Do you ever get overwhelmed by the idea of content-marketing?

A competitor releases an avalanche of content and you decide to catch them up.

3 hours and 5 cups of coffee later and you’re still trawling their archives wondering how on earth you can create that much content overnight. The notepad beside you is filled with ideas for blog posts and white papers, and you calculate it should only take you about 9,347 hours to write it all.

If you’re feeling this way you might enjoy…

Content Marketing… Stripped! Episode 2

This week’s Content Marketing… Stripped episode is a short look at keeping a regular, manageable and consistent content marketing effort.

You can watch it here:

Notes from today’s show

So, let’s go over some of the challenges you might face as a business exploring the world of content marketing, and give you some tips to help:

Boost your marketing confidence (stop racing Usain Bolt)

While it’s a good idea to look to others for inspiration and ideas, sometimes this only kills your motivation and momentum. If you are a freelancer, or small business owner and you’re looking at a much larger agency or corporation for content marketing ideas you’re probably going to be overwhelmed.

If you struggle to get out one blog post a week, but feel you need to be writing every day because that’s what the dominant company in your industry is doing, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of misery.

But a little inspiration and looking around is good. So here’s how to deal with the overwhelm if it arrives.

• Don’t run against an Olympian: Instead of looking at the best in your industry, look at someone just 2-3 steps ahead. It might be less intimidating to get ideas from someone who’s just a little further down the road. 
• Don’t be someone else’s second. Instead of copying what another business is doing, look at your unique strengths. You might struggle to write a daily blog post, but find it easy to do a daily podcast, or a daily illustration. Or you might prefer doing a weekly video. If everyone else in your industry is doing dry facts and reports, perhaps you can provide information in a way that is more entertaining.

Don’t think ‘once and done’

Publishing content is like keeping an online marketing savings account. Every piece adds to your investment and grows in value over time. But you have to keep adding to it. It used to be you could set up a website, load it with content and then wait for the sales to come in.

You’ve got to work harder these days, and the best way to do that is to keep adding fresh content.

You are learning more and more in your industry every single day, which means the new content you write will also increase in value. If you want to see quickly just how much you know compared to before, complete a quick content-audit and you’ll see how much you’ve learned since you started your business.

Don’t stop marketing (aka keep brushing your teeth after marriage)

A lot of service-based businesses are familiar with the pattern of going all out with their marketing when client work is quiet. Once the client work starts building up, it’s harder to find the time to market, and the need to create content doesn’t feel as urgent because money is coming in from clients.

Then the work stops, you realise you haven’t had a fresh enquiry for months and scrabble to write some new blog posts for your ideal customer.

Try to keep a consistent content creation effort going even when you feel the work won’t end. It might be holding a monthly webinar, or sticking to your weekly blog post, or sharing useful content via social media.

Things move quickly online, so it helps to keep your content fresh and updated for your audience.

And remember, if you’re looking for an easy button, it’s probably just the switch to the outside light…