I’ve said it once (or twice) and I’ll say it again: content is no longer king, it’s air. It not only touches all aspects of your marketing these days but of your business as well.<\/p>\n
Your audience expects to find information about any product, service, or challenge they face simply by typing a keyword into Google. If you aren’t showing up, even if someone referred them to you, there\u2019s a good chance they won’t decide to move forward with you because of a lack of trust.<\/p>\n
In my opinion (and I’m not alone), the most important element when it comes to building a long-term, sustainable marketing system is content. But here’s the thing, it’s not enough to simply produce content for content’s sake. You must use content as your voice <\/strong>of strategy<\/strong>, and the best way to do this is to produce content that focuses on education and building trust – all based on your core business objectives and message.<\/p>\n In order to be effective with this, you must come up with a plan.\u00a0Waking up in the morning and deciding what you are going to write about on your blog that day isn’t sustainable.<\/p>\n I came up with this approach a while back and it essentially\u00a0allows you to plan, delegate, curate, create, collaborate, repurpose and get more out of every piece of content you produce.<\/p>\n Create foundational content themes<\/strong><\/p>\n Develop a list of core content topics and assign one to each month for the next 12 months. Each theme should be a substantial topic related to your business or industry and represent an important keyword search term.\u00a0You can also designate terms that you know you would like to rank higher for, but currently, have little or no content that leads people online or off to you.<\/p>\n Bundle your topics into packages<\/strong><\/p>\n I find it helpful to think about it like a book, where each month represents a chapter in what will ultimately make up an important body of work by the end of this year.<\/p>\n But the key is to develop multiple subtopics around each theme and then develop a core “guide” for each theme by linking the various subject together.<\/p>\n I recorded a podcast on this topic that may shed more light on it for you – Content Marketing for Small Business<\/a><\/p>\n Develop\u00a0your content delivery platform<\/strong><\/p>\n Once you have your themes, you can organize your Content Delivery Platform. Here are a few examples of content that I use and how I use them.<\/p>\n Integrate content with core business objectives<\/strong><\/p>\n Once the first two steps are complete, you must map your content plan to\u00a0your core business objectives. This step allows you to better understand how to get a return on your content investment and how much you should actually invest in creating a certain form or package of content.<\/p>\n One of the most important aspects of a Total Content System plan is that it changes the lens you use to view all the information that comes at you all day long.<\/p>\n When you know what your monthly themes are, all of a sudden tools, articles, and conversations take on new meaning and seem to somehow organize themselves for the benefit of your ongoing, long-term approach.<\/p>\n Now, in order for all of this to be truly effective, I want to reiterate that the content must build trust and must educate your audience.<\/p>\nThe Total Content System<\/h2>\n
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What types of content build trust?<\/h2>\n
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What types of content work best for educating your audience?<\/h2>\n