© 2024 Melanie White
Menu
Content marketing offers a great opportunity to grow your business. But how do you create and share content in a way that maximises your reach and helps you build a loyal audience? This episode uncovers three steps to leverage your content to ensure business revenue and growth.
It’s common for people to start posting ‘stuff’ on social media, or their website, and hoping to be discovered by clients. I did this myself when I started my business – and the silence was deafening! I felt so despondent because I’d gone to the effort of writing blogs that nobody was reading, and social media posts that nobody was engaging with.
What was I doing wrong?
A lot of people tried to sell me solutions, but I realised that a combination of things was needed to successfully gain an online reach. I’m going to map out the process so you can do this for yourself, stop getting crickets and start getting visibility and traction!
It’s tempting to think up a groovy blog or podcast headline that you like the sound of, with clever plays on words. But the reality is, nobody is searching for that.
People use their own simple language to search for solutions to their problems.
You want to use titles that ‘hook’ the audience in (titles are often called hooks) and get them intrigued and interested, thinking, well how do I do that?
For example, compare two possible titles for this podcast.
See the difference? One is way more interesting and intriguing, making you wonder – 10x – really? – how do I do that?
After all, the 10x is the outcome that you really want, right?
Based on what matters to the audience, what they want to know about, what skills they want to develop, or where they are stuck with something. This is how I created this podcast! I choose topics of interest and answer questions about those.
If you create content that doesn’t help to solve a problem, doesn’t answer the audience’s questions and is simply your random musings… well, they’re going to tune out.
Conversely, listen to your audience and help them with their challenges, in a clear and simple way, and you’ll have people coming back for more.
The litmus test is audience feedback.
When someone says to me ‘I’ve been binge-listening to your podcast’ – well, mission accomplished. I’m helping people and they value the help.
That’s exactly what I want. And that’s exactly what you can do too.
The secret, once again, is to listen to understand (as Stephen Covey says) – listen to your audience.
Always create content with the goal of getting some sort of response – and ask directly for that response.
For example, if you write a blog, finish it either with a question (e.g. what is your opinion on this?)
Or even better, provide a valuable downloadable thing that can help the reader take action at the end of the blog or podcast or video.
Ask them to subscribe to your podcast, or follow you on Instagram.
Direct response is inviting them to start a relationship with you, by taking action toward that.
Creating content is one thing, but getting eyeballs on it is another. After you create and post content on any platform, there is a follow-up task of sharing that content.
Here are ten ideas on how to do that – which effectively 10x the reach of that one content piece.
Further, over time, you can repurpose your content into other formats and share them on social media so that your message is shared in lots of different ways, to accommodate different learning styles. For example, a blog can be read aloud as a podcast, or sections of it can be turned into a video, or infographic showing a process, or similar. That way, the message is reinforced and can also lead back to the original content source for more information.
These are just ten ideas for maximising the reach of your content.
Today we talked about how to create and share content in a way that maximises your reach and helps you build a loyal audience.
The three steps we talked about to build and leverage your content to ensure business revenue and growth are to:
From there, we discussed 10 ways to get the content out into the world to get 10x the reach of each piece of content.
What other ideas do you have for sharing content?
What has worked well for you?
Understanding who you are and what you need will allow your business to thrive! If you’re truly ready to break old habits and get out of the rut I encourage you to check out the Habitology membership.
Learn more here:
© 2024 Melanie White