Among the most important trends is marketing is providing valuable content to your prospective clients and customers.
The theory behind this model is that in order to increase sales, you first need to build the type of trusted relationships that allow people to feel comfortable buying your products or services.
So that creates several challenges, especially if you don’t consider yourself to be a good writer:
- Finding enough topics about which to write.
- Providing good content that resonates with your ideal clients and customers.
- Finding other resources when your own creative juices start to run dry.
Ann Handley, cited in Forbes as the most influential woman in Social Media and recognized by ForbesWoman as one of the top 20 women bloggers, wrote in an issue of Entrepreneur about Content Marketing Strategies You Can Steal.
Among the six strategies she mentions, one of the most interesting facts she includes in her article is that great content marketers allocate, on average, 37% of their marketing budgets to content programs.
That focus on creating great content differs from the usual focus on allocating practically all of the marketing budget to various types of advertising and outreach.
In other words, the what you provide becomes at least as important as the where you find to provide it.
Another great resource for ideas to share is to do searches on Google and YouTube. It’s amazing how many good ideas are lurking in titles of various articles and videos.
The reason for the search is to find 2 possible sources of good content:
- Ideas for articles that you can write yourself, from your own perspective and wisdom.
- Articles of other people that you can share, as I am sharing Ann Handley’s article with you.
It’s vitally important, of course, not to copy another person’s work. That is plagiarism, which is definitely unethical, and probably illegal as well.
To see the rest of Ann’s suggestions of where to find good ideas, read here…