Content Marketing: Three Keys To Success Content marketing can be a wonderful way to make money online. After all, who doesn’t like to share ideas and resources about subjects we love with others? It’s like going to a movie and telling your best friend three reasons you liked the movie. What could be easier? And yet the reality of content marketing is different for many people. Instead of fun, sharing experience, they find content marketing hard work. They find it boring and confusing. So let me share what I believe are the real keys to success with content marketing. The first key to succeeding with content marketing is to know your audience. Some people will use the term “niche” to describe a group of people with similar interests. Others call such a group a “market” of people. Whether you call the group of people you want to reach a niche, a market, or your audience, always remember they are real flesh-and-blood people just like you and me. Only people can buy products, and that is your ultimate aim with content marketing. That said, you absolutely, positively need to know what audience you want to reach. In other words: You need to know what target you’re aiming at. It is very difficult to hit a target you can’t see. It is downright impossible to hit a target that doesn’t exist. This is why choosing your niche, or target audience is the first (and perhaps most important) key to successful content marketing. If you want to help people, you can succeed with content marketing. But before you can actually help them you need to know who they are, and know them well. Some people will draw up an avatar. Some people will draw up a snapshot of an actual person and create a symbolic representative persona. For example, “Jane is 32. She lives in Wisconsin, she has two children and her family makes $50,000 a year, and they have these needs. She doesn’t have much free time and she wants to make extra income, or she wants to learn to speak French.” Knowing your audience is very important because it’s a big world out there and there are a lot of people on the internet. There is an audience or a niche out there for almost anything, including the information that interest you the most. The more you know your audience the better. Here are a few clarifying questions to help you think about your perfect niche… What do they need? What do they buy? Where do they go to get information? How much time do they spend online? Knowing things like that will play a major role in your success. Well executed content marketing has to begin with knowing your audience. The second key to succeeding with content marketing is providing helpful content. Your audience, your niche, is going to need information. Information is the lifeblood of the internet. People go online everyday, and often many times a day, to learn about new things and to make discoveries. Whether that is how to get the lowest price on a pair of shoes or detailed information on a medical symptom from a site like WebMD, people need information. That’s why content marketing or information marketing is so powerful. You see, we live in a powerfully connected world. When something happens across the globe from us, we hear about it in hours, sometimes minutes. When we are at home and have a question we whip out our smart phones and find the answer. When we want to connect with a friend or loved one we email or text as often as call anymore. Whether these things are good or bad can be debated. What can’t be debated is the overwhelming hunger of people for relevant helpful content. Provide them with that and they will reward you greatly. If you know your audience, you are automatically going to know something about what type of content they need. If you can go out and find it, create it, or curate it, then you can provide that information to your niche audience. In doing so, you will almost automatically be establishing the third key, which is: The third key to succeeding with content marketing is creating a sense of community. When providing helpful content, it’s important to provide different types of content. In an upcoming posts we’ll talk about the best types of content to use in your content marketing. Not everyone wants to read articles on the internet. Not everyone wants to listen to audios. Not everyone wants to attend a webinar. So it’s important to provide helpful, targeted content in different methods. Once you’ve done that, you will automatically create a sense of community among the people who visit your website, or blog, or webinar, or any other format. If you are doing blogging, for example, you’ll have a choice to let them leave comments on your blog. If you do, and your respond to the comments, answer their questions, and thank them when they leave a kind comment, you will automatically be building a sense of community. Doing this will make time your ally, because over time these people will begin to know you, begin to trust you, begin to like you, and they’ll want to buy things from you. Allowing readers to comment on your blog posts, and answering those replies, is the fast and completely free way to start building a community of like-minded friends that will buy from you again and again. They’ll want to know your opinion when they need to buy a product, and that is one of the elements to successful content marketing. To sum up – content marketing is something any website owner or blogger can do, and the benefits are huge. The three keys to focus on now are to know your audience, provide helpful content, and create a sense of community. If you do those three things consistently you will build a powerful content marketing machine that will provide the money you need to live the life you want, and free time to enjoy as well. Some call it the Internet lifestyle. I call it freedom. And freedom is an awesome thing indeed!
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:47:15 +0000
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