Content marketing is a very important method of getting the word out about your products and/or services. Content marketing is the best way to inform, educate and engage your audience while building authority in the eyes of your audience. However, there are some common content marketing mistakes that you’ll definitely want to avoid.

* Avoiding SEO – Search engine optimization involves both on- and off-page actions that you can take to ensure that search engines find your website, blog or product. SEO uses certain techniques and tactics to help your audience find you. Don’t think that it doesn’t matter. The more you put these improvements into place, the better your results.

* Not Using Automation Wisely – Automation can be misused, but it needs to be used to help make everything possible. You’re only one person. A good rule of thumb is that you should personally respond and interact with people on social media and within comments of your blog, but you should use automation for everything else.

* Not Promoting Your Content – When you create any type of content that you want people to find, you should promote it via your social media networks and email. You can even promote it via pay-per-click ads. If you don’t promote your content, you’ll get a lot less positive results from it.

* Forgetting to Optimize Your Headlines – Part of search engine optimization involves headlines, but it deserves a special mention. There are some ways to ensure your headlines are optimized. First, put the keywords in the first three words; secondly, test out more than one headline to see what gets the best response.

* Creating Poor Quality Content – Your audience doesn’t want a ton of content under all circumstances. If you cannot create quality content on a daily basis, don’t. Create quality content on a schedule that works for you. If it’s high quality, answers questions, and solves problems, it will be welcomed.

* Not Reworking and Rewriting PLR – Private label rights content offers you a good way to get content fast. But, to use it properly you need to learn how to update it, change it, and make it your own. You want to avoid duplicate content issues, and you want all your content to speak in the same voice.

* Not Publishing Enough – This may be contradictory, but you do have to publish enough to get noticed and keep the interest of your audience. Don’t get so bogged down in perfection that you neglect creating new content at least weekly.

* Concerning Yourself with Quantity over Quality – By the same token, you don’t want to post daily if the content doesn’t somehow add value to your audience. Just having something up, especially if it doesn’t match your niche, won’t get the results you want.

If you can avoid these content marketing mistakes, you’ll have a lot more success with your content marketing efforts.

One of the hardest parts about video blogging is coming up with topics appropriate for video. But, it’s likely you already have plenty of good topics; you just haven’t thought about it properly yet. Coming up with video topics really isn’t much different from coming up with text blogging topics.

* Know Your Audience – Everything starts with your audience because without them you have no business and no blog. Think about them first in everything you do. Will they want to know this information? Do they need to know what you want to tell them? If you can identify problems for your audience, these can be topics for future vlogs.

* Know Your Niche – Aside from being able to help your audience, you need a wide variety of knowledge about your niche. Read about your industry every day, take notes, and figure out how you can give the information to your audience in a new and interesting way.

* Understand Your Products or Services – Only you, the creator of your products and services, can know the true value of your products and services. Be able to explain your solutions inside and out and always mention them when relevant in your vlogs.

* Brainstorm – Take some time each day to brainstorm topics. Write everything down without any thought. Simply taking five minutes to write down whatever comes to mind, another fifteen or twenty to flesh them out, and perhaps thirty more minutes to organize them and match them with products and services is all you need.

* Create a Content Calendar – Using the information you gain from above, create a content calendar to ensure that your vlogs match your product promotions as well as sales you have scheduled.

* Start with the Minutia – If you’re still stuck, you can always start from the beginning. What are the first things your audience needs to know about your niche? What are the very small topics that you can answer such as definitions, terms, and jargon?

* Repurpose Old Blog Posts – If you already have blog posts, go through them and consider turning them into video blogs. Keep the original on your blog, and make a new post with a vlog instead of text.

* Answer Questions via Video – When you are reading social media, look for questions that your audience has that need answers. Answer on the social media network, but also make a vlog about it and answer it that way too.

You can have a never-ending list of ideas and topics for videos so that you’ll be able to put out regular videos that are on topic and directed toward your audience. It just takes a little brainstorming and planning and you can be very productive and successful with video blogging.

Once you have created a course and set it up on a delivery platform, you need to start promoting your course. If you don’t promote your course, then no one will purchase it and you won’t earn money. Promotion is when the real work of the entire course happens. There are multiple ways to promote your course.

* SEO – Search engine optimization is very important to ensure that people find out about your course. There is on-page and off-page SEO to consider. In short, SEO when done right can enhance the ability of your audience to find your sales pages, blogs, and course.

* Social Media – Use social media to promote your courses. Hint about them and give a sneak peek into them. Pull out quotes from your course to promote with memes on social media, using images that relate to your course.

* Blogging – Write a series of blog posts about the problems that can be solved by taking the course. If you educate the audience on their pain points and then give them the solution to solve it, the course, they will sign up.

* Interviews – Conduct interviews with people who have radio or podcasts. During the interview, mention your eCourse, offering a special coupon code for listeners.

* Testimonials – Give your course to a few good people in order to collect testimonials for the course so that you can put them on your sales page. People like proof that your program works, and this is the best way to gather that proof.

* EBook – You can actually turn the course idea into an eBook which you can use to promote the course. Make an eBook that discusses the pain points and potential solutions to the problems, including your eCourse.

* Webinars – Have a webinar to talk about the pain points and problems of the audience the course is for. Then give them a special offer they can’t refuse if they sign up right now for the full eCourse.

* Sales Page – A really awesome sales page can help you promote your eCourse. You want a page that is totally focused on your audience, their pain points, and how the course will solve their problems.

* Affiliate Marketing – You can use many affiliate networks in addition to your sales page to promote your course. It depends on how you set up the course but you can use aMember.com, ClickBank.com, and other affiliate software to help promote your course. When you have other people helping, you’ll sell a lot more courses.

* Giveaways – You can give away small reports, small segments of the course, and other information to get people to sign up for an email list where you can promote the course in more detail.

It’s important to do a combination of every one of these ways to promote your eCourse if you want to earn you a lot of money from it. A course can earn hundreds and even thousands of dollars if you do what it takes to get the word out to the audience.

Blogging is a great way to earn income, promote your business, or just have a venue to discuss your passion. One way to keep up with blogging is to create a blog publication calendar. A blog publication calendar will take into consideration important upcoming events, product launches, and other issues, helping you work in advance to keep your blog full of interesting and relevant content.

All successful bloggers have three things in common:

1) They post blogs regularly
2) They post unique content
3) They post audience-focused content

If you do at least these three things, you can have a super successful blog. You can have a blog that attracts an audience who wants to read what you have to say and take your advice, and who comes back for more on a regular basis.

In order to make a blog publication calendar, you need to first make a few determinations such as:

* How Often You Will Blog – First determine how often you plan to publish a blog post. This could be daily, weekly or whatever your choice. This helps you know how often you’ll need to write blog posts, and when you’ll need to publish them or schedule them.

* Who You’re Blogging For – Write down a few different personas for your audience so that you can know to whom you’re writing the blog posts. It can help you keep focused better if you can look at these personas when you are ready to write.

* Which Blogging Categories You’ll Use – Depending upon your niche, you’ll need to choose some categories that a post will go under when you blog. Spreading out the categories can help you come up with more interesting content. For example, if you have a blog about Labrador Retrievers, some categories might be Rescued Labs, Feeding, Exercising, Training, Chocolate Labs and so forth.

* Upcoming Events or Product Launches – On the calendar you may want to list any upcoming events related to your niche. For example, is there a conference coming up, or are you launching (or someone else) a new product that is perfect for your niche? Keeping up with these dates can help you create content that will entice readers to buy the item at launch.

* When Industry News Is Released – You’ll want to keep up with the industry news, too, so it will help you to know when the different online magazines or blogs release new information for you to use. For example, if the state of your industry is released every quarter, keep that in mind as you create the publication calendar so you can include important information.

Once you have determined this information, you can start brainstorming content ideas to match upcoming events, product launches, and industry news. In between those types of blog posts, you can put other types of posts up such as educational, informational, interesting and fun blog posts. List these ideas in the calendar so that you can then use the calendar to generate a list of timely titles and subject matter for your blog posts.

Creating content that speaks to your audience on a regular basis can sometimes seem like a chore that never gets done – sort of like the dishes in the kitchen sink. Once you clean them up you’re already making new dirty dishes. Once you push out new content, you already need more new content. It never ends. But, it doesn’t have to be a chore. It can be interesting and even fun. After all, a solid content marketing plan is going to produce serious value for your business.

1. Know Your Why – Not just why you have to create content in general, but understand why you’re creating this one piece of content. What is the point of this article, white paper, blog post, or vlog? What do you want to convey to your audience, and why do you want to do it? If you can answer that for each piece of content and know what you want the results to be from pushing out any piece of content, you’ll be able to stay better focused.

2. Understand Who Your Audience Is – Everything you do needs to center on your audience. You should know who they are, what they want, what they need, and why they need it. Each time you produce content you need to know exactly who it is directed to so that you can word everything in a way that resonates with them.

3. Plan Ahead – Don’t create content from the seat of your pants. Instead, craft a plan in advance based on the time of year, holidays, celebrations, and products and services you’re pushing out. Knowing in advance what types of content you need to produce will actually aid creativity, not stifle it.

4. Craft Compelling Titles – Once you know the topics you need to produce content for each week, you can create titles to work with. You can use the titles yourself or send them on to your ghostwriter to do it for you. But, having the titles gives you the keywords and subject matter that the content should be about, to help you get started when it’s time to produce.

5. Mix It Up – Don’t think of content as just articles, or just blog posts. Content can be in any number of forms. By creating many different types of content you will keep the creativity flowing. Some types of content are best suited for a blog post; others are best suited as a podcast or video.

6. Ask Questions – When you’re unsure about what to do, ask a question and then answer it. Often you can use questions that your audience is asking on social media and in forums to frame your content to be something they want to consume. You can bet if one person has asked the question, more than one wants the answer.

7. Make Lists – When you produce content, from blog posts to videos, lists work well. Each point in the list gives your audience a chance to digest the information, and then the next point drives them forward to consume more. Titles that have numbers in them also get a lot more views than other types of titles.

8. Edit Carefully – Nothing can ruin a compelling piece of content more than lack of editing. One misspelling or misused word can ruin your credibility and reduce the trust the reader has in you as an expert. Not only that; check your facts to ensure that the information you pass on to others is accurate.

9. Stick to a Laser-Focused Topic – Your title should guide you to what to discuss in the content you create. If the content doesn’t relate to the title or starts going off into left field, pull it back to ensure that every word of the content relates to the title. People expect the information they’re reading or watching to relate to the title.

10. Show Instead of Tell – This is a composition principle you may have learned in high school English classes. All it means is to employ action words, to evoke thoughts and feelings to convey the message you want to get across to your audience.

11. Use Words to Evoke Feelings – Copyblogger.com has a list of 50 trigger words. If you can find a natural way to use these words, you can trigger the right feelings in your audience to make them act in the way that you want them to act.

Link – http://www.copyblogger.com/trigger-words/

12. Curate Creatively – Don’t just make lists of other people’s contents; add your thoughts about the content you’re sharing, too. Add new insights to the content subject matter that bring something new to the table.

13. Include Relevant Images – An image, as they say, is worth a thousand words. When you can put an image that relates to the content and pushes the story forward, it will mean a lot more than any words you can write about a topic.

Finally, consistently producing engaging content requires you to adhere to a schedule of some kind. Many people think they can’t produce creatively on a schedule. But the truth is, you can train yourself to be creative by doing it consistently, even when you think you don’t feel like it.

The plan of action that you create, based on the products and services you want to promote, along with the titles, will help you move forward creating consistently engaging content every time.

Guest blogging the right way is important, because doing it wrong can cost you. It can cost you viewers, respect, and Google love. The wrong way is to post a generic post, with generic links, to generic blogs without any thought to your goals or audience. The right way to guest blog is to do all of the following.

* Know Your Goal in Advance – Your blog post should bring them to a specific page – not your home page. Have a plan in place to capitalize on the blog post by sending viewers of the blog to a very special and specific page.

* Provide a Special Giveaway – Don’t just contribute a blog post; contribute a special giveaway that is targeted to the specific blog audience you’re writing the guest blog post for. This will not only appeal to the blog audience, but also the owner of the blog, because they’ll like being able to give away something special.

* Name Drop – Successful blog posts use name dropping when relevant. For example if your blog post has something to do with creating email membership sites, mentioning Jimmy D. Brown might bring him, and his audience, to your blog.

* Create Follow-Up Content – Once you write and publish a guest blog post, you want to write follow-up posts about similar content on your own blog. It will help to relate the new content to the guest post too.

* Treat Guest Posting as a Long-Term Strategy – Don’t work for the immediate results but rather the long-term results that guest blogging can provide today, and tomorrow. A properly done guest post can pay off years down the road if you play your cards right.

* Ensure that a Guest Post Boosts Your Credibility – When writing a guest post you want to ensure that it makes you look good, and that it makes the blogger for whom you’re posting look good. The point of a blog post is to give you the appearance of authority, knowledge, and someone in the know.

* Link to Your Guest Blog Posts – Within other content that you write on your own website and blog, be sure to link back to that blog post from time to time. It will make the blog owner happy and it makes the search engines happy too.

* Answer Comments – For at least the first couple of months (if not forever), answer the comments that appear on the blog post. You can also use these questions as fodder for new blog posts, in which case you can answer the blog post with a link to your new blog that answers their question.

If you do these things, you’ll not only make each guest blog post pay off for you, but also for the bloggers you guest post for. You’ll soon be sought out as an expert in your niche and perhaps even command pay for guest posts because your posts do so well in terms of numbers and return on investment.

Everything about online marketing needs content. You need content for social media posts, blog posts, guest articles, white papers, eBooks, and more. Use many types of content to help get the word out about your products and services, while educating your audience about the issues in your industry. This will help you develop yourself as an authority and your business solutions as answers to your audience’s needs.

The best way to accomplish this is to develop a content marketing plan. You can create a content marketing plan for any type of business quickly and easily.

* Set Goals for the Future – What do you want to accomplish with each piece of content that you want to create? First write down some ideas, such as increase traffic by 50 percent within 6 weeks, increase sales by 60 percent within 4 weeks, or get more targeted newsletter subscribers within a specific period of time. Be specific about your goals in terms of the exact results you want to achieve and how you’ll achieve them.

* Assess Where You Are Today – Everyone has to start where they are today. How many subscribers do you have now? How many people have purchased your product or service to date? What type of content do you have and what types of results is it producing right now? Can you pinpoint exactly which pieces of content are getting the type of results you want? Perhaps none of your current content is getting any results. Note that, so that you know where to begin.

* Know your Target Customer – Take a closer look at who you want your exact customer to be. Create a persona describing that perfect customer so that when you create any marketing content you know who you’re creating it for. You may find you have several subsets of audience personas for the same product; that’s okay, but looking at them will help you develop even better content.

* Understand Your Sales Funnel and Your Audience’s Buying Cycle – You have your product / sales funnel, plus your consumers’ buying cycle to consider. Content should be created for each stage of the funnel and the cycle, because each type of content has a different purpose.

* Know the Purpose of Each Piece of Content – When you know the purpose of each piece of content you create, you’ll be able to direct it to the right person, at the right time, and put it in the right place. These actions will ensure that you receive the results you’re looking for.

* Create an Editorial Calendar – Once you have an idea of what type of content you want to create, get out a calendar and start writing in what needs to be written or created. For example, if you’re promoting a video eCourse, you may need to produce some shorter videos along with articles to give your audience the information they need to choose your course.

* Have the Content Developed – Once you have a calendar, you can just go day by day and create the content you need. Or you can send it to someone else to do it for you such as a contractor. If you want to hire a contractor, you’ll need to create content in advance to allow for the turnaround time of each contractor that you hire.

* Promote Your Content – Don’t just post the content and leave it at that. Instead, once the content has been published tell everyone about it. Promote it to your list; promote it to your social media followers. You may want to try using Twitter Ads and Promoted Posts on Facebook. Also ensure that you set up SEO on your site using a good plugin like SEO Yoast.

* Measure the Results – Using the analytics systems that you have already in Google Analytics, your email marketing software, and any other software that you use for your business, test and measure whether what you’re doing is working or not.

* Optimize and Adjust – When you look at the results of your work, take a look at what you can improve upon and adjust. Try changing one small thing, or doing more of something that is working really good to improve your content marketing plan.

* Rinse and Repeat – Like with most things that work, you should do it again. Keep the process moving forward month after month, year after year, based on analytics and the products and services that you want to promote.

Creating and following a content marketing plan will improve your business exponentially. You’ll be able to stay ahead of everything based on your products and services, including planned launches and so forth. It’s important to be proactive to ensure that the results that you want are obtained.

The most important part of creating content is ensuring that you have a plan to follow. You need to know who your audience is, know the keywords you need to use to attract them, decide upon content types and topics, and then plan when and how they’ll be created and pushed out to your audience. The most actionable content will be the most meaningful content to your audience, which is why they play such a central role in your content development.

* Create Audience Personas – Your audience consists of a specific type of person. You should know their demographics, location, profession, learning style, and more if you want to craft content that people will act on. If you can create audience personas for each type of content you want to produce, you’ll be able to better form your content.

* Know Why You’re Creating the Content – Each piece of content that you create needs to have a reason for being. This may be to sell a new product, promote a new service, and get more subscribers, or something else entirely. It’s important that you know why you’re creating the content so that you can use the right words to encourage action.

* Keep It Simple – The KISS method works for a variety of issues and it’s no different for creating actionable content. Explain jargon to your audience and define terms to them, so that there is no confusion about what something means and no mistake about what you want them to do to follow through.

* Lay It Out Correctly – How something is laid out depends on how the audience will consume it. Will they be reading the content on a Kindle, in a book, or online? Understand how people read books versus how they read content online. For example, online content needs plenty of white space and other factors that break up the content to make it easier to understand.

* Provide Clear Examples – When you tell people how to do something, they’ll respond better than just telling them what to do. It’s the difference between an expert and someone who is just regurgitating information.

* Use Visual Cues – Images can evoke feelings as well as help explain more than words can. You can use graphs, memes, infographics, and other types of images to get your point across and inspire your audience to take action.

* Answer Burning Questions – Your audience has burning questions that need to be answered. If you’re aware of these questions, not only will your audience feel as if you can read their mind, but they’ll also make you the go-to person when they do have a question that needs to be answered. Find questions where your audience hangs out, online and offline, and then start producing content to answer the questions.

* Think Outside the Text Box – When most people think of content creation, their first thought is almost always blog posts or articles. But, there are so many other forms that your content can appear in. Be innovative and think of new ways to present your information and your audience will be transfixed.

Finally, remember that your job is to create value for your audience. To create a loyal audience you need to deliver excellent content every time at the right time. By developing a plan of action and planning your content out strategically with purpose, you can deliver value to your audience every single time.

Preparing and planning the content for your blog will put you ahead of the rest in a huge way. Believe it or not, many bloggers only blog when the inspiration strikes and have no regular content plan. But, those who are serious and want to create a money-making, high value blog, start with a plan.

Understand Who Your Audience Is

Part of creating a great blog with awesome content is to really know your audience inside and out. You need to know what words make an impact on them. In addition, you need to know all their worries, fears, loves, and interests and how it relates to your products and/or services. The more you can speak their language about your products and services, the more impact your content will have on them.

Know Your Industry

The niche you’re involved in has a past, present and future. It’s important to understand the history of your niche as well as who the movers and shakers are. Knowing about your industry as a whole over just your one small part of it will keep you on the forefront of the industry, which can help you improve the content you create and take you to a whole new level.

What Seasons, News and Events Impact Your Niche?

Knowing in advance about what is coming up, or being aware enough to jump on something that has just happened in the news surrounding your industry are important components in creating an excellent content plan. Whether you blog about events, accomplishments, and happenings in your own life, or about a business industry, doesn’t matter. Keep it relevant by matching it to things your audience cares about.

Consider the Impact of Newsletters, Email and Social Media

Today, your blogging content has to work in concert with newsletters, email and social media content. You cannot plan your blog content without thinking about how you will promote the content. It’s no longer good enough to write it “and they will come” – instead, it’s important to understand how it all works together.

What Main Pages Will Your Blog Have?

Your blog needs to have more than just a blog page. There are important pages that you will need in order to look very professional. Potential pages to choose from may be:

* About page
* Contact page
* Guest posting information
* Advertising information
* Media page
* Services/product page
* Archived posts
* Tools and resources
* Subscribe page
* Start here page
* Privacy policy
* Terms of service
* Disclosures page

Not only are these pages important, but they also provide more real-estate to add in copy that is needed to attract search engine traffic and your audience to reading your blog post. Decide in advance what pages you’ll have so that you can plan the content for each page.

Categories Are Important But Don’t Have Too Many

Once you’ve determined the pages you need outside of the “blog” page, it’s important to determine which categories you’ll have on your blog. Limiting the number of categories for your blog is important. Stick with 9 to 15 categories. The more you can narrow down the subject matter and categories, the more focused your blog posts will be and the easier they will be to find for your readers.

What Type of Content Schedule Will You Choose?

When creating the content plan for your blog, ask yourself how often you plan to post content. This is very important to know as you create an editorial calendar based on the products and services you want to promote. Knowing you plan to post daily requires just slightly more work than posting weekly when you have the plan in front of you and of course, will get better results when it’s focused.

What Are the Major and Minor Keywords That Define Your Niche?

Studying keywords within your niche can help you come up with categories as well as subjects which you want to blog about. The subjects can also help determine what forms the content will appear in. For example, you may want to interview movers and shakers within your niche. These might be better suited for a podcast while a “how to” post might be better if it appears as a video on your blog.

Creating a content plan for your blog is an essential element in having a successful blog. Without a plan of action to move your blog forward, it’s easy to get stuck only blogging when the whim strikes, which is why most blogs do not produce an income or results for the bloggers. Blogging with purpose and focus will make all the difference, and that starts with a content plan.

One of the types of content that you need to create in your content marketing endeavors is social media content. Social media content is any content that you will use for purposes of promoting on social media. It might be a blurb that goes with a link to a video or blog post, or it might be an infographic or meme to help you get a point or two across. Creating content for social media is an important part of every business’s marketing strategy.

* Plan Ahead – Most people seem to totally forget to plan ahead regarding social media content. This is a mistake. If you create a blog post, for example, then you should create a tweet, a Facebook post, and other blurbs for whatever social media network that you plan to share the information on.

* Add the Content to Your Calendar – Include social media content on your editorial calendar. If you know that in August you’re going to promote a great new product or service, then you should also be planning for social media content to use in that promotion – both leading up to the launch and during the launch.

* Create Images for Social Media – Remember that images are a form of content, and that you need to create images for social media sharing. Images are more likely to be shared than text and are an important part of your marketing actions on social media. Using a variety of images as content, like infographics and memes, will increase shares and engagement.

* Outsource It – You can use your content calendar to get help creating social media content with experts. These experts can help you create infographics, memes and a with a copywriting expert they can also help you craft just the right words to use for a blurb supporting your other promotions, products and services.

* Share More Than Once – It’s important that you promote the content that you create and that you do it more than once. People do not check their entire social media stream, so sharing the same content with new blurbs and a new spin on the information several times will increase the view rate exponentially.

* Conduct A/B Testing – Also called split testing, you want to see what times, headlines, and topics get more attention than others. As you collect this data, you’ll soon know exactly what time is best to share any updates with your social media followers.

* Target Each Audience – Each social media network has its own personality, and the portion of your audience that follows you and engages with you on each network is usually slightly different. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that the content you create for each network is exclusive to that network.

* Create Content Often – With social media you need to have content for every day of the week, and share it more than once per day. This can seem like a lot of content to create, but it all stems from the basic message you want to get across to your audience based on your promotions.

Creating content for social media will be a large part of your content creation program. It will help ensure that the products, services and information that you need to communicate to your audience gets the attention it needs.