How to Create a Successful Content Marketing

Creating a successful content marketing strategy is key for any membership site. If executed correctly, content marketing can build you a following, attract new members, and help you retain old ones. So just what exactly does a successful content-marketing strategy look like, and how can it be created?

In this article, we will discuss exactly what content marketing is and how it can help your site to realize its goals. We’ll then look at each aspect of an effective content marketing strategy and how it can be implemented.

What is Content Marketing?

First off, content marketing is the creation and distribution of relevant and valuable content designed to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Content comes in various forms—from emails, blog articles, and landing and product pages to social media posts, videos, webinars, podcasts, and more. In any case, the content you produce should be carefully thought out and planned to help your site convert against its goals.

Successful content marketing can help you accomplish any or all of these objectives:

• Drive Traffic to Your Site
• Improve SEO
• Generate Leads
• Engage with your Audience
• Promote Your Brand
• Increase Returning Visitors
• Acquire New Customers
• Retain Existing Customers
• Sell Products and Services

Content marketing isn’t just for the big guys. All online businesses, whatever the size, should have a concise content-marketing strategy that helps them manage their content creation and promotion, giving everything they do a purpose and consequently maximizing results.

Creating Useful Content Calendars

You’ve spend a good amount of time crafting lots of perfect content. Now it’s time to share it on each of your social media platforms. If you don’t have a strategy to organize and schedule your content, you may be feeling overwhelmed and stressed about getting it out to your audience. Creating content for your social media campaigns is one thing; trying to figure out just how and when to share it is another. This is where a content calendar comes into play—and we’re not talking about where you write “Share blog post today!” on that old-fashioned full-sized desk calendar. Nope. We’re talking about a calendar that helps you track all your content and schedule when to post it.

Let’s clarify that there is nothing wrong with a pen-and-paper calendar. You can definitely use one of those. Our goal is to help you create a calendar—whether it be something you can write on or something you can type in—that will help you become more organized in scheduling that awesome content you’ve created. Our tips here are geared toward building a calendar in spreadsheet format, but you can adjust the information for whichever type of medium fits your calendaring needs.

There are several content calendar templates available on the web. The trick is to find the one that’s perfect for your business. While we can’t say which one will work for you, we can highlight the things we feel are most important and useful to include on your calendar. You’ve worked hard on that content—let’s organize it and get it shared!

Determine Your Content

Because each business is in some way unique, your content and how you present it will be unique as well. Some of the ways to share content will work great for you; some will work better for others. There may be some you don’t ever use. The key—whatever methods and however many you use—is to organize them by content type. That way you get a big-picture view of what you’ll need to create and share each week, month, and year.

5 Reasons Every Blogger Should Start a Membership Site

Most blogs are purely a labor of love. Places where anyone can get on their soapbox and broadcast their message about fitness, technology, recipes, finance, fashion, music, and more — but they have to be a labor of love because they don’t bring in much money.

If you’re such a blogger, you know that as passionate as you are about your topic and audience, it can often seem difficult (or sometimes even impossible) to continue investing time when it isn’t generating revenue in return.

However, if your blog has gained some traction and you’ve built up a dedicated group of readers, a membership site can be an excellent way to start monetizing your blog.

Here are 5 great reasons to incorporate membership into your blog:

1. When done right, membership sites can bring more income than ads.
   Ads don’t pay much unless you’ve got a high volume of traffic (it’s a dirty little secret of monetization on the internet). In order to generate substantial revenue from advertising on your blog, you must use extremely relevant ads and have a ton of traffic consistently washing over your site. In contrast, membership (even at a minimal rate) can add up to a lot more immediate and long-term revenue, especially if you encourage and entice all of your readers to sign up.
2. It’s simpler than you think to produce premium content for your membership site.
   You might not realize it, but you’ve probably already got a great “product” to sell as part of membership. We’ve seen folks take existing content from their blog and refactor it into some premium content. Now, we’re not suggesting that you take down your free articles, as that could have dire consequences for your Google rankings, but we do recommend that you combine, expand on, and incorporate existing content to create new premium content.
3. A member’s only area will increase the value of your content.
   Not every blogger offers premium content, and the fact that you do sets you apart. The age-old saying, “That which we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly,” is very, very true. When people know that you charge for some of your content, it increases the value of ALL of your content and your reputation.
4. Membership helps you better engage and build your community.
   When you get people to raise their hand and decide to participate in your blog (rather than just lurking) you will see that you’ll engender more commitment and fans who are more likely to spread the word about your blog.
5. Setting up a Membership site is much easier than you think (and doesn’t require any coding experience at all).
   If you already have your blog on a self-hosted WordPress site (NOT wordpress.com), then all you need to do is get MemberPress, install it on your WordPress website, tweak a few settings to configure the details of your membership, and voila – your very own blog with a member’s only area!

Endless love for your blog, its subject matter, and your audience are all definitely great reasons to stay devoted to producing great content… but money’s pretty cool too. And it doesn’t hurt that it pays the bills too.