Are you wading through the morass of content on the Internet looking for information, tips, and insights on how to do content marketing better? Do you want to make sure that your digital marketing efforts pay off, and to ensure that the time spent on your content strategy brings you hungry customers who can’t seem to get enough of your content?
As you read this, it’s only getting harder to be found online, to gain traction, and to generate leads. It’s getting harder to get the average web-dwelling, Instagram-happy, and Facebook-addicted customers to pay any attention to what you produce on a daily basis.
While it’s getting harder, it’s certainly not impossible to create buzz, get noticed, build your own tribe, and to generate qualified leads.
You know that your sales funnels can be set up in a way that nurtures leads automatically. This will ultimately lead to sales. If you need help building custom sales funnels for your business, get our Funnel Blueprint video series.
Chances are that most of the content you create for your funnels will not make the kind of impact it should; that is usually because of a few things forgotten. Here’s what you need to do to make your content sweat:
1. You have a voice. Use it.
If you thought that it’s only Anthony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk who have a voice while others are constantly being drowned out, you are completely wrong. Let’s go back a few steps for once:
- We are all unique.
- Our way of saying (and writing) things is different from one another.
- People want to hear from other people, not machines (at least, we aren’t there yet).
- You know what you know. Others want to know what you know.
- Everyone wants to get from point A to point B. If you can show people how it’s done, you win.
Your content strategy doesn’t have to bore when it comes from your heart. You might be saying the same thing that your competition is but what’ll stand out is your voice. Your voice will come through your blog content, podcasts, videos, and social media updates.
You have a voice and you should use it for communication. If you think you don’t have a voice, you haven’t heard yourself properly yet.
2. Find creative angles
Creativity isn’t just about wall paintings, art, and illustrations. It’s also about how you happen to wing two different things together and still make sense. It’s about picking up an idea from one popular content piece online and twisting that idea to create a different content piece that’s relevant to your niche.
Next time you try to cook up a blog post title, try to think of how you could pull out information from a completely irrelevant and different source to use it in your content strategy. Or get others’ opinions on what works (in your niche) and give it your own twist.
Your voice, combined with your insights, and the creative angle you pick is the formula you need to produce content that always works.
3. Hook, Line, and Sinker
Let’s just assume that you are going to follow point one and two above. Even then, it’s hard to keep your visitors engaged with your content.
You have another card in your content strategy deck that you can use to strengthen the stickiness factor of your content.
It’s called Hook, Line, and Sinker.
First, you hook your readers and this is where powerful headlines work their best. You’d then, make your visitors follow a structured path to ensure that they keep reading.
At some point, you’ll give (whatever your headline promised) it away.
The Hook, Line, Sinker method works across industries, for all niches. You just have to be prepared enough to use it and then benefit from it.
4. Curate to convert
Quick question: Assuming you want to get serious about content marketing, what’s fast, easy, bring you links, boost your SEO, and allows you to produce content like a machine?
The answer: Content Curation!
You don’t have to create content all the time (it’s just an inefficient way of doing content marketing). You could also do content curation which is much easier to accomplish than creating content. Curating content is also a great way to link out to various sources and in turn getting linked to.
With tools like Curately and others, content curation can be fast and efficient. Content curation is a must-have for your content strategy while allowing yourself to also create listicles, repurpose old content, and so much more.
How does your content marketing playbook look like, right now?