If you’ve been wondering how to pull together all those pieces of your online business together into one nice little strategy, I’ve got just the thing for you! In this post (and video), I’m sharing the nine steps I use to piece together my strategy to create content that sells and flows nicely with your lifestyle.
1. Create content by setting your goals.
The very first step to making sure you create content that sells is to set reasonable goals for yourself. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t take the time to set a goal before they just begin tweeting, pinning, and interviewing lots of people for their podcast. Before you even so much as write one blog post, you should ask yourself why you’re writing it and for whom. Know who you’re reaching and what your outcome should be as a result of the piece of content you’re creating.
Ask yourself if you are trying to increase your:
- lead magnets
- search engine ranking
- converting people on your list
- hitting a certain revenue
What are your specific goals? Figure this out and write them down.
2. Create content by determing your customer avatar.
Determine who your customer avatar is by painting a mental picture of a particular type of person or group of people. In order to figure out who this ideal customer is, you can do one of several things:
- you can go through a coaching program (I’ve gone through a few of these and I also offer one)
- ask yourself key questions about who you want to serve, namely: what are their interests, what are their pain points and struggles, their demographics (income and age bracket), and personal interests.
Try to get to know your ideal customer better by asking them questions. You can run a survey or visit Facebook groups where you know they hang out and find out what they’re asking. You can visit answerthepublic.com and see what kinds of questions are being asked. Visit Pinterest and see what folks are pinning about.
3. Use focused and researched keywords when you create content
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase before that “content is king”. I agree that content is king and queen of your online business. The main goal of creating content, however, should be to ensure that your audience is getting their needs met. And they can’t get their needs met if they can’t find your content.
Be sure to use keywords that will help your audience to find your content on this huge worldwide web. You can do this by using one of several keyword research tools. I happen to really like Uber Suggest, but Keyword Planner is free and I always recommend that first. You might also want to check out Answerthepublic, Moz, SEMRush, and Ahrefs.
Your goal is to find out what people are looking for and how many times they’ve researched your keywords in the last 30 days. This is going to give you a pretty good idea about what your audience is searching for and how you can help solve their problems.
4. Decide on the types of content you want to create.
The beautiful thing about content creation is that you don’t need to do it all, nor are you restricted to one type. Years ago, when I heard someone say they were a blogger, I immediately assumed that they sat in front of the computer and hashed out content about their personal lives (that is, until I discovered the powerful connection between blogging and online business). As a blogger, you not only can blog about your business, but you can add additional layers to your blog, making it more attractive to your audience- with videos, audios, images and graphics, interactive polls, and downloadable worksheets and printables. Your blog can become as interactive as you’d like it to become.
But the choice is up to you as to what kind of content you want to provide. If you prefer writing, then blog. If you prefer videos, create a vlog. If you love talking, a podcast might be your best choice. I do recommend, however, that you add a second layer to your blog (making sure your blog is home base).
The idea here is to make sure you are very comfortable with the type of content you choose to provide. It needs to be so easy for you to create because it comes naturally for you. You might need a bit of help when it comes to editing and such, but the content itself should flow out of you easily because you enjoy talking (and writing) about it.
5. Choose your platform to create content.
Figure out which platforms you would rather be on consistently. I personally don’t like Twitter much, and therefore, I don’t have much going on by way of the twitterverse. However, I do like podcasting, so I’m on Itunes, and I love vlogging, so I’m on YouTube. I’m also pretty interested in Pinterest and Instagram, so that’s where I hang out the most. Most of my content is found on my blog since I do a lot of writing and creating SEO-friendly content.
Find out where you’d like to create content and which social media platforms you want to be on and go for it.
6. Plan and produce your content
In this step, you’ll need to decide how you want to produce your content and who will be helping you to do it. Will you bootstrap your way through and do most of the tasks yourself for now? Will you go ahead and hire out some of the tasks?
You’ll want to figure out who will be involved in the production part of your business- writing, editing, and publishing blog posts, editing and publishing podcast interviews, tweeting posts, managing the social media accounts, all of the works. Once you know who is doing what (maybe you’re doing it all like I’d been for a long time!) then you can move forward with your systems.
7. Create an editorial calendar
In this step to create content, you’ll need to determine how often you want to publish your content. What should be published and when? This is something you’ll want to have on a set schedule for each month.
How often will you show up on YouTube? Tweet? Pin your pins? Post on Facebook and Instagram?
8. Time to market your content
Be sure you get the word out by having everyone blast your content. Don’t be afraid to share your content and get the word out. This is your time to shine and toot your own horn. Time to celebrate!
Part of this process means making sure you have a system for sharing your content on social media. You can use platforms like Buffer or Hootesuite to help you manage that, hire a virtual assistant, or manually go in and share them yourself using your share buttons straight from your website (I’m using the Sassy Social Share plugin).
9. Analyze your content.
Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can check to see how your content is doing. You won’t know how well your content is doing and how you’re reaching your audience, which keywords have been pulling in traffic, or which error pages are showing unless you take an analysis of your content.
Get in there and do the work of analyzing your content. It will help to make your website better and give your visitors are smoother experience the next time they come through for a visit.
And those are my 9 steps for you! I hope this was helpful.
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