Creating Content That Sells for You
Content creation is a growing problem for busy marketers. Fortunately, however, you don’t have to struggle with a lack of content. That’s what this article is all about.
When you sit down to develop your content marketing plan, it’s important to realize that you need to create content that sells for you. The great thing about this is that you can repurpose content, use a combination of PLR and original work, and you can hire writers.
You can create content that sells for you without working yourself to death if you have a plan. Because the truth is, many online businesses are generating a lot of content, but their sales don’t stand up to the amount of work they’re doing. To ensure that you create the right content that will sell your products and services for you, you’ll need to understand the product, the audience, and the platforms you’re using.
List the Products or Services You Want to Promote
This is going to help you know what types of content you need to create. Know what problems each product or service solves so that you can develop five to ten effective calls to action to use throughout your content development.
Understand Your Audience & Their Buying Journey
Know everything you can about your audience, including their buying journey. There are four basic stages to the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, decision, and loyalty. Know where your audience is in this process based on where you’re sharing the messages. That way, you can send them the right content at the right time.
List the Platforms You Use for Promotion
What platforms does your audience hang out on? If they’re on Twitter, you should be there. If they’re on Pinterest, there too. Wherever they are, make a presence as this is where you’ll want to share the content you create.
List the Marketing Collateral You Need
The other writing you’ll need to do is anything for direct marketing collateral like websites, sales pages, white papers, and so forth. If you need to create the overarching story of your brand, you’ll need to do that. If you need more educational blog posts about your niche, that’s what you need. You’ll match the type of content to the platform and the platform to your audience’s journey.
Make it a Habit
When you develop the right content for the right place, you’ll see your profit margins explode beyond what you thought was possible. If you have an honest and good product that really solves a problem, there is no reason you cannot succeed. One way to succeed is to determine what you need each time you want to promote a product so that you already know what to create in advance.
Remember that you can repurpose the content you create so that you don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. There is nothing wrong with using a paragraph from your brochure in a blog post to promote something related. Reusing the content in many ways is what’s going to really push your business to grow because you have a plan and you are implementing the plan.
RELATED: Going the Extra Mile with Creating Content with Story Telling
Are You Doing Enough Marketing? 80% of Your Time Should Be Spent on Smart Marketing Tasks
If you’ve noticed the idea of repurposing, then you know that eventually, you’re not going to be spending all your time creating. Even now, it should be argued that spending all your time creating is not going to pay off as much as spending your time selling. You can have the very best course or widget on the market in your niche but make pennies compared to someone with a mediocre product or service who is out there marketing.
You Have a Product
If you’ve finished your website, have a lead magnet, and you’ve finished setting up your email list, and you have a few products to sell, it’s time to transition into spending more time marketing and less time creating and making sales. Remember, once you are making money, you can get more help with the work you need to do.
Always Be Marketing
Most experts say that you need to spend about 80 percent of your time on marketing. I like to say that you should simply, always be marketing. One could argue that the moment you have anything to show anyone, you should start marketing.
Build a Real Business
It’s up to you how you do that but know this: spending more time marketing means more sales. More sales mean more money. More money means you can hire people and when you hire people, you immediately boost your business from being one accident away from being over to being something you can sell to others or pass on to your kids. You’re building a legacy.
Get SMART
To spend time on SMART marketing tasks, understand what they are. It stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. This really means that you want to spend time using the right type of marketing that you can measure, test, and tweak over time to perfect it and get more out of it. Putting it all down in writing helps too.
Write Down Your Marketing Objectives
Using the SMART acronym, write down your marketing objectives, and then match each objective with one or more ways to achieve it. For example, if you set the objective to get 10 new customers in two weeks for your pain reducing body pillow, you want to describe how you’re going to do it so that you can pluck the tasks or (to-dos) out and put them in your calendar.
Whether you determine that you need marketing content, or you realize you need to run a Facebook Advertisement, the important thing is that you do something each day to market your business or products directly. Making more offers makes more money. When you organize everything so that you can know what tasks to do each day and where you can automate something, you’ll soon start seeing the results you want as long as you’re making more offers to get more sales.
If your marketing is not working for you there might be a reason. Or as Neil Patel writes maybe there are 10 Reasons your Content Marketing isn’t working.
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Start Your Day with Marketing Tasks
If you really want to succeed at something, the best way to avoid problems is to make it a priority and do it first. Think about how you exercise if you are on a weight loss plan. You get up in the morning, and you get it out of the way, so you are successful right at the start of your day. That success carries with you throughout the day, making every choice going forward that much easier to make due to that success you experienced by getting your work out in early. You can do the same with marketing.
It’s so easy to get caught up in busy work, customer service, content creation, bookkeeping, and all sorts of tasks that take you away from the one money-making task you have which is promotion and making offers. The thing is, even if this makes it take longer to create the next product, that’s okay because the most important aspect of having a product is marketing that product if you want to have a successful business.
Because it’s so easy to get off track and caught up in other things that don’t bring in money right off, start your day with at least one money-making marketing task. Let’s look at a few things you can do first thing that will make a difference in your bottom line.
- Write & Send Email with CTA – Have you collected any case studies or stories of people using your products or services? If so, post a case study in an email with a CTA for them to get the same solution.
- Create a Meme with Stats from Your eBook & Share on Social Media with Link to the Book – If you’re selling an eBook, even if you did not write it, you can create a meme using facts as a quote that makes people think. Include a note about the problems this book solves, and you’re golden.
- Write & Publish a Blog Post with CTA – Blog posts should always include a CTA, and because of that, you can consider publishing a blog post to be a money-making marketing task as long as the post is promotional. A good post type for this is a product review.
- Write & Send One Promotional Email – Your emails can be a one-off email that promotes a sale or something. Look through your affiliate offers to find something you can promote of theirs.
- Record One Video & Post to YouTube & Facebook – You can earn in a few ways with YouTube.com. Turning your highest rating blog posts into YouTube and FB videos. If these have a CTA to buy something, it will really pay off.
- Go Live on Facebook & Post CTA in Comments – One fun thing you can do is anytime you have something to promote is that you can go live on your business pages and in your groups. Excited about a product or service of yours or someone else’s? This will show that excitement.
- Turn Your Meme into a Boosted Post — Once you have let the meme go for a bit, if it’s getting good results already, go ahead and boost it for a few bucks.
- Turn your Video into an Advertisement on Facebook & Google – Take an entire video or cut of another video to make it into an advertisement on both Facebook and Google ads. If appropriate, you can also promote on YouTube.
- Use Creator Content for Your Affiliate Promotions so You can Cut & Paste an Email and Social Update – Many awesome creators who have affiliate programs give free content to you that you can simply cut and paste into your systems. This is the fastest and easiest way to do a money-making marketing task each day.
Keep in mind if you have already created the content, doing these marketing tasks in the morning will be fast and simple. You can also hire someone to help. A content marketing manager may handle collecting content from your writers (or theirs), editing, and posting it in the right spots with an amazing CTA so that you don’t have to do it.
The more you can get help, the easier marketing will become because you can automate most things once you start outsourcing. Because you are putting your marketing tasks first, you’re going to be able to outsource a lot sooner than most.
RELATED: How to Skyrocket Your Success With a Motivating Morning Routine
Make an Offer in a Daily Email
The more offers you make, the more money you’re going to make. It’s a simple fact of life. It doesn’t matter if you have a big list or a small list, test it out for yourself.
The first thing you need to do is to look at the things you are promoting to choose a couple items to promote to your email list subscribers. Try to set up for sending more emails to your audience that promote a product so that you can earn money. A good rule of thumb is that you want to send out a sales email for every informative email that you send.
However, you can turn all your informative emails into sales emails too. The best thing to do is to send out a promotional email every single day that asks for a sale, goes to a sales page, provides a solution to a problem, adds value to your audience but also adds value to your bank account. Shoot for daily but realize that it’s okay if you don’t do it daily but shoot for it.
The emails that you send can be promotional for your own products and services, or they can promote someone else’s if you’re an affiliate. Using affiliate offers can make it even easier because often you can simply grab content from the creator to cut and paste, tweak, and then send out to your audience fast for super-fast profits.
Your promotional emails can be hard sell, soft sell, in-content offers, or even simply promote your newest blog post with a blurb and a link to your email subscribers, but the important thing is that a money-making offer is presented each day (or as often as possible) so that you can boost your bottom line.
Let’s look at some of the different ideas for sending offers to your email list:
- Soft Sale – When you use the “soft sell” approach in your email messages, you’re simply using careful language to avoid appearing too aggressive to the potential buyer. One way to do this in the email might be to send your subscribers a note about your Saturday afternoon shopping trip and somehow, along with a picture, tie the activity to something you want to tell them about that will help them solve a related problem.
- Hard Sale – This is an email that simply asks for the sale. You might send them to a sales page, but your blurb doesn’t beat around the bush. Your email is basically a sales letter with a strong CTA leading either to the sales page or right to check out with your button.
- In-Content Offers – Any email you send to your audience updating them on what you’re doing, what the industry is doing, what other people are doing, and so forth are good opportunities to include offers that match the content. For example, if you mention software that you really liked using to edit your pictures to your photography email list, linking to the software is a good way to make sales.
- Blog Post Marketing – One thing a lot of creators forget to do is tell their list about their newest content or blog post. You can set up your autoresponder system to automatically tell your audience about the newest blog posts which are going to have a strong CTA as well.
When you are choosing what to send to your audience, the best advice that you can get is to mix it up. Send all types of content and not just one type. At least pick three or four types of content to send and start from there. When you mix it up and send emails often, you train your subscribers to respond to you due to the amazing information and offers you provide to them.
Here are some examples of daily email people love to get in their inbox.
Soft Sell Techniques for Social Media
Selling on social media takes a certain finesse. No one who is on social media is there to buy. They are there to read stupid things, socialize with friends, communicate with family, and look at pictures of babies and animals. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t sell there. You just have to go about it softly.
It’s a Conversation
Remember that social media is all about conversing with others. You don’t want to preach to people or lecture them on social media. Remember, a conversation is two ways with the salesperson, letting the buyer lead the way.
Get Emotional & Build Relationships
Soft selling appeals to emotions more than hard selling does. It’s all about building relationships, sharing your own emotions, and writing something (or making a video or audio) that gets the audience thinking and being more emotional.
Be More Personal
On social media, being an anonymous person isn’t going to work anymore. You must be who you are, even if you have an overall brand that you want to promote. You and other members of your team need to be free to be more personal if the behavior is “on brand.”
Offer Value & Focus on Benefits
When you offer value to your audience, that doesn’t mean you’re begging them to buy from you. Instead, it means that you put that aside and focus on giving them the information that appeals to them where they are. If, for example, your audience is busy moms and your business is helping people get organized, you might share pictures of well-organized homes. Showing the benefits of the organization will be clear to the audience.
Listen & Engage
Social media is also a place that you must listen so that you can engage appropriately. People on social media will not respond to your one drive-by post in a group or on a page, no matter how well written or long it is. Instead, they want to get to know you, and you to get to know them. On social media, this is important for all types of products – not just expensive ones.
Encourage User-Generated Content
When you build groups or pages on social media, getting more content added via comments to your posts will build trust so that when you do post a link to something awesome, they’ll pay attention without you having to shove it down their throat. Having your customers share their testimonials and case studies about the service or product you offer is a winning way to use the soft selling approach.
Respond to Questions
Once you start posting engaging information on your social platforms, expect to get messages with questions. Once you start getting questions, that’s when you can share the link to your sales page, which of course is more direct.
Post Research Information
Another soft sell approach is to share research with the audience that leads them to realize they need the thing you’re selling. For example, the insurance industry is famous for this approach by posting stats about dangers.
When you use soft selling techniques, no matter if it’s on social media or elsewhere, it’s important to understand that you need to understand your audience and what they care about to properly engage in soft selling. Over time, many salespeople claim that soft selling generates just as much revenue as hard selling.
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