In the last few years, content marketing has become the marketing approach that all the cool kids are supposed to be doing. You’ll need energy, thought, and time to create good content — whether you create it yourself or use a capable professional writer. (You can still get the excellent benefits of those platforms by syndicating your content there after you’ve published on your own site.) Create content that attracts a wider audience Your “cornerstone” content will help you start to build strong relationships with the people who can eventually become your customers. Now you’ve got to find readers for that content … which means you’ll create content that’s specifically designed to attract and widen your audience. You’ll still rely on the factors that make your content worth reading — make it useful, make it interesting, make it readable, and put a killer headline on it. If you have the chops to write content worth reading, and you have solid cornerstone content on your own site, you’re ready for prime time. Guest posting puts you in front of a larger audience (or sometimes, just a new audience). The smartest guest bloggers build landing pages just for these new audiences, to give fresh readers a great first experience with their site. Don’t go too long without making an offer If you’re content marketing, you can’t forget the marketing part.
In the last few years, content marketing has become the marketing approach that all the cool kids are supposed to be doing.
Coca-Cola is doing it, IKEA is doing it, Copyblogger has been doing and talking about it for more than 10 years now. So it’s a no-brainer, right?
Except, uhhhh, what is it exactly, again?
Even as the “think pieces” pile up, the term content marketing remains frustratingly vague.
So here’s my definition. I’d say that content marketing is communicating with potential customers in a way that:
- An audience actually enjoys paying attention to, and that
- Demonstrates to that audience that you would be a good person to do business with.
Combining those two “simple” factors can be a little tricky to execute, though.
So today, I’m offering a checklist to make sure you’re building your content marketing on the right foundation.
Just like nutrition, parenting, and the designated hitter rule, there are passionate differing schools of thought on some of these.
But this is my essential list for you to build a solid content marketing program on. Check these off, and — based on my experience in my own businesses and those of my students — you’ll have the right framework to create a successful program.
1. Don’t build on rented land
Before you create a single piece of content, think about where that content will live and how audiences will get to it.
Effective content marketing takes work. You’ll need energy, thought, and time to create good content — whether you create it yourself or use a capable professional writer.
Nearly all of the content you create needs to live on a domain you control, using a platform you can do as you please with.
That means you’re not publishing the bulk of your original creative content on LinkedIn or Medium. (You can still get the excellent benefits of those platforms by syndicating your content there after you’ve published on your own site.)
And you’re not publishing on a “website in 20 minutes” solution that forces you to use someone else’s domain.
If your domain isn’t www.YourWebsiteName.com, you don’t own your platform.
If you can’t publish what you please, with the wording, sales messages, and images you please, you don’t own your platform.
About 99 times out of 100, self-hosted WordPress is the right solution here.
I don’t just say that because of our long, proud history with StudioPress (although it’s an incredible framework). I say it because WordPress is flexible, it’s robust, it’s easy to find excellent developers for, and it makes life very easy for you as a content publisher.
You can absolutely use social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to nurture customer relationships and get the word out about the content you create. They can work beautifully for both purposes. But don’t build your entire business there — it’s a dangerous mistake that can end up costing you hours (or years) of lost work.
2. Craft your cornerstone
In order to create a content marketing platform (as opposed to just writing about a bunch of stuff you find interesting), you need to understand your cornerstone.
The cornerstone of your platform comes from what interests and engages your audience. If you’re just starting out, you can start with what interests and engages you, then observe and adapt from there.
If your site is brand-new, start with about 10 posts that really convey your fundamental beliefs and values about your topic. Think about what you would want every single reader of your site to know.
If you’ve been writing for a while but your site lacks focus, look through your most popular material and pull your best stuff into a series of well-focused content landing pages.
These solidly useful pages are a great place to focus your SEO copywriting work, because readers love them and they naturally tend to attract links and social sharing.
3. Make your content worth reading
This one is tricky.
I’ve seen marketers assure me that their content was “high quality” because it contained a certain number of words, because they didn’t use article-spinning software to write it, or even because they actually know something about their topic.
There’s a lot of lousy, unreadable content that conforms to those three standards.
If you don’t get likes and shares, if Google suddenly hates you, or if your traffic tends to bounce like a superball, you have to take a hard look at the possibility your content just isn’t as good as it needs to…
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