One of the crucial aspects is to have a content marketing strategy – I mean, YOUR own content marketing strategy!
I won’t beat around the bush and will dive right in.
So what’s the meaning of content marketing?
It is nothing but a marketing technique where instead of bombarding your target audience with your sales pitches, you offer them valuable and useful content.
You have to create and distribute high quality content. Your content should not only interest your potential customers but also should solve their problems.
In short, your content should be useful to them – this way, you gain traction, attract people to your blog!
Content marketing has become most of marketing these days.
Earlier, it used to be punching on the face kinda marketing – Door to door marketing, cold call marketing, spammy kind email marketing etc.
But now is the age of content marketing.
In short, those who use content marketing correctly and effectively are only achieving the greater benefits of marketing.
Now, don’t assume that you have to write tons of blog posts and that’s content marketing – it alone doesn’t make all of content marketing.
You can in fact do content marketing in a variety of ways so that you aren’t bored and you don’t bore your potential customers.
Before I get to the variety of content marketing options available these days, let me focus more on what’s promised in the title of this post.
Also, before I dive into the post, let me give you a warning here.
You will encounter lots of questions throughout the post! For some of you, it could be annoying.
But if you manage to get through it, I’m sure, you’ll get clarity and you will be able to use content marketing effectively!
Why should you have your own content marketing strategy?
So you are having your OWN business, right? You have your OWN product or service to sell, right?
Also, most probably, you have your OWN work space (even if it is just a couch in your home), right? You have your OWN dream, right?
You have your OWN name, right?
So you need to have your OWN content marketing strategy too!
I’m not sure if you got my point, but I’m starting to see an increasing number of bloggers who adopt the content marketing strategy of a different business.
Usually they copy the strategy of another popular blog and wonder why it isn’t working for them!
They adopt, well to be precise, copy the strategy of a different business and expect to get the same results!
Wait a second, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t learn from the pros.
When popular bloggers share a tip or a strategy and when they say that they’ve got impressive results there’s nothing wrong with taking that tip and putting it to practice.
This is perfectly OK with little tips or tricks or one particular strategy to succeed with one particular piece of success.
But when it comes to the big picture, you cannot copy someone else’s strategy.
So when a popular blogger teaches you how to build email list fast, you can adopt his/her tips or tricks – but not the whole strategy!
That’s the point I’m trying to convey here.
Why does the content marketing strategy of a different business doesn’t work for you?
Ya it won’t work for you! But why?
Every business is unique in terms of formation, in terms of purpose, in terms of market position, in terms of target audience/customers, and in terms of end value.
And this is why you need your own unique content marketing strategy in order to succeed in your business!
Every business, especially the big ones that you tend to copy, has invested years of experience and quite some amount of money in figuring out the strategy that works for them.
They would have made quite some mistakes and hence would have paid a price!
But once they figure out what works for them, they stick to it and do more of it – sort of rinse and repeat!
Your business is totally different from their’s even if you are on the same niche and selling the same product.
You might be having a different audience, you might be having a different product with a slight edge over their product, you might be having a different goal to achieve with your business and so on.
As you can see, the purpose and the target audience vary for every business – so you cannot copy and use the content marketing strategy of a different business.
Your business should have its own content marketing strategy.
I’ve already explained what content marketing is. So now let’s get to the really important bit.
The “how” bit of the whole story!
How to identify and have a content marketing strategy for your blog?
Many bloggers think that it is hard to find out what will work for them. It is part of any business.
You have to be prepared to do quite some trial and errors until you find the sweet spot.
So when it comes to identifying your own content marketing strategy there will still be quite some trial and errors too!
But there won’t be too much of trial and error if you get clarity about your home based business and its goals in the first place.
So, I come back to the same question I asked you in one of the earlier posts: What is your UVP?
Another question is this: Who is your target audience?
Once you know the answer to these two questions, it should be dead easy for you to create your content marketing plan!
So here you go!
Find out your position in the market (you need to use your UVP analysis in this case).
Once you find out your position, you need to find out a handful of your competitors.
Now before you ask me the question,
But Jane, you told me not to copy my competitor’s content marketing strategy?!
– wait a second.
Analyse your competitor’s content. What kind of content they write?
Who is their target audience? And what kind of social media and other promotional tools they use?
Take a note of all these. Now you are going to create your own content marketing strategy based on what the others are doing.
Find a sweet spot that fills the gap.
Find something that your competitors are not doing yet; something that is important; something that is crucial to help people – probably the same target audience.
The whole point is this:
You have to identify a sweet spot so that you stand out from your competitors.
You want to differentiate yourself from your competitors, so that you don’t bore your audience (and make them run away) with the same kind of content that your competitors publish; and perhaps get an impression that you’re copying that big name!
I cannot give you a step by step process here since every niche and every business is different. But I have given you ample steps to get there!
How to create your own content marketing strategy that serves your purpose?
So why did you start your business blog? (I warned you in the beginning that there will be lots of questions, right?).
Your blog has a purpose.
Following are some of the possibilities:
- You want to capture leads (sign ups) to your business.
- Say, you have a product to promote.
- You might want to promote a service that you offer.
- Your blog is part of your company and you want to keep your customers informed about the updates/notifications/announcements etc.
- You might want to showcase your talents to attract clients – your talents in this case could be writing, web design, SEO knowledge etc.
So ultimately every piece of content you create should be aimed at serving the purpose.
For instance, if your primary goal is to make people to join your email list, you should absolutely write highly informative, entertaining posts.
And then, you have to entice them at multiple places in the post that they should sign up to your list so they can be informed of more useful information like this.
But I totally understand that you cannot do this with every blog post you write.
For instance if you want people to buy the product you sell, you cannot be writing and publishing the same sales letter over and over at your blog.
So here comes the …..
Mix and mash content marketing strategy for your blog
…. Do it in right proportions for effective results
With the mix and mash technique you can achieve more than one goal!
You can capture leads, sell a product and also make affiliate sales.
That’s totally possible, only if you know how to mix and mash and provide your readers with variety.
Now there are 3 kinds of mixing that you ought to do (do I start to sound like I’m teaching you to cook?)
1. Create a mix of content so that you don’t bombard your readers on their face just so that you can achieve what YOU want!
2. Create a mix of content so that you don’t bore your readers.
3. Create a mix of content so that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to building a business for consistent income.
Let me briefly explain what these are so you can go ahead and create your own mix.
Mix and mash content strategy: Mix so your readers get what they want
When you have one goal with your blog and if you want to achieve that goal, it is pretty straightforward to think that you have to publish every piece of content to exactly achieve what you want to achieve.
But from the readers’ point of you, this is going to be annoying.
Think about it – if you are going to publish blog posts and if all of them are going to tell your readers to buy your product, do you think your readers will come back to your blog? They won’t!
People come to your blog to gain knowledge, to solve their problems, to make their life easier and so on.
Of course if you can help them with all these, and entertain them and provide them with value, they will be ready to buy your product or to sign up to your email list.
But not if you keep asking them only that and don’t provide them any value!
So create a mixture of content that is informative.
Write and publish one post per week that is in-depth and provides ample information on a topic – educate your readers.
Create and publish posts that solve their most common problems or one of the acute problems – help your readers.
Write and publish posts that provide tips to get a complicated thing done in a simpler way; or provide them smarter solutions – make your reader’s life easy!
Mix and mash content marketing strategy: Mix so you don’t bore your readers
You know, there’s a variety of content. As I said above, you can provide your readers with educating, helping, and useful content. But you can also provide variety in the way you present your content!
Instead of writing just text blog posts, you can create videos, podcasts, infographics, presentations, short pdf reports, and so on.
By providing variety you can kill many birds with one stone – but here are the two most important birds:
(i) Your blog posts become less boring and more visually appealing and engaging.
(ii) You can re-purpose the different versions of your content in different platforms – for instance, videos can be published on Youtube, presentations on Slideshare and so on. This means you can market your content to a variety of audience as well!
Now here’s where you have to focus on having “your own” strategy!
Just because your favorite A-list blogger is rocking it on Youtube, it doesn’t mean you should just blindly jump to embrace the same strategy.
You might not be good at making videos, or may be your target audience hang out more on Pinterest (say if you are doing an interior decor business) – just saying!
So you have to carefully provide variety so that you don’t bore your readers; at the same time make sure you’re doing it effectively by targeting the right audience.
Mix and mash content marketing strategy: Mix so you don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Yup! This is a very serious issue especially when you are looking for some serious income from your blog.
If your content focuses only on selling your product, and if you have content tightly targeted around only a few keywords, if your site gets slapped then you lose all traffic and all income.
On the other hand, if you also focus on writing content to capture leads, you still have your potential customers with you – so you can still drive back traffic to your blog.
This way, you can also approach them with your product offers or other affiliate offers (occasionally, only after providing useful content).
In addition, if you have a good variety of content so that you publish it on various platforms like Youtube, Slideshare etc. then you still have your target audience accessing your content!
That’s it with my mix and mash content marketing strategy.
Watch this video to find out how to create great content for your business!
Click here to know more about the course.
Having your own content marketing strategy: Off to you!
Have you thought about having your own content marketing strategy so far? If not it’s time to change!
I hope this post will help you identify the content marketing strategy that works for you and make the best use of it too!
If you liked this post, please share it with your friends/followers. They will like it too!
Hi Jane,
Super post!
I mix and mash quite a bit. I post big bright images of me traveling the world in my posts, along with different types of content. Videos – although here in Nepal the speed is a bit slow for upload – ebooks, and of course, I sell ads, and affiliate products too.
But I mix to keep my audience on their toes. The moment you become predictable you are dead; might make a few sales but bored readers will look elsewhere for their content.
Mix and mash. Wonderful advice Jane. Practice, practice, practice creating. Feel the fear of criticism and create wildly different, authentic, eye-catching content, and you cannot help but to succeed with your content creation campaign.
Thanks for the share Jane!
Ryan
Thanks Ryan 🙂 Glad you like the mix and mash! This strategy has worked for me all the time!
And yes, when it comes to content marketing, practicing makes it perfect over the time 🙂
Great post, Jane! Content marketing is so crucial to blogging success, and this post really explains it well!
You are welcome David. Thanks for stopping by!
Hello Jane, this is quite interesting post you know, i was glued to the post till the end, it is amazing i must say, keep posting these valuable post, the sky is open for you to soar.
Thanks Pst! I’m so glad you liked the post 🙂
Woow! I love your blog post! thanks for sharing it’s very informative and I;m going to apply those tips that you have shared above… And I agree when you said creating a unique and high quality contents is your stepping stone going to achieve your goals.. your a great inspiration.. 🙂
Thanks for stopping by and leaving a nice comment Albert!
WOW! What an epic article, Jane.
You’ve covered all the basis here. I learned after being in the blogging world for a while that it’s important that I devise MY OWN promo strategy. Sure, I can take some cues from those in my niche that shared what worked for them, but ultimately I had to learn how to make it my own and tailor it to work for ME.
I think that’s what a lot of new bloggers are missing. They’re mistaking “modeling” someone else’s content marketing strategy for “copying” which isn’t as effective.
You should take the time to develop your own flavor and rhythm and figure how what you like and what you’re willing to do. Once you’ve come to terms with that, then you’ll have your own unique marketing strategy that delvers the results you need.
Thanks for taking the time to write up such and awesome post, Jane and sharing your perspective with us. 🙂
Ti
Ti, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing your insights. From my personal experience and from what I’ve seen from my blogging friends like you, only those who have their own strategy easily succeeded and they did so in a unique way. For instance, you are known for connecting with others (genuinely) via blog commenting and also engaging with others in blogging communities. Your success is huge and it worked for your brilliantly coz you managed to tailor it to suit the needs of your business 🙂
By the way, I invite you to join my blogging community DoSplash > http://www.dosplash.com/
I’d appreciate your involvement at DoSplash too! Thanks again 🙂
Epic Post Jane,
I have been reading every word to word. I have already implemented my own content marketing strategy a few months earlier, i have tasted failure and learned from my mistakes. A few weeks earlier i sprung up and made tweaks to strategy and begin tasting success.
Glad you liked the post Gautham. It is always good to have failures; this way, you get to learn precious lessons so you can improvise 🙂
Hi Jane
I will be honest with you as always, I usually read and enjoy your posts from the beginning to the end and like each paragraph you have, now with this post you made me get bored very fast. I hope you will not do it again. You are an amazing writer and you can make your point fast in very short sentences, but not talking like that. It feels like you are talking to baby 🙂
and by the way, this social plugin you are using to bookmark inside the post is also not professional, sorry for being honest but I really love your blog and love your content and will hate it to see it going backward..
don’t hate me 🙂
Thanks so much for your honest feedback Jossef – helps a lot. Oh and I don’t hate people for being honest 🙂
Sorry to know that the post is boring to you! And what aspect of the bookmarking button (the ones inside the post) you don’t like? If you can elaborate a bit, it will help me make things better for users like you.
Again I really love your writing ad reading your content is very interesting to me.
I was talking about the bookmarking inside the post, it look great but repeating it more than twice is not professional, but its only me .. the way i see it
Wow! This post is amazing! I make sure I savor every word in this post.
You really did a great job here.
Wow!
Thanks for the tips. It really is important to know ho your target audience is. And this can be especially confusing when you’re just starting out. One way of finding out, for me, is asking the questions, “Who do you want to serve?” and “Who do you want to pay you?”
Anyway, thanks again for the super long and informative post! 🙂
What a great post – loads of useful info.
Content marketing certainly is hugely important for any business with an online presence.
It’s helped me build a big Twitter following and massively increase my web traffic.
More importantly, revenue has increased too.
Hi Jane,
I just want to include that, As content is king, a proper strategy is very necessary to get success.
Unique and high quality content is essential for every content strategy. Many of the newbies bloggers consider spun content as their strategy, and at last they fail.
Awesome post, The idea of creating our own content marketing strategy is really brilliant and worth trying.
thanks
Hello Jane,
A wonderful article you have presented by defining content marketing strategies.
Content is the main part to get successful in online marketing as well as blogging. Providing valuable content in an appropriate manner is the main key.
Keeping people’s interest in mind, we need to prepare our content according to that. Now days maximum people are interested to watch slides, videos. They prefer youtube videos more rather than textual form.
Its difficult to make videos or slides at the initial level. Once we are habitual, its not hard to do so. Writing 1000 words article wasn’t easy for a good blogger at the initial level, but he does. And as time passes writing guide articles is just matter of few hours for that webmaster.
Making different forms like slide, video, pdf etc. of single content can lead to gain more traffic on site which is main requirement and also get popularity on other platforms.
You have already mentioned about images and videos importance for Pinterest. Really providing single content in different forms make a faithful and quality impact on people towards us and our brand.
Thanks for sharing this useful content for every webmaster.. 🙂
Hi Jane,
Very nice points you have been pointed out.
Every blogger must have one strategy. It doesn’t matter whether it is self made or copied.
But yeah if it is copied then it must be twisted with some others method.
It should not be like that, if one pro blogger is doing that then I must do the same. Pro bloggers know about the consequences and the concern. They may get rid of it. But not all newbie or bloggers do the same.
I was hooked from the very beginning of this post. Good content is what many bloggers are missing. I believe if you take the time to identify your target market, discover their main concerns, and provide solutions for those concerns, you will eventually develop a following. I found your post delightful and content rich. AWESOME JOB!
Having a unique content always make a difference,even the recent update of Google algorithm ‘hummingbird” follow unique concept.
Your post loudly speaks you have very clear content marketing strategy for this blog. That is why you tie every reader from start to end. Not only that but you keep goading your readers to tweet vital phrases of your post and share you post on their social media accounts. You keep up your readers during whole narration of your readers. It means your content marketing strategy is to make your readers chew your words, swallow your thoughts and digest your views to by your loyal readers and convert as customer for your next sales pitch. You are really a great bloger Sheba. I learnt a lot from this post and would apply on my blog.
Thanks for the mention 🙂
I clearly agree that a strategy is absolutely necessary to have any sort of success. Without a plan there’s nothing to measure. And without measurement, there’s nothing you can improve upon.
Hey Jane,
Everyone expects to generate something lucrative and crafting a killer content can be really overwhelming because of the competition people have.
Coping someone’s strategy is never a good choice. I have met many clients complaining about not getting the expected results.
Coming up with something new is the best thing.
Thanks for sharing with us.
~Ravi
A very useful advice of doing mix and mash while promoting or marketing content. As they say, successful bloggers spend 20% of their time creating content and 80% of their time marketing it. Also, one post per week advice is something to be followed religiously. Write useful, educational, informative posts for your readers, market it vigorously and traffic will follow soon. Thanks for sharing this great article. 🙂
Do you have any post on getting traffic from social media and how to become independent from Google?
Hey,
Very informative post. I learned a lot from your post as content marketing is key to success. It increases brand awareness and visibility. It also helps to position your brand as an industry leader and usually generates traffic to your website. Keep it up!!
Great post, Jane! Content marketing is so crucial to blogging success, and this post really explains it well!
Hi, jane Sheeba
Do you have any post on getting traffic from social media and how to become independent from Google? Reason Reply
I run a travel blog with text and pictures but I may consider incorporating alternative mediums.. Videos are extremely time consuming but then you are also able to point it on youtube. Everyone loves infographics and perhaps even combining an infographic as a downloadable and printable PDF to make things even more user friendly! Thank you for the ideas!
Hi ,
Now i am happy to visit in your blog, lovely and informative content. i can understand to make a content marketing strategy.This is very helpful article for everyone thanks….
As always a great post but i am really finding hard time in marketing my blog through social media. Can you please share some tips on how to gain more followers without investing any money. thanks
Hi Jane, Your post is awesome. Have to have a right content in right time. very informative. Thanks for your great tips
You are welcome Shamsa 🙂
content marketing is a key to a successful business. tahnks for the great post anyways.