9 Content Marketing Tactics You’re Doing Wrong

Avoid These Mistakes With Your Content Marketing Tactics 

You have a lot of competition out there. The more content you create and provide for your audience, prospects, and customers the better chance you have at turning your website efforts into a successful online business.

A good content marketing strategy keeps your audience happy, and they grow to know, like and trust you, since you’re regularly giving them answers to the questions that nag them. You reliably and routinely solve big problems in the lives of your prospects, and they reward you with loyalty, traffic, sales and profits.

Some people claim that content marketing doesn’t work, but that’s because they’re doing it wrong. If you want to avoid problems, make sure you use the right content marketing tactics in the right way.

FREE Download: 5 Step Content Strategy

 

9 Content Marketing Tactics You’re Doing Wrong

1. Your Content Doesn’t Provide Value to Your Audience

If you’ve not bothered to research what type of content your audience needs and you don’t know anything about your audience’s buying cycle, or you don’t know what your point is for creating and publishing a piece of content, you can’ be sure it will provide any value.

For example, if your audience consists of cat lovers and you sell cat training and toys, you don’t want to get mixed up and send out content about dogs. Keep your content consistently targeted.

2. You’re Not Promoting Your Content

When you publish any content, promote it as if it’s the best product or service you’ve ever launched. Cross-promote it to your email list members, to your social media platforms, and even in person whenever you can.

For example, instead of just posting the blog to your website and being done with it, create specialized graphics for each social platform you use and push it out to those accounts and paying for promotion when necessary.

3. You’re Being Too Cheap

Content marketing is not free. That’s a big misnomer. Even if you create all your content yourself, it’s not free. You will spend valuable time on creating the content, so you want to make sure you do it right.

If you want to get someone else to write your content and you plan to hire someone who is really capable, you’re going to have to pay them upward of $25 per 500-word article at a minimum to have any hope of getting something you can work with.

4. You Aren’t Doing Regular Niche Research

Even if you think you know a lot about your target audience (and even if you have a doctorate in the niche), you need to keep studying the niche every single day. What killer technologies are being developed right now that might change things for your audience? What problems does your audience have today that is different from ten years ago? What do the next ten years look like?

5. You’re Not Using PLR At All, or Not Correctly

Private label rights content (PLR) is an important addition to your content creation system. The main reason is that it’s near impossible, and very expensive, for a sole proprietor to publish enough content on their own. You’re going to need help. PLR is content that you can use as your own.

When you buy PLR, know how you’re going to use it before you buy it. Make sure you look at it and edit it to make it sound like you. Add your own case studies, stats, and images to make it look unique.

6. You’re Trying to Compete with a Big Competitor

When you choose keywords for your content on each page of your site and blog, don’t even bother competing with the biggest competitors – especially with paid ads. Use less popular keywords that have less competition but still many searches.

Instead, follow your competitor, join their list, and learn how they do things and where they get the most response from their customers. You can learn a lot from them, but don’t try to go directly against them. When you find a tactic you want to try, don’t just do it halfway. Instead, learn about how those who have succeeded have done it and copy them. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

7. You Aren’t Giving It Enough Time

Content marketing is not an “overnight sensation” type of marketing. It takes time to build an audience and to grow a community of people who are interested in what you have to say.

When you set up your content marketing plan, try to plan it out for the entire year and commit to doing it for at least a year. For most people, it takes one to three years of consistently publishing the right type of content for the snowball effect to take place. Don’t give up before that.

8. You Need to Educate Yourself Better about SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a lot more involved than just sticking a keyword in the title, in headers, and in various paragraphs. The more you can learn about it, the better. You can also use technology to help you, such as by incorporating a plugin like Yoast! SEO to help guild you.

9. You’re Spreading Yourself Too Thin

You can’t always do everything with everyone. Instead, focus on building up one part of your content marketing at a time. Get content on your website, get content into your autoresponder, and work with influencers on a campaign. But do it serially instead of all at once until you have established the systems you need.

Free Checklist: 5 Key Content Marketing Tactics

If the creation and delivery of blog posts, videos, ad campaigns and other content related interactions with your audience isn’t managed correctly you’ll never have any way to know from one day to the next what to expect from your business. You’ll also lose readers and viewers because your audience is hungry for information, and after several days or even weeks in a row of not hearing from you, they’ll go somewhere else to get the information and help they seek.

Download my Free Checklist, The 5 Step Content Strategy to discover 5 key content marketing tactics used by the most successful bloggers and online entrepreneurs.