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When content marketing is done right, it can be one of the most powerful marketing channels available.
Good content marketing can offer a return that far exceeds most other marketing spend, both in the short and the long-term.
Content has the power to drive visibility and awareness to your brand years after its initial publication, and continue making money for you around the clock.
After all, each piece of content can act as an entrance door for your brand, making consumers aware of what you have to offer and naturally moving them closer and closer to a sale.
The potential is insane.
The real power of content marketing however, comes when you can begin utilizing these benefits at scale – releasing more and more content that all works together in a system, each piece building each other up.
By developing a framework that fosters this long-term growth, you ensure that each piece of content that you release continues to build up your brand. Permanently.
In this article, let’s go over how you can create a content marketing strategy that continues to work for you, and build your brand over the long-term. These strategies aren’t specific to any one platform. They’ll work whether you’re utilizing blogging, YouTube, podcasting, social media, something else entirely, or a combination of all of these.
Let’s get to it!
1. Release Content On Evergreen Topics, When Possible
Content is only useful for the extent that it is relevant.
If you want your content to attract consumers for a long period of time, you need to be sure that the content remains relevant for a long period of time.
This means releasing content on topics that have a long shelf-life, and aren’t particularly prone to changes or updates.
Some examples of evergreen content ideas include:
- 7 Breathing Exercises To Improve Your Singing
- How To Throw Your First House Party
- Traveling To Dubai – The Ultimate Guide
Some examples of topics that are not evergreen, include:
- News articles
- Discussions of products that will later have updated versions
- Anything discussing current events or trends
When you release evergreen content, you may find that your weekly views on each piece of content actually increase as time goes on. As time passes, evergreen content will attract more links, be passed around to others, and saved for later reference by an ever-increasing amount of people.
Additionally, if you follow the advice I lay out later on this article, there will also be plenty of opportunities for you to drive additional traffic to these articles or videos long after they’ve been published as well.
2. Ensure All Pieces Of Content Have A Direct Tie To Your Content Marketing Goals
Content, even if it is getting viewed, may not actually be doing anything for your business.
One of the biggest mistakes content marketers make is basing their success off of vanity metrics – metrics such as page views, comments, and even social shares.
These things certainly have value, and are generally correlated with more important metrics. However, while these things can act as a benchmark to showcase how well certain pieces of content are resonating relative to others, they may not be valuable on their own.
Therefore, instead of crafting your content with the goal of increasing these vanity metrics, it’s important that your content can directly lead to the marketing objective you have in place for that campaign.
For example, my baby product brand utilizes its blog for brand awareness far more than direct product sales at this moment. However, we also develop articles around product lines we know that we’ll be releasing at some point. When that time comes, you can be sure these articles will be utilized to push those products.
When we’re not able to push for a direct sale, we look at retaining the audience that we attract, in hopes of making them a part of our ecosystem. This means prioritizing email signups and following us on social pages. We know that by doing this, we’ll be able to sell to them later on when it’s more appropriate.
How effectively we’re able to retain visitors is one of the key benchmarks we use to measure content effectiveness.
For my personal brand here on JamesMcAllisterOnline.com, I pursue a similar strategy – but direct product sales through my blog is much more of a focus. Most articles on here will have a relevant product promoted at some point during the article.
By remaining conscious of our marketing goals while developing our content, we can be sure that each consumer has an opportunity to do further business in some way.
As you release more and more content, this very quickly becomes very powerful.
3. Release Content You Can Reference Later
Develop your digital content in a manner that’s so comprehensive, you never need to release another piece of content on the topic.
I’m not exaggerating.
Make each piece of content you release the end-all-be-all piece of content for that topic. Make it so well-researched, so thorough and complete that there isn’t any possibility of a consumer needing to search out another article or video.
By doing this, you give yourself something you can link to and reference countless times over the coming months and years. Every time this topic is mentioned elsewhere, you have a full and complete resource for somebody that’s interested in learning more.
Your content will benefit from higher rankings due to the increased consumption, and the natural links that this will generate. This will also make link building and email outreach work so much easier, as you’ve truly built something valuable that will help out other content creators as well.
Bonus tip: Create a spreadsheet with all of the content you’ve released, a link to it, and some tags to identify what it’s about. As your archive of content grows, it’s easy to forget everything that you’ve released. Having a spreadsheet will help you quickly find relevant content to link out to.
4. Prioritize Long-Term Traffic Sources
When it comes to cumulative return on your content, some traffic sources are more valuable than others.
While aggressive social media marketing of new content will quickly generate visits for example, these will inevitably fall off once your marketing has ended.
Pay-per-click and influencer shoutouts are also two traffic sources that will very quickly dry up once you stop pouring money into them.
However, other traffic sources can bring fresh eyeballs to your content long after you’ve finished investing time or money into them.
Some examples include ranking your content on search engines, linking to your content on sites like Quora, blog commenting, and forum posting.
Links placed on these pages may continue getting clicks in perpetuity, as long as they remain relevant and useful.
I discuss all of these strategies in detail inside of my blogging course. While it’s primarily geared towards driving traffic to blog articles, the concepts in this course are applicable to other types of content as well.
5. Repurpose Your Content For Maximum Distribution
If you’re going to spend the time to create truly epic pieces of content, it’s important that you make the most of it.
After all, the higher return you can get out of each piece of content, the more time and energy you can justify investing into it.
Therefore, when possible, never publish your content on just one platform. Look for opportunities to spread each piece of content as far and wide as possible, making changes so it fits naturally on all the various platforms that you can release it on.
For example, you may have noticed at the beginning of this article that I also include an audio version. This allows me to send this article out to people who are consuming it in the form of a podcast.
At the end of this article, I compile all of the main points into a SlideShare. Then, I sync those two things together and have a YouTube video.
Some of the key points will also be created into my ‘tip of the day’ posts that I share on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In these posts, I will likely mention the fact that there’s a full article that goes into the concepts in more detail, and direct people back here.
Everything works together in a system and by structuring it all this way, I hit a large number of different audiences, and far more new people than I otherwise would have – many of which would have never found me or my content otherwise.
If you’re interested in learning more about my content repurposing strategy, I share a 36-page slide deck with all of my new email subscribers. Sign up to my email list and you’ll gain access to The Vault – it contains not only this slide deck, but a bunch of other resources as well that are only shared with my email subscribers.
If You’re A Blogger, You’ll Want To Check This Out
I said that there’d be a pitch, didn’t I? 😉
Although the content strategy tips I’ve shared in this article are insanely important to building your blog, podcast, or channel over the long-term, it’s unfortunately only one piece of the equation.
I’ve put together a blogging course that ties every important aspect of blogging together, helping you to create a blog that not only hits the objectives you have in place for your company, but does so in a way that it can be easily scaled to massive levels.
In other words, it lays out a blueprint for growing to tens of thousands of dollars per month in recurring revenue.
It does this by focusing on the four key components of the world’s most successful blogs:
- The blog structure – topic selection, design, user experience, and the foundation.
- The blog content – generating content that engages readers, keeps them coming back, and funnels them towards your marketing goals (i.e sales.)
- Building traffic – connecting with an growing an audience of loyal fans that are excited and engage with your brand.
- Monetizing that traffic – making money from your audience in the most effective manner possible.
While each one of these are incredibly important, it doesn’t help you to only be great at one of them. All four need to be done correctly in order for things to really work out for you, which is why each section is covered in so much detail.
You can learn more about the course by clicking here.
Conclusion
Aimlessly publishing content without any sort of strategy is a recipe for disaster.
By following the advice laid out for you in this article, you ensure that every piece of content you release will continue to work for you years into the future. These truly are 5 core components of a solid content marketing plan.
I hope that this article has given you some ideas, and I’d love to hear how you plan to shape your content strategy going forward.
As always, if there’s ever anything that I can help with, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
To your success,
– James McAllister
Summary:
Review the main points of this article in the SlideShare below. Feel free to embed this on your site, use it in your organization, and share it with others! All I ask is that you give credit! (Download links are available from SlideShare’s website, which you can access by clicking the LinkedIn icon)
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