Serve your people
They say content is king but is it really king? Well it’s King if it serves people, if it really is getting people to take the desired actions you want them to but just putting out content for the sake of it isn’t helping. I’ve seen a lot of people waste a lot of time saying ‘I’m going to create a blog,’ then they make all of these blogs but don’t get much traffic and are left scratching their head. Sometimes they get on social media or create a lot of posts but then don’t get the traffic they want.
Why do you think that is?
Many times it is because they didn’t create content that was valuable to the audience for which they were aiming. Or they didn’t market their content to be put in front of people.
You Must Market Your Content
If a blog post is written in the forest does anyone read it? Well it’s kind of the same concept as the tree falling in the forest… you get my point. So if you write a blog post but then don’t promote and share it, people may not ever know it’s there. You’ve got to let people know it’s there!
But First It Has To Do 1 of 2 Things…
Before you even write, you need to make sure it’s going to serve a purpose. It needs to serve and communicate to your target audience and provide some sort of value. It’s either going to give them pleasure and help them get closer to pleasure or it’s going to move them away from pain and resolve an issue they have. You can give them some sort of information to do one of those two things. You may say “what if you’re just trying to be funny or entertaining” well that’s going to give pleasure. “Well what if you’re giving information that’s going to help someone solve a problem?”… Yeah there we go! It’s either pleasure or pain, that’s what drives people’s behaviors.
Strategy For Creating Effective Content
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Think about who you’re connecting with, what they’re seeking or trying to move away from and then create content that’s going to help them do one of those two things. You can do this and if you need some ideas you can always go to your benchmarks or competitors and see what they’re talking about. Go to popular websites that have a lot of content, see what content pieces are getting the most comments or shares and then write some content that shares YOUR particular insights on that topic.
You don’t have to write anything so complicated or revolutionary that it becomes very challenging to write. In fact, people are coming to you because you have knowledge of a particular subject. Now you can give out expert high-level content and you’re going to attract people that probably know as much if not more than you do about your topic. But if you’re trying to serve a particular level of people then you want to speak at a lower level, not a bad level but a level that’s helping to serve the people that are looking for the information you are providing.
For Example:
If you are a financial advisor you don’t need to come up with crazy complicated, high-level financial advisor blog posts that are going to be over most people’s heads. You can create simple blog posts that speak to the average Joe because what may be basic to you as a financial advisor, may be very valuable information for someone in the general public who is looking for baseline advice.
Ideas to Brainstorm for your Content Strategy
4 Questions to Ask Yourself:
- What are common questions that your target audiences asks you?
- What are questions that you answer on a regular basis?
- What ideas or perspectives are unique to you?
- Do you have your own stance on a topic?
Communicate these things. Personally I like doing a nice laundry list of different ideas and topics that I could potentially turn into videos or blog posts. From there I simply record and produce them. After they’ve been prioritized I work towards optimizing.
Making it easy
If you try to make it too complicated you’re going to have trouble getting it done. So go easy on yourself, make the commitment to get it finished and start implementing your content strategy today! For now good is good enough, let’s get started!
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