Does your content stand out?
If you build it, they will come, right?
Not necessarily! It’s a jungle out there with millions of content pages competing for attention.
A lot of great stuff can easily be missed.
It’s entirely possible that your content is already the best of the best, but if you want more traffic, you’ll still need to take a deep breath and a good long, honest look in the Internet mirror to figure out how to be seen.
Keep Going and Going
To make it in content marketing, you need to be like the Energizer Bunny, even if no one seems to be responding. You want people to find a thriving city when they happen upon your content, not an abandoned building. Even if you don’t have a big audience yet, the biggest mistake is to stop producing.
Be Relevant
Are you really producing what your target market needs and wants? Are you customizing, personalizing, or using a new angle instead of just regurgitating what others have written? Add relevant new content a bare minimum of twice a month.
Watch What the Successful do
Watch the big players. Get ideas and inspiration from them. Then make your own mark. You can emulate much larger companies in miniature form. (Miniature for now, anyway.)
You need people to get excited about your content.
Automate and Share
Think about the biggest content creators – EBay, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the others in their league. They have thousands and thousands of users creating their content. The staff creates only a fraction of it. Make that your mission, creating forums, soliciting comments, establishing wiki sections and so on. Create as many ways as possible for your users to contribute for you. You can also add automated feeds that pull aggregated content from other sources.
Get as Busy as You Can
Volume is really important. Create as much content as you reasonably can, keeping in mind that people have little patience for lengthy material. Take that great would-be five page magazine article and make it five smaller blog posts.
Trial, Error and Testing
Try a wide variety of content types, styles and formats. Scrutinize and analyze, figure out what works and perfect it. Actors, actresses, athletes and other performers practice, fall, try again. The same strategy goes into making great content.
Make the Time
Content creation is probably not your primary business, and time is money. But treating content as an after-thought will mean after-thought quality content. Commit to a certain period of time each week and make it as much of a priority as other parts of the business. Half-baked content attempts are actually worse than none at all. They take away from your professionalism.
Instead, prove yourself and your expertise through excellent content. Do it regularly. Go for the gold. It really is worth it. You’ll see.