The purpose of creating content is to make money, right?
No, it’s actually not.
I know that sounds like a contradiction when this post is focused on teaching you how to make money with your content.
But making money shouldn’t guide your content creating process because it weakens the quality of your content.
The purpose of creating content is to educate your target audience about the value your business provides to them.
When you concentrate on communicating your product or service’s value, you provide your audience with a real reason to purchase from you.
When you only focus on making money, you create content that is nothing but a big sales pitch.
Doing this kills your ability to make the sale because you’re not focusing on your audience’s pain points — which is what you do to effectively grab their attention.
Therefore, stop making your content about you and focus on solving your audience’s problems and you’ll have no problem nurturing the relationship to the point where they become your customer.
Of course, more details go into the conversion process and I’m going to show you they work together to produce more money for your business through your content.
Just having valuable content alone isn’t enough.
When you operate online, you’re competing against hundreds, thousands of competitors who want the attention of the same audience you’re trying to engage with.
That means an overflow of content coming from many different individuals and businesses and your audience cannot possibly consume all of this content.
Therefore, your content must standout by creating a content engagement system that allows you to communicate effectively with your target audience.
Let me show you how this is done.
Identify a Problem & Create a Solution
Your content is useless if it’s not focused on solving a problem your target audience is experiencing.
Both businesses and consumers have problems they are searching for providers to solve for them.
The providers who win their patronage are those who can effectively communicate the value provided by their product or service.
In order for this to occur for you, you need to thoroughly understand your target customer and the problems that they are having related to the product or service you provide.
The questions you need to ask:
- What problems is my target customer having?
- What is the cause of their problems?
- How are they currently solving their problems?
- If using one of my competitors, are they satisfied with their work?
- How can I produce better results?
These five questions will allow you to have a complete understanding of why your target customers experience their problems, how they’re currently being handled, and what you can do to provide a high-quality product or service.
You’d be surprised how many businesses skip over this vital discovery process, which is why they have a hard time attracting their target customer.
You can’t create engaging content without knowing how to initiate the engagement process.
Your target audience will only respond to content that immediately peaks their interest, which means you need to create a headline that grabs their attention.
Remember that you’re focusing on addressing a problem that they’re having.
Therefore, you want to communicate through your headline that your content will provide a solution.
Examples:
How to Market Your New Business in a Very Competitive Industry
7 Ways to Turn Your Struggling Business Into a Thriving Company
5 Sales Strategies that will Help Your Business Make 6 Figures
These type of headlines address a problem your target audience is currently having and indicates that your content will have solutions they can immediately implement to produce better results for themselves.
The goal is to reel them in by touching on their pain points and then get them hooked with value packed content.
This is how you start to build a following for your content.
Build an Audience
It’s very disheartening to spend hours of your time creating content just for it to be ignored.
It makes you want to give up, which is the wrong decision to make if you want to build a profitable business in today’s world that primarily operates online.
This is why you need to focus on building an audience with each piece of content that you create.
Your audience doesn’t know your content exist unless you constantly put it in their face and make them notice it.
This is where the real work begins.
There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be marketing your content with the existence of social media.
As soon as you publish a blog post or upload a video on YouTube, market the hell out of that content.
Paid advertising on Facebook allows you to specifically target your preferred audience so that your content appears on their news feed.
Both Instagram and Twitter allow you to use hashtags to target users who are interested in the content you create.
With just a $50 paid ad budget and a well thought out social media strategy, you can begin to engage directly with your target audience so that they can become familiar with who you are and the value that your business provides.
Sadly, too many individuals and businesses don’t put in the effort to build an audience.
They want it to come easy and when that doesn’t happen they quit putting forth an active effort.
This leads to you being sporadic with your content creation, which makes it hard for people to recognize who you are and what you do.
You must be persistent, consistent, and creative to attract the attention of your target audience.
It doesn’t matter if you only have 10 people engaging with your content. If you keep pumping out content of high-quality and market it, you’ll eventually build a large audience that supports your business.
Again, remember that your content needs to provide value to your audience.
98% of your content needs to focus on how you can help produce results for individuals and businesses.
The other 2% can be fun while indirectly highlighting your success earned from producing results for others.
Your audience wants to see that you’re authentic, relevant, and if you have the ability to provide them with value.
Once these three criteria are met, you’ll begin to build a large audience of loyal supporters.
Create Engaging Content
Not only is content supposed to educate, but it also needs to excite the person reading, viewing, or hearing it.
A lot of content being created is boring and it sucks.
Your content can’t be plain when you’re up against so many competitors.
You have to standout to gain attention.
Don’t just present facts, tell a story that has lows and highs.
People love content that is full of drama and success because it teaches a lesson, while being entertaining.
You can share about your own personal and/ or professional journey, or tell about how you helped your clients produce better results.
You want your content to take your audience through an experience.
Ask open ended question that spark a conversation.
This will help ensure that people are really immersed in your content and engaging with you.
Your goal is to have them invested in your content so that a connection is created.
There’s too many social media platforms that allow you to perform this type of engagement so you don’t have an excuse for having content that doesn’t have interaction — unless the quality is just terrible.
You want comments, social shares, and emails to occur when you create new content.
If this isn’t happening then you need to revise your strategy and check if your content needs improvement.
Make an Offer
You created a piece of content that is tailored to your target audience and full of value — now it’s time to start making money.
In order to make money with your content, you need to initiate the selling process.
You have two ways in which you can do this: soft selling or hard selling.
Soft selling is a persuasive offer that isn’t directly asking for an exchange of money.
For example, you’d offer an e-book or webinar in exchange for the individuals email address.
An email address allows you to directly communicate with that individual, providing you the opportunity to nurture the relationship through valuable content and promotional offers.
Hard selling is directly pushing for the consumer of your content to purchase the offer you’re selling.
This is done through a landing page, webinar, or paid advertising.
You’re more focused on the quality of your audience than the quantity when hard selling.
This is because you don’t have time to waste trying to nurture people with this technique.
These are supposed to be interested buyers who just need the extra push to be converted into customers.
This is why stellar content is required when hard selling so that your offer sounds too enticing to pass up.
All your content needs to make some type of offer — rather it be a soft sell or a hard sell.
Collecting email addresses is just as good as making money because they can be leveraged to make money.
It’s better to gain something through your content than nothing at all.
And speaking of making an offer, have you downloaded our e-book Creating Content that Sells?
If not, you need to do that right now!
It covers what was discussed in this post in greater detail.
Don’t worry, we’re not doing any hard selling in the e-book.
Just providing great content, with a soft offer at the very end.
Conclusion
Creating content is an investment of your time and money which should yield you a favorable return.
If your content isn’t making you any money then your process needs to be evaluated to learn where the issue lies.
The online marketplace is filled with billions of dollars and you need to create content that allows you to get a piece of this lucrative pie.
Your content should enable you to make 6 figures at the minimum if you follow the tips provided in this blog post.
One thing to remember is that you must remain consistent.
Making money through your content is not an overnight event.
It’s a process that has to be continually fed in order to produce phenomenal results.
If you need any help with content creation or your content strategy, send us an email at info@contentengagementconversions.com or join or email list to receive valuable tips about creating engaging content that converts.