When you think about online marketing, there are a lot of pieces to consider. To make your life easier, I have ripped a page from The Happiness Project and put together a one-step-at-a-time plan to improve your life.
In my first blog post, I covered Steps 1 – 3: updating your website, putting together a mobile site, and listening to what people are saying online. Let’s move on to steps 4 – 6.
Step 4: Put Together an Editorial Calendar
After looking at Google Analytics and listening to what your target market says, you know what topics to cover as you create content. Stay organized by putting them in an editorial calendar:
- List topics – Start by narrowing down the topics to the ones that are most relevant to your expertise. Then brainstorm – what areas can you cover for each topic?
- Choose content platforms – Decide what pieces of content go where. Blog posts are great for how-to’s and advice, which can then be shortened into newsletter articles. Quick tips, offers, updates, photos, event announcements, and company news are perfect for social media.
- Decide on timing – Finally, decide how often you want to publish content. Blog posts work best when you publish at least once a week, but it’s perfectly fine to publish your newsletter monthly. When it comes to social media, though, you must be active on it every day, so plan your schedule accordingly.
Step 5: Improve Social Media Engagement
Because social media is constantly evolving, I think improving social media engagement is an ongoing goal for all of us small business owners. Here are 3 basic things we should always be doing, no matter what social media platform we’re using.
- Find your audience – Research social media networks beyond the biggies – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+. Look at Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Viddy, and others to see if your target market uses them.
- Learn what to share where – Because each social network is used differently, the information you share on each should be different. For instance, you could keep social messaging on Facebook and Google+ and social alerts on Twitter.
- Respond – The best way to increase engagement on social media is to throw out questions to your audience and respond to their comments and questions.
Step 6: Start a Blog
Because search engines reward sites that are regularly updated with fresh content, starting a blog makes a lot of sense if you want to increase traffic to your site and improve search rankings. A blog will also boost your thought leadership and position you as an expert in your field.
- Set up a blog schedule – In the previous blog post in this series, you learned how to set up an editorial calendar; time to add your blog to it. While blogging every day is ideal, it is not always realistic. Aim to publish one blog post a week on the same day at the same time so people will come to expect it.
- Choose your topics – In the first blog post in this series, you learned how to listen to your target market. Since you know what topics they care about most, sit down and write out a month or two of blog post ideas at once to make the writing process go faster.
- Make your content actionable – The most useful and shareable blog posts are the ones that teach your audience how to do something. Focus on making all of – or most of – your blog posts actionable.
- Write clearly – No matter how much you know, focus on writing in a straightforward style that is easy to read and understand. Keep your content as concise as possible, and don’t repeat yourself.
- Back up what you say – When possible, use examples, stories, and statistics to back up the point you are making.
Coming up next in Part 3, we’ll look at visual content, newsletters, ebooks, and SlideShare presentations. Since most of this post was on content marketing, what’s your biggest challenge when creating content?
Image by Flickr user kewl (Creative Commons)
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