Content marketing is all the rage right now and we’ve all heard about how blogs and businesses are investing more in this aspect of internet marketing than any other.
But what does that look like in practice? What does content marketing really involve?
Let’s imagine a fitness website. The site belongs to a ‘personal brand’ (a guy or gal who want to promote themselves as the head of their brand) and makes money from both advertising and selling an ebook. How does this page go about using content marketing to reach prominence and start selling to a ravenous audience?
The Posts
The first type of content this site could benefit from is blog posting. The more regular here the better and ideally you’d want to see posts every day or at least several times per week. This will provide regular value and it will incentivize visitors to keep coming back.
These posts should be well written of course and the personal brand will allow the owner to make use of a narrative structure. In other words: by structuring blog posts as stories rather than factual reports, you can make them much more interesting and engaging and create more of an emotional hook. If you describe how something worked for you then your audience can imagine how it might work for them.
You need to make sure all your posts have a USP. That means they should offer something that can’t easily be found elsewhere online. They also need to have a consistent ethos and tone. In other words, people need to know what they can expect when they read a blog post on your site so that they know that they tend to agree with your point of view. It’s this that will earn you the trust to sell to them.
Other Content
But content marketing is more than just blog posts.
Social media posts are also important here and again you can ride that ‘personal brand’ by making sure that you are seen to be living the lifestyle you are promoting. You should be the living proof that your methods work, so that means posting images to Instagram that show you training and looking healthy, or eating great meals.
Likewise, you should consider having a YouTube channel. YouTube is a surprisingly effective tool for engaging with your audience and for really getting them on-board with your message. If you can create videos with good production values and sheen, then this will instantly demonstrate your skill and professionalism. And if you can portray your personality in a way that is engaging and likeable then you can build a lot more trust to sell your products.
People who have seen you speak will feel like they know you and like they understand what you’re about and what you represent. You can use this to your advantage to sell your products but that’s the final tip – you only sell when you have something you genuinely believe in and feel passionate about.
