Agencies, Freelancers, Design, Copywriting & more.: [Copyblogger] How to Succeed at Content Marketing Even if Your Content Skills Suck

How to Succeed at Content Marketing Even if Your Content Skills Suck

How to Succeed at Content Marketing Even if Your Content Skills Suck

Sad Content

Turn on your TV at 6 pm. What do you get?

The news, right?

Then turn it on tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, and the week after.

You can turn in on at any day and guess what?

The news is still on at 6 pm.

Now imagine if you tuned in on a Monday, and they had a sitcom. What if you tuned in on Tuesday and oops, it’s an adult movie with clothes flying all over the place. And then maybe on Wednesday it's the news again.

Would you continue to watch that channel for news? Or would you simply go to a channel that was more reliable?

Many people don’t understand that the most important thing in content marketing is reliability. I don’t care if you put out ten or twenty or seventy-three pieces of content a month.

I just want to see it same bat-time, same bat-channel. So be reliable.

If you’re going to write an email newsletter, the first thing you need to know is that it needs to be published on a pre-fixed schedule from now until the year 2025. If you’re going to post videos on YouTube, plan for 2025 too.

It doesn’t matter if email newsletters or YouTube will change or even continue to exist in the years to come. What’s important is that you’ve created a channel, and you’re the content producer. And you jolly well better show up, or I'm leaving you for a more reliable channel.

It’s not just your credibility that takes a beating; it’s also your sales.
And not just your sales, but also your pipeline of new customers.
And not just your pipeline of new customers, but also return customers.

Your whole darned business really depends on your reliability of communication. Why? I’ll tell you why!

It’s because if you don’t show up, the customer’s memory of you gets increasingly blurry. And that’s only one part of the problem. The other part is that if you don’t show up, and the customer wants to buy your product or service, they’ll buy the product or service anyway… from someone else.

Remember the time you bought an iTunes album, just because you got the newsletter?
Remember the time you bought something online just because you saw a video?
Remember the time Oprah recommended a book, and you traipsed off to buy that very book?

Of course this brings us to a very important juncture: The problem with perfection.

What if you don’t really like the quality of your current content? I have news for you. You’re never going to be completely satisfied—ever!

But you'll look back at your work six months from now, and the work you're doing then will be much better, even though you still think it's not good enough. You’ll look back at today’s work two years from now, and you’ll wonder how you ever got anyone to pay attention at all.

If you really want to get better, you won't get better wondering about it. You'll get better only by producing content consistently. You have to put out newsletter after newsletter, video after video, to get better.

Put out what you have today. It doesn’t matter how crappy it looks to your eyes… just put it out. And then improve as you go.

People will put up with less than polished prose, or less than professional video or audio, but they won’t put up with fruity frequency. They’ll simply change the channel and go elsewhere.

If you don't want customers and prospects to leave, you need to have a plan.

So here’s your plan:

Get started today by putting a schedule in place.
Promise this schedule to your audience (even if you have a list of three people).
Get your content out on the day/days you promised.
Don't forget that reliability is everything, because quality comes from consistently doing.

About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a free report on 'Why Headlines Fail' when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter. Check out his blog, too.