Why your blog should have a content marketing strategy and how to devise one?

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:

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

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?)

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!

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