A question that many aspiring entrepreneurs have is, “How can I make my business website work well?” That, of course, depends on what the person is trying to get out of the website and what his/her content strategy plan is. Unfortunately, a lot of business people are not aware of what a content strategy plan is.
Content Strategy Plan – what is it?
Many business people believe that just setting up a website or a blog and a Facebook page or Twitter account is good enough to achieve their business goals. Most importantly, you need a content strategy plan to succeed in business. A content strategy plan is a plan for the creation, publication and management of useful and usable content.
It is a plan on how to create goal focused content, how to publish the content, and how to manage the content after publication. In today’s technology-driven world, the amount of content delivered to users is increasing day by day. Here are some guidelines on creating a valuable content strategy plan for your small business.
- Start a blog and create quality content: The first step in any content strategy plan is to start a blog as it gives you the space to talk with your customers directly and build a more personal relationship with them. With a blog, you can create quality content that defines your business goals, themes, messages, topics and ideas. The purpose of your content, industry-related issues, your opinions, gaps in the industry and other essential elements can also be added to it. Your content should be awesome and truly helpful to your customers. Ensure that your content focuses on your customers’ wants and needs.
- Create insightful guides, videos and eBooks: To keep your customers on track, you have to produce a constant flow of new content, from blog posts and social media updates to guides, videos and e-books. This will improve your search engine rankings, drive traffic to your blog and help in nurturing your existing leads. Keep in mind that your content should be relevant and remarkable.
- Produce infographics that address industry pain points: The next step is to work out the best way to present your content for maximum reach. Infographics (information graphics) are the best choice. Infographics are visual representations of data that can convey complex information quickly and clearly. Generally, image-based content is highly effective and there is no limit to how creative or informative your content can be. You can easily address your target audience about your industry’s pain points.
- Have a plan for content distribution: How can you promote your content? How can you influence people to read it? This can be made possible only through social and email channels. You can use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc, to spread the word. You can even start an email based monthly newsletter with links to your top blog posts or any of your important business activities.
This is the best possible way to drive more traffic to your blog. Yet another way to attract more readers to your blog is by setting up an RSS feed. Allow people to subscribe to your RSS feed and whenever you add new content to your blog a notification will be sent to them, which will hopefully draw them to your site.
- Establish authority by giving away quality content via guest posts: Giving away quality content via guest posts is indeed a great way to expose yourself and your products to the audience. Through guest posts on well-known sites, you can gain tons of credibility and exposure. Suppose you have content that doesn’t fit your blog’s content strategy, you can guest post it on another site, with you as an authoritative source. This opens doors to new opportunities and new relationships.
- Network with industry peers via social media: You can try targeting your customers via different platforms; the best is to network with industry peers via social media. This will definitely have a great impact on awareness of your brand. You can also integrate social media with your blog and permit people to follow/like/tweet and share content directly from your site.
Hope these guidelines have helped you in demystifying certain concepts and given you some practical knowledge to get started. With the guidance of SEO Experts, building a quality content strategy plan for your small business will no longer be a challenge.
Image Credit: Smemom
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