I typically promote content for at least four months. With that in mind, here are my top four strategies for building a strong content foundation. I constantly track my competitors’ content efforts, using Buzzsumo to track their links and Brand24 to track their mentions. For those people, what they’re doing today is not what’s making them successful. Related: Now That You've Created Your Buyer Personas, Here's How To Effectively Employ Them Out of the 100+ people I reached out to, about 30 or 40 contributed to the article, which ended up getting about 15,000 visitors and 45 backlinks. The process to create this piece was longer than that of a typical blog post, but sometimes investing more time and effort in a piece is necessary to achieve greater success. Whether they’re influencers or your competitors, you can build a relationship with them. On Twitter, marketing expert Scott Stratten writes, “If you believe business is built on relationships, make building them your business.” Over the last two years, I’ve made it a point to connect with marketers and practitioners through Slack, by email and in person. Your goal should be to build the relationship, that way the links and references will come naturally. This process can take less time and effort than creating new content, and because you’re improving on it, it’s going to yield better results.
When it comes to content marketing, we marketers are naturally results-oriented. We hit publish and immediately hope to see the views and downloads skyrocket. But the reality is that most content doesn’t drive results right away.
But does that mean we should give up and move onto something new? No, we need to have patience to build the right foundation. Trust me, it will pay off.
I typically promote content for at least four months. And that’s because I don’t get the same results in that first month that I get in the fourth month — or even the eighth or ninth month. Content marketing is not a one-and-done type of thing. You have to be in it for the long haul.
With that in mind, here are my top four strategies for building a strong content foundation.
1. Be mindful of the competition.
Do you know what your competitors are doing? I do. I constantly track my competitors’ content efforts, using Buzzsumo to track their links and Brand24 to track their mentions.
You have to ask yourself, “What are they doing that’s working?” Look at how they’re getting mentioned and where they’re getting links to and from. Also, keep track of how many times they’re mentioned. That’s the number you want to beat.
But be careful to not just copy what the most successful people are doing. For those people, what they’re doing today is not what’s making them successful. It’s what they’ve done in the past.
For example, you can’t do what HubSpot does today and expect to get their results. That’s because they began years ago, and they have so much traffic that they can pull off just about anything. You can’t just look at what HubSpot’s currently doing, because it’s probably their older stuff that’s actually getting the links. Same thing goes for your competitors.
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