A lot of my audience are DIY marketers and recently I’ve seen a lot of questions come in about content, so here are content marketing mistakes you shouldn’t be making.

Content Marketing Mistakes

No Goal

If you haven’t defined what your goal is, how will you plan your content to reach it? Your goals should change too, BTW. Often I’ll look to reduce a bounce rate, increase new organic users, or increase click-through rates. If you structure your content strategy around what goal you have, you’ll have a better chance of success. Remember, some of your content can be low, or even free, on SEO and not all pages need ideal readability scores.

Single Phase Content

Customers have phases of the buying process. If your content is primarily only meeting 1 or 2 of those phases, you may be missing critical parts of the buyer’s journey. These 4 primary stages are: Educate, Entertain, Inspire, Convince. Now that I’ve written this small paragraph, I’ve decided these phases of content will be an article for the very near future. If your content is primarily education and entertainment, that’s great. You’ll have plenty of raving fans. But will it be enough to close business or get referrals? In most cases, it is not.

You Aren’t Being Patient

Aggressive SEO efforts can provide quick results in only a few months. But content marketing or smaller SEO efforts take longer. Much like social media marketing (without paid ads) 6-12 months is usually the time to start seeing some results. It took my first website about 2 years to gain the results I wanted. Content is not the strategy for those who want instant gratification. You want Pay Per Click. For tips on boosting your PPC efforts, check this out.

Your SEO Isn’t Optimized

Some people write great content but do not include any SEO. This means people will only find your content if they’re following your RSS feed, or you’re sharing it on your social channels. You need SEO and your site to index to Google if you want to truly take advantage of what search engines offer, in terms of gaining exposure.

You Aren’t Promoting Your Content

Talk about your content online using your social channels. Copy your blogs on Medium. Cross blog, co-author. Have an email campaign. Give your viewers an opt-in for additional content.

You Aren’t Asking

As your online presence grows in other places, more people will be generated to your site via links, shares, etc. So ask in your content for other connections, introductions, social media follows. You want your audience to be educated and entertained across multiple channels if possible. This makes your content more powerful and influential. You also want to promote people to contact you for help, sign up for something, get their free consult, etc.

No Consistency

Content and SEO works but it isn’t so simple. Quality and quantity both play a critical role. If you can only afford to do your content once a quarter, you’ll grow much much slower than someone doing a post once a month (assuming their posts are of the same quality). I post weekly or more and trust me, it’s tough. Consistency is important. Your raving fans should know when they’re going to get content from you so they don’t miss your new posts.

Your Content is Too Confusing

The average person reads at a 14-year-old’s level. MBA’s (according to Forbes) prefer content online to be easy to read. Don’t give too much away too quickly. Write things in a simplified manner that’s easy to read.

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What are your thoughts? Any content marketing mistakes I missed? Anything you’d like to add to? For stuff like this and more, let’s connect on Facebook. If you need more help with your content, or you have more questions, Summon the Jedi Knights!