People read content for two reason; to learn something, or to be entertained.

In his post: How to Create Content That Outranks Your Competitor’s Content Marketing Guru, Neil Patel says:

“Inbound marketing boils down to creating useful and engaging content, solving problems for the target audience, and then building relationships with those users along the way.”

Here are five must dos if you want to build and maintain an online audience for your content:

Create Compelling Content:

Make sure you understand and write to your target audience. Your content needs to hit home with them. Do your research and narrow your target market to a very specific audience. Content aimed to please the masses is like warm coffee.

Visual components are a necessity, both for your audience and for the search engines. We process images much faster that we can interpret text. Content with lots of visuals and short explanations are more likely to be read through and shared. If you need to use lots of text, keep the paragraphs short, and provide sufficient white space between them.

Plan Your Content in Advanced:

Take the time to plan out your content. Develop a theme, a series, etc. Working this out in advance greatly increases the chances of you actually delivering the content.

Having a plan takes a lot of the stress out of the content development. Your content will become more focused and cohesive. It also makes it easier to work ahead when time permits.

Be Consistent:

Develop a schedule for your content delivery and stick to it. Your audience will judge your credibility on how well you do at providing your content.  Sporadic posting seldom get much traction. How do you follow someone when you never know when they’re going to put new information out there.

Being consistent shows that your serious, dedicated, and makes you look professional. People see that they can count on you.

Create Content on More Than One Platform:

It’s kind of like in the old days (did I just say that) when you would take out adds in multiple publications. It’s no different today. Post your content on multiple online platforms.

This can mean posting different content, targeted at different audiences or simply posting the same content.

When using the same content across the various platform, make small changes to tailor your content to best suit the audience and the characteristics of the platform you’re posting on.

Re-purpose Your Content Across Multiple Platforms:

This is similar to the above point an may be referred to as layering. I use this technique with the content in these blogs. The information is first presented as a tool or technique in our weekly Surrey Rapid Time Network meeting. It then gets summarized in the Weekly News Letter with a link to this blog, which is the full article.

In this manner I only need to write the content once, usually the blog, then draw the information I need for the meeting and news letter.

If your in business, providing online content for your prospective clientele is an expected. Your competition is doing it for a reason. It helps to build the know, like, & trust that is required in order to get people to buy what we’re selling.

© 2016 Robert Shular