Finally, the ideas are flowing and you’re in the writing zone. You publish your world-changing, earth-shattering post and then… nothing. Nobody likes it, nobody comments on it and nobody reads it… except for your mum and maybe your best friend. You may be wondering if it’s all worth it. You’ve been told, “create content” — but the hours involved in this process don’t seem to be reaping any rewards. If you feel like you’re churning out content like a worker on an assembly line, I want to encourage you not to give up. Content Machine author Dan Norris said that he wrote for seven years before his posts had more than a handful of shares. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait seven years. Today, I want to share with you five golden tips on how you can get more traction with your content, as well as save time and money on producing it so you can feel less like a slave and more like a content legend.
1. Seek ideas from your community
If you’re starting from scratch, you may have to borrow someone else’s community to kickstart this process. Who else is reaching out to the people you want to reach? Make a list of other businesses, organisations and individuals who seem to have pull with your ideal community. If you’re not starting from scratch, you can ask directly. Jump onto Periscope and do a Q and A session or host a Twitter Chat. Ask directly via your email newsletter. If you don’t ask, you won’t know.
2. Ask the right questions
One of the best questions you can ask is: “What’s keeping you awake at night?” Chances are people will easily be able to answer that one. The answer might not relate to your business directly but it will give you a clue as to how you can help them alleviate the problem. Another is “What is your biggest struggle with ____?” There are several ways in which you can find the answers. One is to ask directly if you already have a community in place (as mentioned above). Another is to be a fly on the wall in the online places and spaces people hang out at. Take note of questions that come up on complementary forums and groups. Take note of the pain points people have. Start writing them down and look for common threads and themes.
3. Use the right communication methods
You can write blog posts till the sun don’t shine but if your ideal community prefers Youtube Videos or Podcasts, you won’t get the traction you want from your content. Examine what communication tools and social tools your community prefers. Do they prefer LinkedIn over Facebook? Twitter over Pinterest? Periscope over Instagram? Do they listen to podcasts as they work out or drive? Do they go to Youtube to find the answer to their problems? Find out and then start building your content in the format your people will love. A big hint about podcasting and Youtube: If you are doing any kind of video or audio content, these can easily and quickly be transcribed and repurposed for written content. More on that below…
4. Create flagship content
Once you have established your community’s pain points, sought their ideas and established the right communication methods to reach them, it’s time to create your flagship content. To be classed as Flagship content your content should address key reader/listener concerns, be highly shareable, be long form to encourage scrolling (even if you do a podcast or Youtube video, creating a blog post with notes or a transcript is a must for SEO purposes), and be compelling. If this content doesn’t keep people reading and listening, then it’s not flagship. Not every piece of content you produce will be like this but you need at least five pieces of content that are. Why? The main reason is so you can use this content in native ads. Native ads are ads that promote your content and not a sales offer. Their purpose is to drive more people to your website so that you can retarget them with sales offers and subscriber offers via future ads. This strategy reduces your ad spend because you are focused on only marketing to people who are actually interested in what you offer rather than taking a wild guess. It is worth paying a professional copywriter or producer to work with you on developing this flagship content as the goal here is to maximise social shares, website click throughs and scrolling. Your goal with content should not be to churn out regular content at the cost of quality. Focus instead on creating amazing content that you can promote again and again over time.
5. Repurpose your best content
Your most popular blog posts can be turned into indepth webinars. Your most downloaded podcasts can be repurposed and reworked as blog posts or ebooks. You can create 30 day challenges based on a piece of content that successfully addressed a key pain point with your community. You can create an e-course based on a series of related Youtube videos. The possibilities are endless. You should also chunk your content. By chunking I mean, break down your content in bite sized, shareable pieces. If I went through this post, I can create social media chunks from any of the paragraphs above easily. For example: Facebook and LinkedIn Posts: “You’ve been told: “Create content” but the hours involved in this process don’t seem to be reaping any rewards. If that’s you, I want to encourage you not to give up.” “Content Marketing Tip: Who else is reaching out to the people you want to reach? Make a list of other businesses, organisations and individuals who seem to have pull with your ideal community.” “A big hint about podcasting and Youtube: If you are doing any kind of video or audio content, these can easily and quickly be transcribed and repurposed for written content.” Twitter Posts: “5 Golden tips on how you can get more traction with your content, as well as save time and money.” “Your goal with content should not be to churn out regular content at the cost of quality.” “Create flagship content. Here’s why!” Once you’ve created social media chunks, you can plug these into a tool like Hootsuite or Meet Edgar and use them to promote your content. You can see here that this one blog post can be promoted in at least three ways without it feeling like I’ve just blasted people with the same content over and over again. Gettin’ the picture?
Over to You
If you’re just throwing content out there that you hope people will like and that you think people will resonate with, without actually putting in the leg work to find out what people want, chances are you won’t get the traction you want. However, when you use the above tips to plan and create your content, it’s more likely that you’ll get results from the content you produce and share. Are you ready to get off the content creation assembly line? Why not give the above tips a try? If you apply this process and start seeing results, I’d love for you to share your success with me. Hit me up on Twitter or Facebook.
