Everybody says “you need to do content marketing,” ” Content is King ” that you’ve got to “get that content out there.” But they often don’t stop to define what content marketing is.
So what I want to do is share three keys to understanding content marketing that will help you move ahead in your own business using this powerful tool.
Content marketing really comes down to three things.
- Number one is providing helpful content, and we will talk in just a moment about what that really means.
- Number two is serving a specific niche.
- Number three is building trust with the people in that niche.
Remember this about niche marketing, all “niches” are made up of real people. These are just people who have a common interest online.
So let’s look at these one at a time.
Providing helpful content.
What is content anyway? Well, “content” refers to anything that helps a person understand how to take a next action on any topic, or anything that helps a person learn.
- An article can be content.
- A video on YouTube can be content.
- A telephone call can be content.
- A webinar can be content.
Anything that informs a person, educates a person, encourages a person or motivates them is content. The more useful information it provides, the more “helpful” it is.
Makes sense, right?
So when it comes to “content marketing”, it’s important to understand that this is not just “article marketing.” It’s not just writing articles on a blog. It can be much, much more.
Here are a few more ways we can share content.
You can choose a whole variety of ways to provide content on your website. In fact, when it comes to content marketing, there are almost endless possibilities!
Now, one thing to remember is that your content needs to be focused. It needs to serve a specific niche.
And what is a niche?
A niche is just a group of people who have a common interest.
- People who are recovering from a particular disease are a niche in the respect that they have a common interest.
- People who are interested in meeting other people are a niche in the respect that they have a common interest.
- People who want to make money online are a niche.
- People who want to learn how to use Facebook are a niche.
It’s important to serve a specific niche because there is so much content, so much information out there. The internet is a vast ocean of information over every topic imaginable.
Narrowing your focus to a specific niche will help you succeed and will help people in your nichefind you.
You need to make sure before you begin with content marketing that you’ve chosen your niche very carefully.
For example, if your goal is to make money and yet you choose a niche of people who don’t have any money or who won’t buy anything online, then it’s going to be very difficult for you to succeed at your goal.
On the other hand, if your goal is to share information about a particular topic and all you want to do is put the information out there, then it will be easier to succeed with the same niche that doesn’t want to spend money.
So you have to consider, before you begin with content marketing, what your end result will be. Like Stephen Covey said in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you need to begin with the end in mind.
The third key is to build trust with the niche you’ve chosen.
Building trust takes time, but it doesn’t take an impossible amount of time. The trust you build willrelate directly to the quality of the content you provide.
You want the content you provide to be genuinely helpful to the people within your niche, and to speak to their needs and interests specifically. You want that content to educate them, assist them, or make their lives better in some way.
For example, if you’re providing helpful content in the form of articles or videos or links to other sites, and you’re sharing that content with a specific niche of people on a website or blog or some other methodology, and that content is beneficial to the people in that niche, then you will build trust with them.
And when you build trust with the people in your niche, everybody wins, including you.
If your goal is to make money online, this benefits you because they will begin to want to have your recommendation when they consider purchasing a product. This opens doors for you to make money with affiliate marketing, or with marketing your own products as well.
So to summarize, content marketing is the process of providing helpful information or “content” to a specific niche for a specific reason and then, over time, building trust with that niche.
I hope this overview of content marketing will help you understand what it is and will help you see how it can work for you.
I encourage you to consider using content marketing to grow your business, because it’s a powerful tool. Especially when it comes to curation (which we will discuss in more detail in a coming article), content marketing is one of the easiest ways to reach a large audience, make money online or achieve many, many other goals.
Thanks to Charlie Page for writing this great article. I love this guys content.