There’s no doubt that content still reigns supreme when it comes to results producing, cost-effective, and all around darn good marketing strategies.
But as great as content marketing it, it can also take a lot of time to create.
A LOT!
So just how much content do you really need to produce?
What Is Content Marketing
Before we dive in, we should probably go over what exactly I mean by this ambiguous term, “content”
My definition of content is:
Helpful (educational or entertaining) material produced by a business in order to provide value, connect with, or sell to a target market.
Basically, content is simply stuff you put out to the marketplace.
Content could be:
- Blog Articles
- Videos
- Graphics
- Quote Cards
- Images
- White Papers
- Reports
- Online Training
- or… Anything else!
(For more information on content marketing you can also visit this post on “What Is Content Marketing“)
Why Content Marketing?
Content marketing continues to be one of the most effective marketing strategies to build authority and expertise in the marketplace.
It also allows you to provide value and share your knowledge with your audience like nothing else.
And it forces you to clarify your USP (unique selling proposition) so you can get crystal clear on what you do, and who you help.
Finally, content marketing allows you to build up a valuable online asset of articles, videos, and images that you can repurpose and share for days, weeks, months, and even years to come.
Content Strategy
So just how much content is enough?
While the amount of content you’ll need to produce varies depending on which industry and market you’re in, and it’s level of competitiveness, I can give you a few pretty good rules of thumb that are working well today.
Back around 2005/2006 creating daily 400 word blog posts was what it took to quickly build an audience, and launch your website to the top of the search engines.
But times have changed.
And the focus now is on quality over quantity.
And this is good thing.
Here’s why…
Quality vs Quantity
If you really know your subject (and I’m assuming you’ve got it nailed!) then creating fewer, but better, pieces of content is actually a whole lot easier and more manageable then trying to stick to a daily blogging schedule.
When it comes to content creation aiming to produce one solid piece of content each week seems to be a pretty good benchmark to set.
The key is in creating the best piece of content you can that week.
But here’s the good news.
Once you have that one killer piece of content, you can then get to work carving it up to squeeze every last drop of marketing goodness from it.
This means taking a 1000+ word blog post and turning it into:
- Videos
- Facebook posts
- Tweetable Tips
- Quote Cards
- Infographics
- Pinnable Images
And the list goes on, and on, and on.
Once you’ve finished carving up the post into smaller pieces, you can go back and embed these new assets back into the post for an even better and more interactive piece of content.
A good example of doing this is this post: How To Grow Your Business Using Digital Marketing which has:
- 2 Videos
- 6 Images
- 1 Slideshare
- 1 Content Upgrade Download
- And 14 links to other relevant and helpful content
You can check out that post now by clicking here.
What Type Of Content Should You Produce?
In order to decide what style and type of content you should be focusing on you need to ask 2 simple questions:
- What kind of content does my target market like to consume?
- What kind of content do I enjoy producing?
These are both important because if you end up producing content that your target market doesn’t care about, or isn’t interested in, you’ve wasted your time.
And if you try to choose a style of content that you hate creating, then you’re not going to be able to be consistent in your creation schedule.
And content marketing is all about consistency.
[Tweet “Content marketing is all about consistency.”]
How Much Time Should I Spend Creating vs Promoting My Content?
The best advice I’ve heard on this subject comes to us courtesy of Derek Halpern who advises spending 20% of your time creating content, and 80% promoting it.
This is great advice.
The reason is that unless you have a thriving and rabid audience of 100,000+ just waiting for you to put out new content…
You’re going to have to work a bit to get it in front of the right people.
Tweets on Twitter have around a 20 minute shelf life.
Facebook is constantly slashing it’s organic reach.
And 300 hours of new YouTube videos are uploaded every, single, minute.
That’s a lot of content!
This is why focusing on creating one quality piece of content a week is a really good place to start.
The rest of the week can then be devoted to amplifying and promoting that piece of content to make sure it ends up right where it belongs.
Directly in front of your target audience.
Any Other Ideas?
So now I turn it over to you…
- Are you using content marketing in your business?
- If so, what have you found to be the most effective? If not, why?
Leave your thoughts in the comments section below now.
