Content Marketing for Small Business Archives

January 2, 2018 by RonTester Leave a Comment

Are You Leveraging the Right Resources to Grow Your Business

When you’re trying to grow your business, the right resources can make all the difference.

Is it time to get serious about growing your business online? Marketing your business with online content is the ultimate way to bring traffic to your website. You can use articles, newsletters, blog posts, social media updates, FAQs and more to help bring traffic. The trick is to use content in a systematic way to grow your business right. Having a lot of followers isn’t indicative of success. Earning money is. So, if you want to grow your business you have to know which resources to leverage.

Content Is Still King

Everything revolves around content. Content is needed for every aspect of your business. If you create information products you need even more content. However, even if you sell other types of product or service you still need a lot of content in order to educate, engage, and encourage your connections to buy from you.

Forms of Content

There are many different forms of content that you can use, such as blog posts on your website, guest posts and articles on other websites, inside print publications and online newsletters. Content can be text, audio or visual in nature. Having a combination of different forms of content will ensure that you reach more of your audience.

Have a Plan of Action

The other key to ensuring that you are leveraging the right resources is to have a plan of action. Don’t just create or have content created without a point of view, voice, and the goals for the content in mind.

Create a Publication Calendar

When you know what content you want to create, it’s important to spell it out in a calendar so that you will do first things first. For instance, if you are launching a new product in three months, you can start whetting the appetite of your list now.

The Email List Is the Most Important

They say the money is in the list, and that’s as true today as it was five years ago. Walt Hampton, the President of the Book Yourself Solid School of Coach Training says if you don’t have a list you don’t have a business. The first time I heard him say that I winced. The reality is that social media marketing hasn’t replaced email marketing; it has created another way to lead people to your email lists. Leverage your social media to build your list.

Develop Incentives to Collect More Email Addresses

The point of your blog posts, social media updates, and even webinars is to provide useful, valuable information to your audience and, in exchange, collect information from your target audience so that you can market to them within your email lists. Host webinars, ask for sign-ups on social media, and incentivize lists with free give-aways or low-cost entry products and services.

All Content Should Work Together

Starting with the product, service or event that you want to promote, work your way back to today to decide the different types of content that you will use to get more email subscribers to whom you can market and promote your wares. Decide what type of content they need to become educated and informed about your products and services so that they will purchase.

Consider Drawing a Workflow

Looking at how all your content works together to bring in buyers as well as encourage the purchase, may help you identify gaps in your content needs. Your content workflow might look like this: Email Subscription Bait > 7-Day ECourse > Webinar > Short Report > Long Report > EBook > Coaching > etc… Seeing it written out should help you decide what you need.

By knowing what your goals are for the content that you create, you’ll be able to use it more efficiently to grow your business far beyond what you thought possible.

February 18, 2017 by RonTester Leave a Comment

Eight Ways to Get Content Fast

Don’t Have All Day to Create Content? Don’t Worry, Read On

If you read my recent blog post, Eight Reasons to Keep Blogging, you probably agree that blogging is important. But you might also be concerned—”How am I supposed to come up with all those blog posts?” You know you need plenty of content to keep the search engines ranking you high, and your audience coming back for more. But, where in the world will you ever find the time to keep up with the demand for high-quality content that your audience will find value in? The first thing to understand is what constitutes content, and then to realize you don’t have to do it alone.

1. Understand What Makes Up Content – Content isn’t just a certain type of blog post, or an article, or even always text. Sometimes it’s a video, an image, a PDF file download or even an app. When you open up your mind to realize that you can provide all types of content in many forms to your audience, it gets a lot easier to get excellent content fast. I mostly write, but I’ve started experimenting with more video.

2. Buy Private Label Rights Content – While you will have to rewrite and edit it, it can still be a lot faster than starting from scratch. PLR is content that you buy and use as your own. The trick is finding a reputable source to buy it from, to ensure that the research is accurate and the content is not difficult to rewrite to make your own. I’ve used PLR at various times and I find it helpful for structuring an effective blog post.

3. Hire Several Writers to Help – You can use a service like Upwork.com to find freelancers to do the writing for you. Hire someone with experience of writing in your niche and realize that if you want the work to sound like you, you’ll need to edit it and add your own voice. But, you can get a lot of content written quickly relatively inexpensively. I would strongly encourage you to hire a native speaker. I have written for others and I have hired other writers to write for me and we’ve had lots of success with outsourcing.

4. Curate Content from Others – You don’t really always have to create scratch content. You can be the source for all things “your niche” that will make your business website or blog a one-stop-shop for your audience. Introduce, and provide a link to, important content that you feel your audience will enjoy. If there happens to be an affiliate link involved – even better.

5. Repurpose Content – If you’ve written books, or created other content, you can repurpose it. Even if you have already written a blog post, you can turn that post into a podcast or YouTube video. Change it up a bit but keep the facts the same, and the content will feel brand-new.

6. Keep an Idea File – One block that many business owners experience is simply having an idea. But, as you know, ideas come when you least expect them. If you start an idea file and keep track of every idea you have, you’ll be able to come up with and create content quickly when you need to.

7. Write in Bulk Ahead of Time – Using your idea file, take a couple of hours to create a lot of content at one time. It’s a lot easier to do four or five articles or several videos at once on a topic than it is to try to do it every single day, one at a time. When you’re working, you will get into a flow and be able to create more in a short period of time. This post is one of several I will be writing this weekend, when I’ll have a long stretch of time to do Deep Work.

8. Keep It Simple – Try not to think too hard about each thing to the point where you cause yourself to have a block and be unable to create content. Trying to be perfect can cause procrastination. Procrastination can lead to not getting things done. If you want to get content fast, you’ll need to learn to keep it simple.

Getting Help

Getting content fast (or at least faster) is a possibility. You don’t have to spend all your time pecking away at your keyboard all alone to get content for your website or blog. You can get help from others by outsourcing and curating content. You can keep an idea file so that when it’s time to sit down and create, you’re ready. If you’d like to read more about how to come up with great ideas for your blog, I recommend you read this article on Copyblogger.

To help plan my blog posts, I’m using a content calendar. If you’d like a copy of the content calendar I use, please email me.

May 5, 2016 by RonTester Leave a Comment

Content Marketing for Small Business—Growing Trends of Content Consumption

Give Your Customers What They Want and They Will Return the Favor

If you Google “Content Marketing for Small Business” you’ll get about 113,000,000 results. At least that’s what I got just now. Why so many hits? It’s the hottest thing happening in marketing right now and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future. To get people to pay attention, you have to provide value. One of the best ways to do that, and to establish yourself as an authority in the eyes of your customer, is to produce the kind of content your potential customers want. That’s content marketing.

Understanding where your own audience is in terms of these trends is important. You can use Google Analytics to find out what devices your audience is using to consume your content. If you’re not sure about Google Analytics, stay tuned to this blog. I’ll be going into more depth soon. If you’ve had a drop in visitors the last year, consider whether or not it could be because your content is not useful, relevant, or available in all formats.

Here are the trends you need to be aware of. Ignore them at your peril.

Mobile Consumption Is on the Rise — It’s been said many times in many places. If your website isn’t mobile friendly now, you’re going to lose out big time. More people are consuming content via mobile devices today than they are via desktops or laptops. Many work places have blocked certain types of websites from their workers, so they’ve moved to their mobile devices during the day, and may use their home desktops or laptops in the evening — when they have time.

Content Must Be Original — Gone are the days of the spreading the same content throughout the web in the form of reused guest posts, article marketing sites and so forth. You can still participate in guest blogging, article marketing and so forth, but all the content that you contribute needs to be unique and not used again elsewhere – not even on your own website. If you want to attract people to consume your content, make it new, make it original, and make it frequent.

Content Needs to Be Targeted — You probably knew this before and it’s not really a “trend” as such. However, it needs to be repeated. Making original content that has nothing to do with your target audience is an exercise in futility. Make unique content that puts your target audience first and you’ll be more successful.

Content Needs to Be Useful — If you are spitting out content without any thought at all, then you’re not making useful content that will get your audience excited. Instead you’ve become nothing more than a content bot putting words together into word salad that makes no sense. Your content must put the audience first; remember it’s all about them, not you.

Content Needs to Be Multimedia — Video, infographics, images, audio, eBooks, articles, blog posts and more should all be used together to create a storm of new content that works together to promote the products and/or services that you want to promote. Content can still be repurposed into new forms, but you need to put a unique spin on it. This is such an important trend, even I am creating videos. Believe me, I wouldn’t be doing it if people weren’t wanting it.

Responsive Content Is a Must — The comment earlier that content should be mobile doesn’t really do justice to what is happening. Creating a separate mobile website, and then a regular site, and then separate content and sites for each type of device is a waste of time and money. Instead, ensure that your content is consumable on all types of media.

Content Curation Requires Attention to Detail — Mobile devices offer apps to help deliver the type of content that your audience wants to see on their screen, often removing graphics and ads. How you deal with these apps and deliver your content to your audience your way will be up to you.

Capturing Attention Is Paramount — How you go about capturing the attention of those who may consume your content is changing. Your use of content, images, promoted posts, advertisements, video, audio, events and more all matter if you want your content to be seen.

It’s your job as a small business owner to understand what is happening in terms of your audience and content consumption. Read industry news so that you can get a better understanding of what your audience is consuming and expecting from you. If you’re not sure, poll your audience and ask them directly what they want. You might be surprised at the answers. If you’re ready to dive deeper into content marketing, I suggest you start with Joe Pulizzi’s Content Inc. for a fascinating look at what you can do to build your audience and your business. Lastly, be sure you’re subscribed to this blog to get actionable marketing advice on a regular basis.