Planning Your Content

Continuing on with our Content Marketing Plan, this time we are discussing how to PLAN your content. One thing that’s very important, if you plan to leverage the power of audio, video, and text, is to have a comprehensive content marketing plan.

Here’s a little checklist that might help you do that.

Setting Your Goals

Step 1: 

All your content creation should have a purpose and that purpose should not only benefit your readers but benefit your business as well.

Some purposes might be:

• • Search engine traffic
  • Word of mouth and viral effect
  • Pre-selling and warming up the audience to a product
  • Establishing credibility and authority
  • Reader satisfaction
  • Boosting your opt-in list subscribers
  • Boosting customer relationships
  • Selling your products

Just remember, the goal or purpose of each content piece is aligned with your overall marketing strategy. This may also help you decide whether content should be in audio, video, or text format. For example, if your goal is to boost customer relationships, you might choose a video of yourself to do that.

When you do your content marketing plan, make sure your content includes a call to action that supports your goal. For example, “For more information about how to manage debt, grab our free report 12 Steps to Eliminate Debt in 12 Months.” – tell them what you want them to do next.

Research

Step 2: 

Carving out time for research is very important. From brainstorming topic ideas to finding supporting information for those topics, there is plenty to be done. You also want to research potential places to distribute your content as well.

Here are some things that will make your research easier:

• Keep a list of content ideas throughout the month.

• Use the following to generate content ideas/topics:
• • Social networking
  • Keyword research tools
  • Blog comments
  • FAQs
  • Client interaction
  • Brainstorming

Review the analytics and results of last month’s content and evaluate which pieces generated the most interest or results. Know which pieces your audience responded to and use that information to create content topic ideas for this month.

While you’re researching topics, take note of interesting articles, statistics, and other items you might reference later as you’re creating your content.

Keep your eye out for places where you might publish your content. Connect with other website owners who might publish for you. Connect with them by subscribing to their sites, on Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Creation and Distribution

Step 3: 

Here are some things to plan and keep in mind, so your content gets out there to your audience.

• How much content will you need? Will you write it all yourself, hire a writer, or use PLR? If you’re using a writer, ensure they have all the information they need well ahead of time, so they can meet your deadline.

• Have you created your content publishing schedule? Plan ahead, so that you can match content topics with products you’ll be promoting. Decide where each piece will be published and which pieces will be published in multiple places.

For example:

• • Autoresponder
  • Blog
  • Guest blog
  • Website
  • Social networking page
  • Article marketing site
  • Video sharing website (ex. YouTube)
  • Audio sharing website (ex. iTunes)
  • Other

Repurposing

Part 4: 

The best way to make the most of your monthly content is to find ways to reuse it and repurpose it. However, when creating your repurposing strategy make sure that you’re still focusing on your goals. Each repurposed or reused piece of content still needs to serve a purpose and support a goal.

• You’ve created a plan to reuse or repurpose some or all of your content. For example, an article published on your blog can be rewritten and published on an article marketing site. Or an article that resonated with your readers, could be made more visual and viral by turning it into a video.
• Each piece of content that is repurposed or reused content has a goal/purpose. You should always keep benefiting your business (and your audience, of course) in mind.

It may seem overwhelming to have to plan all this content in a variety of mediums, but over time you’ll learn what your audience responds to and where you should focus your efforts.

And remember, quality is more important than volume, so focus on delivering quality.

This ends this series on Content Planning. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful.