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7 Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

You should know who your readers are, or who you want to be your readers, and speak to them. You should have a content marketing agenda to keep you on track and so you can complete your goals.

But what are some things that you could be doing wrong along the way?

  1. Your content is too promotional.

It’s all about you. You’re not trying it, but the content you are creating is just promoting how great your services are. No one cares about your services. Only when they see you’re an expert on the topic and that you can help them where they need it, then they will care about what you have to offer. But it begins with trust, and that begins with content. Prove that you are the expert in your niche by providing information that people are searching for and the sales will eventually follow from it.

  1. You aren’t providing anything of real value.value

Everything you put out there should be for a reason. After reading it, your readers should be able to take something away from it. If they didn’t find anything resourceful from it, then you didn’t give them any value. Share it with co-workers, a customer, or someone that would benefit for the topic you are writing about. Ask them what they got out of it. If they learned about a new tool or an actionable marketing tip then ok. If they just say it’s good but don’t really give any other feedback then they probably didn’t learn anything from it.

  1. It’s not easy to share.

Everyone likes simple and easy. Make it easy for your readers to share your content. You can do this by adding social sharing tools that scroll with the reader as they move up and down a page. Social sharing bars that pop up at the top of the page when a reader scrolls down reminds them to share. Sharing icons above and below the post give a subtle hint to share when they first visit and start reading, or after they have read the piece. Include sharing numbers too. It’s a psychological thing, but more people will share if they see that other people are also sharing it.

  1. Content isn’t long enough.

You’ve read online that the general rule for a blog post is at least 500 words. So you just passed 500 words so call it a post, right? Wrong. In-depth articles of at least 1000-1500 words will do much better in search engine rankings. Not every piece will be this long, but strive for the majority of pieces on your site to be in that range if not a little higher. You get more content in the post, more resources, and more chances that you will show up for certain keywords. This doesn’t mean to add a bunch of meaningless fluff though. If you are being repetitive or something isn’t resourceful, take it out.

  1. Grammar mistakes make you look bad.grammar errors

Everyone makes mistakes. That’s why you should always have someone else look over your writing. Aneditor, a colleague, your manager…someone. We all need a second eye on what we write because we tend to miss mistakes in our own writing. Even the best writers ever use editors, are you better than them? Probably not. If you’re not a writer, that’s okay. There are plenty of content ideas for the non-writer that can help you get content on your site with minimal effort.

  1. Your titles aren’t catchy.

People love lists, numbers, how-tos, tutorials, tips….something where they can scan and get actionable information from you to use. If your title isn’t catchy then no one is going to read it. If your title is catchy, your first paragraph better be good too or you won’t grab their attention and they will probably leave your site. If you can get their attention to read all the way through and they share your piece then you have done your job. Humans typically have an attention span of 8 seconds. So you have 8 seconds to get them hooked to read the rest of your article, learn something, share it, and then maybe they funnel through your site.

  1. Your content is clearly for SEO purposes.

You have a list of keywords and you try to cram them in every piece you write so that search engines have a better chance of finding your page for a wide variety of search terms and you will rank better for them. That’s great. But humans are reading your articles and that’s who you want to become leads and customers. So write for humans, not search engines.

Don’t fall into making these mistakes and losing value for your content marketing pieces. Remember to always speak to your audience, be resourceful, create awesome content, double-check everything and your campaigns should start to see results whether it is by traffic, increased rankings or leads

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