Updated May 2016
Do you use content marketing as a way to generate sales or inquiries for your business? If you do and like most people, you’re not happy with your results, you may find the answer you need right here in this post.
Here’s what I believe to be the primary mistake people make with content marketing, and how you can avoid it.
Focusing too much on the marketing
The main focus of most content marketing articles and guides, is the marketing part.
- How to promote your blog, podcast, video etc.
- How to motivate people to forward your newsletter to their friends.
- How to get more people to share your content on social networks.
- How to make your content rank highly on search engines.
In short: How to increase the number of people who see your content.
Marketing gives your content a push. It doesn’t give it legs
The challenge with that approach is that it presupposes that churning out content is enough… so long as you market the crap out of it. This is 100% incorrect.
The most successful people, who use content to market their products or services, actually do very little marketing of their content. Like me, they write, hit publish and then share their work on whatever social networks they use. It takes around 2 minutes if you do it manually.
- If the content is useful enough, lots of people read it through, then a subset email you or call you. Others share it.
- If the content isn’t useful enough, few people read it, even fewer get in touch with you or share it.
The key thing is the content. That’s what gives the; newsletter, article, blog post, video or podcast, legs. It’s what causes the reader to connect with you or ignore you. It’s what builds a tribe around your work or means you have to start from scratch each time. It’s what positions you as an expert or yet another purveyor of generic information.
Yes, the marketing is important
However, it’s by far the least important part. If you’re writing content, sharing it with your networks and not seeing much response, it’s the content you need to focus on.
- It could be too long, like most ineffective content. People are busy and prefer short, information rich content, (rather than over-long content that the search engines seem to prefer).
- It could be that the title fails to grab them.
- It could be that you are SEOing your thoughts rather than expressing your thoughts.
- It could be the 5th time they’ve seen someone writing a post about the same subject that morning.
It could be any number of things related to the content, which means it’s failing to engage and motivate people.
Writing with passion, clarity and brevity on your chosen subject, is something you can become very good at, relatively quickly.
It means being willing to practice. It means writing often. It means being prepared to adjust your style. However, you can do it and it’s well worth the time and effort involved.
This will help
This explains how I manage to publish lots of useful information, (I published 50 posts last month across 2 sites) and how you can improve the quality and quantity of your writing: How to write great content, every day.