Content marketing, and in particular blogging, is deceptively easy to do. And yet at the same time, it’s ridiculously hard to get right, as Neil Patel of the Content Marketing Institute explains:
“Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies available today. All you need is to write a few thousand-word articles several times a week, produce masterful, in-depth, search-engine-optimized, intensely visual, user-focused content, and unleash it with the grace of an industry maven and the power of a market leader,” Patel writes in his article “9 Mistakes You Might be Making With Your Content Strategy.”
“Easy peasy,” he says, adding, “If only.”
It’s so easy to post content (really, ridiculously easy when you consider how the barriers to online publishing keep falling) that a lot of people don’t take the time to understand how to post really good content.
And unless you post really good content, the silence is going to be deafening.
Patel boils it down to nine basic mistakes that most marketers or SBOs make with their content:
1) Your content isn’t great, or even very good.
2) Your content isn’t useful.
3) You’re selling instead of teaching or inspiring.
4) You don’t come off as a subject matter expert.
5) You have no idea what you want that piece of content to do for you.
6) Your content isn’t evergreen.
7) Your content isn’t a relevant to your audience.
8) Your content isn’t optimized for your channel.
9) You don’t practice good SEO tactics.
The good news is that all nine of these problems can be fixed with a good content marketing or blogging strategy and a careful look at what you’re posting…although you might have to tell your ego to stand down a little bit; it can be hard to take a deep dive into what you’ve been doing wrong. But it’s worth it, I promise.
“By creating content that people can relate to, learn from and share with others, you increase the odds of becoming seen as a credible source in your industry. This will make it easier to acquire leads, increase sales, and get future content read and shared by increasingly larger audiences,” Patel summarizes.
It’s great advice, and another fantastic article from CMI that is well worth the read.