If you write enough blog posts, you become very comfortable with the experience. All I need is an outline about a topic I would enjoy writing about, and then I’m off to the races.
Producing content eventually becomes effortless. However, if you want to turn content creation into a business, then you need to be prepared to put on your marketing hat.
Creating the content is not the marketing. Create it, and no one may show up. Marketing can get very confusing very quickly. You think you are on the right path, and then all of a sudden, you get a curveball.
It’s possible to achieve effortless marketing, but you have to treat marketing in the same way you would treat writing content and producing videos.
You have to work on marketing your business every day. Some days will be easier than others, but if you pursue someone every day, you will eventually become a master at what you are pursuing.
Putting on the marketing hat correctly means putting the marketing hat on and keeping it on for as long as possible. I sometimes find myself producing content without thinking about the marketing.
I used think about marketing for a few days, grind at it, and then go back to spending my time only creating my content. Now I market my brand every day.
Consistency is vital in everything that you do—especially with marketing. I feel like content creators have consistency down with their content, but the marketing consistency isn’t there at all.
Now it’s time to get the marketing consistency down.
Identify HOW You Will Market Your Business
When you identify the ways you will market your business, it’s always a rough draft. You’ll never have the final copy because you’ll keep on making changes to the draft.
Identification will give you an idea of what needs to be done. The word “marketing” doesn’t indicate what workload you are going to embrace. Will you use social media marketing (which ones), email marketing, local marketing, or something else.
Once you know what you must do, you can implement. During this identification process, write down all of the tactics you will use to market your brand. More specifically, what will you do EVERY DAY in order to achieve the results you are looking for?
With all of this marketing, I’m sure that many content ideas will arise from your efforts.
Set Goals
Setting goals with a deadline gives you more urgency to put in the work. If your goal doesn’t have a deadline, it’s probably not going to get accomplished.
If you create a lot of content, then you are good at setting goals with a deadline. Chances are you have a blog or YouTube channel that must have at least one piece of new content every week/month. The consistency grabs your attention.
Forgetting to write and schedule a blog post for a given day would be devastating.
We need to think about marketing in the same way. To not market your brand on a given day must possess the same feeling of devastation as forgetting to write and schedule a blog post.
One important thing about setting goals is that you must make them attainable. If you set a goal that is impossible for you to reach, then you may get discouraged right from the beginning. In the beginning, set a goal for yourself that is very easy to reach, and then gradually rise your standards.
Do Research
I wish I could accomplish a goal just by writing it down. Writing the goal down significantly helps out with goal achievement, but you have to put in the work.
Putting in the work is an obvious need for goal achievement, but what type of work do you have to put in?
The answer to that question comes with research. If you want to grow your email list, you would go on Google and type in phrases like “How to grow an email list.” Then immerse yourself in as many email list growth related articles as possible.
Make this research a daily habit. That way, your knowledge will expand—and this knowledge will be SPECIFICALLY RELATED to the goal that you are trying to achieve. And this is knowledge that will actually be worthwhile—unlike other forms of knowledge.
Only the implemented, relevant knowledge is power.
Experiment
After you have the rough draft (plan) and have done the research, it’s time to take action. Some parts of your marketing will be flawless, other parts will be beyond your expectations, and there will be some duds.
That’s one of the universal truths about all of marketing. But the only way you determine which tactics are good is by experimentation.
The most important part of experimenting with your marketing is that you must have data. The data lets you know exactly how successful or unsuccessful one of your tactics is.
You should experiment with at least one marketing tactic per day. That way, you’ll learn more things about how to most effectively market your products and services.
With that said, you don’t want to take experimentation too far. Each change an individual product or service receives should be at least two weeks separated from another change. Here’s an example.
Let’s say you have a Kindle book that is getting two sales per day. You decide to change the description and the book’s cover at the same time. You analyze the results a month later and discover that your book is still averaging two sales per day.
What if changing the cover doubled your sales, but changing the description cut your sales in half? Or vice-versa?
The problem is that you can’t tell. You have no idea what those two changes did to your book sales. If you have two Kindle books, you can change the cover for one of those books and then change the description for the other book.
The key thing is to experiment every day, but at the same time, you don’t want to over experiment to the point where you can’t tell what changes with each new variable (i.e. changing the book cover, changing the description, etc).
Outsource Some Of The Marketing
When you have mastered a certain marketing tactic, it’s time for you to outsource the work. With the mastery, you can easily explain to a freelancer what type of marketing needs to get done.
There’s a smaller chance of error, and if the freelancer is a dud, you can still do the work until you find another freelancer.
Outsourcing some of your marketing is important because outsourcing opens up extra time. With the extra time, you can experiment with more marketing tactics and analyze the results.
As you continue to master more marketing tactics and outsource them, your brand will start growing exponentially. At a certain point, all of the marketing you do will put your content into the hands of thousands of people who would love to share your content.
Now you have a free army of people who will promote your content for you. The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Mashable among others have done a great job at putting their content in front of people who would love to share that content with their audiences.
In Conclusion
Content creators know how to consistently put out new content. Now, it’s time to consistently wear our marketing hats and put our content in front of people who would love to share it.
What are your thoughts about marketing? Have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.
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