If you’ve read some of our other articles, you will understand the benefits of content marketing. It builds trust with your target audience, it gives you a better reputation, and all of this leads to more business for you. It is also cost effective. With the right kind of content targeted at the right people, your ROI could be really impressive.

“But I don’t have any experience with content marketing”, we hear you say. Here is the best news: you don’t need any experience. We have put together a few steps to follow to publish the best content for your business.

1. Know what your competition is doing

Find other businesses that do what you do and look at the kind of articles and blog posts that they publish. Which ones seem to be most popular? How long do they wait between articles? Who are they trying to speak to?

The trick here is not to copy them, but to provide the information they aren’t. If you are looking through their articles and think to yourself: “Why didn’t they write about [insert topic here]”, that is what you need to write about.

2. Create a publishing schedule

When you have researched your competition and have a few article ideas together, it is time to create a publishing schedule. The schedule isn’t set in stone, but it is important to understand how often you want content to go out. Keep your audience in mind. Less than once a month will make them forget about you, but once a day will probably cause them to unfollow you or unsubscribe to your newsletters.

A good start will be to divide your content into categories. Maybe cover a different theme every month. Also remember that you don’t have to stick with written articles. Your content can take the form of videos, interviews and infographics.

3. Understand what you want to gain from your publication

Have a goal in mind of how much website traffic you want to gain. How fast do you want the numbers to climb? Where do you see these numbers in the next few months? How would you like to change and mould your business through your publication?

4. Learn from your posts

At this point you are ready to start writing. It might not be easy at first, but as you go you will experience it getting easier.

Once you have a draft in place remember to edit and revise the article. Treat the first few posts as an experiment, observing how people react to them. Some of your ideas might not work as well as others, so pay attention to what people react positively to.

5. Publish and engage

After a bit of publishing and learning, you will be able to write more content that will appeal to your target audience. Measure the performance of every article. Post and boost your content on social media and make sure to answer messages and comments.

6. Keep learning

Commit yourself to keep creating content and learning from the results. Professional content creators didn’t start out as professionals. They started at the bottom and just never stopped creating.

Stay on top of what your competition is doing and read more content on related industries. This way you will stay on top of trends and market shifts.

Content marketing might seem very daunting in the beginning. We should know, we are the experts. If you need assistance with your content marketing strategy, contact us today.