that I have been a happy customer of her tutorials for many years - and highly recommend her Copywriting Course to anyone with an online business!

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