When you start an online business, you need to market it.
And for many entrepreneurs, this means getting into content marketing.
Blog posts, photos for social media, infographics, and video are great ways to connect with the right audience.
But before you start creating the actual content, you need a plan.
This is where a lot of people go astray.
They tend to focus too much on topics and ideas, along with scheduling and organizing a content calendar.
But that's really only part of the content marketing equation.
What's truly important is figuring out how content can help you reach your business goals.
The end goal is profit, but it's all too easy to get distracted from that.
In a recent post from Contently, the author explains how you can create or revitalize a content strategy that focuses on objectives and achieving well defined goals.
Content Strategy
Content strategy is much more than coming up with a bunch of story ideas and populating an editorial calendar.
It starts with examining organizational needs. (What business goals do you hope to impact through content, and which are most important?)
If you’re a brand-driven organization, for instance, your content goals will level up to brand marketing objectives, and the brand marketing team will likely make final decisions about what to produce.
Next, you need to conduct a content audit to identify what assets you can repurpose and what needs to go.
Then you have to put in the time to understand your audience personas and the content they crave, which will help you figure how to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Most importantly, you need a plan of attack for getting that content to people through the right channels at the right time.
That plan should contain a proper framework for approval workflows (who needs to sign off?), governance (how can we make sure we won’t get sued?) and comprehensive brand and style guides.
Taken altogether, that’s your content strategy.
You can learn more about how content marketing is evolving in the full post from Contently, which highlights rising trends you can expect to rise to prominence in 2018.
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