Now that we know how important content marketing is and that it will hardly succeed without a good strategy, the big question is how to make a good content strategy?
As always, I’m going to be practical, we are not going to go into great and brainy methodologies (which there are and I recommend you take a look at them). I will take what, in my opinion, would be the most important keys and put them in order so that you can apply them in a simple way to your project.
On the other hand, I am going to start at the beginning. That is to say, I am not going to start from a project in progress, but I am going to go to the moment before the creation of your project. We are really going to start from scratch.
So, in case you already have a project underway, you will be able to review and, if necessary, correct some things that you did not do well at the beginning.
- Decide your objectives
The first thing to do is to be clear about why you want to do this, what do you want to achieve?
This is logically something very subjective (each project is a world) that depends a lot on you.
The best advice I can give you is to set aside enough time so you can meditate calmly what really moves you: your personal satisfaction, improve your financial situation, specific professional goals, create a personal brand, become an “influencer”, simply fill your free time with an activity you like, etc..
The crux of the matter is to be really aware of what you want, to make it explicit. It will help you make much better decisions in the following phases.
For example: it is not the same a professional who wants to create a blog or YouTube channel to improve his professional reputation, create a personal brand, than a person who wants to create a blog or YouTube channel to sell.
In the second case, the ultimate goal of selling, I would bias the contents clearly towards things that have a direct or indirect relationship with the products you want to ultimately sell because in this way you are attracting the right people to your site.
This, in a fashion blog that aims to sell, for example, it would be important to have transactional content (that reflects a purchase intent) such as “Top 5 online stores to buy cheap brand name clothing”.
By positioning this content for searches such as “where to buy cheap brand name clothes” you manage, on the one hand, to attract a suitable audience for your blog that you can make loyal to follow you, while at the same time you have it relatively easy to get direct sales.
- Identify your ideal audience
And with this we also go to the next key: identify who your audience is.
The better your audience is defined, the better you will be able to adapt your content to them. And this is very powerful.
In the ideal case, your content will be so well adapted to your audience that you will generate many times in your audience that feeling of understanding them perfectly, of reading their thoughts.
When you manage to repeatedly generate that feeling in your audience, these people are not going to be simple followers of yours, they are going to be genuine fans. And that implies not only a wonderful relationship with your followers, but a brutal marketing potential.
This channel (suggested to me by Raquel, my wife, as an example) is a perfect example of what I just said: just with its name, with only three words, it perfectly defines its audience, with the important added value of a touch of humor that makes you like it the first time you see it.
Its author, Norma Escandón, simply with this name, has already defined that her audience is characterized by:
Being a woman.
She is 40 or older (we can also include the “long thirties”).
She is eager to live and enjoy.
In addition, a high % of this profile of women will be moms, they will be interested in healthy living, beauty, etc.
Now look again at the video above from this perspective; it is not strange that in this type of audience it has been the most successful to date and Norma already has half a million subscribers, right?
Here you can see a list of the most viral videos on her channel and, again, you’ll see that all of them, without exception, fit perfectly with this audience.
By the way, I recommend doing this type of analysis on YouTube channels that you identify as similar or similar to your project.
By going to the videos tab and sorting by the most popular videos, you will quickly see a list sorted by number of views, which will be gold gold to learn and inspire you with ideas for your own content.
- Choose the media and create the content
Now that you have a first criterion of how to guide your content, it’s time to decide what specific content to publish and in what media (blog, YouTube, podcast, infographics, eBook, newsletter, slideshare, webinars, etc.).
Here I have three fundamental tips:
- Go from less to more
You cannot create from day one a blog, along with a YouTube channel, publish two eBooks and make a bunch of interesting infographics. If you go with this mentality, your project will be absolutely overwhelming, you will end up giving up out of frustration.
My recommendation is to start by choosing between a blog or a YouTube channel, both ways only in case you clearly see yourself with time for it.
To know which option is better, make at least 3 written contents and 3 videos. Evaluate where you feel more comfortable, how much work it involves and what is the predominant option in your niche and why.
Follow an absolute discipline with an editorial calendar.
Taking into account your availability and the effort that these first contents have cost you, organize an editorial calendar. Keep in mind that not everything is content, you also have to do outreach work, resolve technical issues, respond to comments and emails, etc.
The key is to comply with the calendar without excuses. I would strongly recommend you not to go below a minimum publication rate of once a week when you start from scratch.
In this blog we published twice a week at the beginning and now, after building our audience and gaining authority in Google, we can publish once every two weeks, that is, at a rate 4 times lower.
On the other hand, I would recommend you to anticipate, at least, 5-10 contents in the calendar, that it is clear that they are going to be the topic and title of those contents, along with their corresponding SEO analysis.
If you’re launching your site (whether it’s a blog, YouTube channel or whatever), a good trick to tackle this challenge is to completely finish at least five pieces of content before publishing anything. Then publish them on a weekly basis.
From 0 to 5 content you should notice a major change in your fluency in creating content, while you have created a cushion of time to build the next package of content without stressing yourself out. You should always have at least 2-3 100% finalized contents in the chamber, to solve complications in your schedule.
To calculate hours of dedication, I suggest, as a starting point, to calculate 75% of time for the creation and layout of the content (including SEO work) and 25% for the rest.
As you gain visibility, these initial figures will be adjusted by your own reality and the % of the part that is not content creation will go up.
- Keep a close eye on the focus and productivity of your actions.
I never tire of talking about how important it is to focus and not dizzy with other things, when you are creating content and in any other type of work. People get really dizzy without realizing it.
With a good focus, 10 or 15 hours of dedication per week can be a lot of work, but with the “normal” attitude of most people, a high % of this time is spent in the usual distractions (email, social networks, etc.).
Be careful with this, it is the difference between being able to launch a successful project with little time available, or not getting anything.
The other axis is productivity. Never get into that mode of doing things like a robot. Always ask yourself in each of the tasks you perform if it is really productive, does it bring you something? How much does it bring you? How much time does it consume you in exchange for what return?
Here are some examples:
The difference (which I mentioned above) between wasting 4 hours with a mediocre content and without SEO that after a few initial visits is lost in the infinite space of the Internet to investing 20 hours in a super worked content that will be positioned in Google and will bring you traffic for years.
How many hours are they costing you and how many clicks are they bringing you? If it’s a lot of hours for very few clicks, wouldn’t it be more profitable to pay for online advertising in your case?
You are making a huge effort in generating one content after another, but you don’t have a mailing list and you are not getting loyal followers. Does that effort in content make sense when you are not taking advantage of its fruits? Shouldn’t you have your mailing list first to amortize this effort?
In part, knowing how to ask these types of questions is knowledge and experience, but in large part it is also a simple matter of attitude and common sense. So, use your common sense and be critical of yourself at all times (but don’t get mad either, of course…).
- Design customer acquisition
Along the same lines of jealously guarding the productivity of your actions, I recommend that you design and implement the lead acquisition process very soon. I would tell you not to wait until you have published more than 10 pieces of content to get serious about this.
If you don’t, you will be wasting a lot of the effort it takes to get those first visits to your website. The people that you keep on a mailing list and that you can contact whenever you want, have a lot of value not only as potential customers in the future, but also to grow your website.
If you notify them of new publications, you will have a certain % of visits and a small part will even share your content on social networks, getting some more visits.
This, little by little, will form a virtuous circle of visits that will end at a point where you will practically no longer have to worry about the dissemination of your new content, because your loyal readers will do it for you.
Another key point of success here is also how to segment your list well and achieve maximum conversion, i.e., a maximum % of registrations with respect to the visits that are coming to you.
