Tips to Leverage Your Content Marketing Efforts

The 2010 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge is about developing – and sticking to – a content creation and promotion schedule. It is about evaluating where you are right now, today, with respect to your online business – and deciding where you want to be.

Oh yeah – and figuring out how to make it work with the rest of your life!

Once you have a better idea of where you are today (your baseline) and where you want to go – you can start working on a systematic approach to get from Point A to Point B. However, if you don’t have a clear vision of what, specifically, you want to accomplish – you may end up wasting a lot of effort by creating content simply because you’ve heard that’s what you need to do.

The 2010 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge is About Leveraging Your Efforts to Get the Greatest Results

Over the course of last year’s 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge, I created and added over 90 pages of unique content to this site – mostly in the form of daily blog posts. There are 2 things that exercise confirmed for me:

1. Daily blogging drives more traffic – without question, the more I blog, the more traffic the site gets.
2. That type of traffic is rather short lived – UNLESS that particular blog post happens to rank well in the search engines. If not, older posts tend to get buried by newer ones and slip from the radar all together.

Actually, I knew this. However, the drive to keep up with a daily blogging schedule often took precedence over establishing a well-defined strategic vision for my business.

Fact is, creating new content day after day after day without a plan to leverage it is … well, kinda like a hamster wheel to nowhere.

Have You Experienced the Same Thing?

If so, you already know how frustrating it is to invest time and energy into researching and creating great content – only to have it quickly fall off the radar. Fortunately, there are 3 things you can start doing TODAY to stop this from happening in the future: (We’re going to discuss each of these in more detail in the coming weeks).

1. Utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tactics: Performing keyword research and creating content around what people are actually looking for is a great first step – as is optimizing the on-page factors you can control – title tags, meta-descriptions (not for SEO, but to get better click-thrus rates), and image file names, ‘alt tags’ and descriptions.
2. Build Quality Backlinks: Specifically, you’ll need incoming anchor text links pointing to specific pages and posts – the more, the better. Commenting, article marketing and guest blog posting are 3 ways to do this – and we’ll look at each of these in more detail over the course of the next several weeks.
3. Find – and Re-Purpose – Hidden Gems. Search your archives for long-buried posts or articles. Then, update them into something fresh and new for your site – or convert them into articles, videos or audio presentations for off-site promotion. In other words, look for ways to leverage the work you’ve already done to boost your current content creation and promotion efforts.

Week 1 Objective: Develop a Gameplan

If you’ve signed up for email updates on the 90-Day Challenge (you can use either the form below this post or in the sidebar to the right) – you will receive a downloadable action plan worksheet to help you get started.

If not, here are a few things you’ll want to consider:

• Who do you want to reach?
• Why? (What EXACTLY do you want to accomplish?)
• How much time (or money) do you have to invest into your Content Marketing campaign over the next 90 days?

Tomorrow, we’ll look at some actual numbers from the last 12 months to demonstrate how Content Marketing results accumulate over time. Then, the rest of this week, we’ll focus more on how to develop a workable action plan you can live with for the next 90 days.

Til Next Time,

PS Have questions? Leave a comment below  – and don’t forget to add your targeted keywords and link to a specific page or post!