I was talking to a business coach the other day about content marketing training who was thinking about re-opening his practice and starting a new website. He’s been writing for years and has all kinds of content he can draw from, and so he asked me straight up. “Mike, what’s it gonna cost me if I don’t do this?”
The “this” he was referring to is the 10-week content marketing training that I offer called the Blogging Bootcamp. It costs a few hundred bucks so he was rightly concerned with his investment – both of money and time! He already knew how to write – though he admitted perhaps not well – and he already had a reasonable plan and idea for content marketing. Publish short blog posts that invite readers to subscribe to receive much longer articles via email over time.
Sounds pretty legit, right?
Whenever we’re talking about investing in something, whether it’s an app or a course or a service, savvy business owners will consider not just the upfront cost of implementation, they’ll also consider the longterm benefits and the potential cost to the business if those benefits aren’t realized.
In this case, the purpose of Content Marketing Training is to spend time thinking through the factors that make content marketing a successful endeavor for a business, including:
- Determining your target market and audience
- Determining the topics and questions of real interest
- Determining a plan for creating and utilizing content to drive business results
- Determining how to promote new content to drive more targeted traffic
- Determining how to optimize content for search engines for even more traffic long term
- Determining how to measure success
Which means successful content marketing requires a lot more consideration than just having a lot of content.
In a recent live training with my blogging students, I said, “A successful, profitable blog is not formed from creating more and more blog posts. It comes from creating the right series of content that helps readers on their journey, ultimately leading to an opportunity for you to make a paid recommendation.”
In other words, if you do not take the time to craft a real plan for your content, if you aren’t researching your topics in advance and writing about what your audience craves, the cost is wasted time. Wasted opportunities. Wasted effort.
Do you have time to waste?
If you don’t. If you want to make sure that every piece of content you publish has a purpose. That every article serves to build your brand’s trust and authority and leads to more traffic, leads and sales, then isn’t it in your best interests to invest in Content Marketing Training?
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