The idiot guide to content marketing part 1

The Idiot Guide to Content Marketing: Part 1 freedomiseverything.com /2016/07/06/idiot-guide-to-content-marketing/

The Idiot Guide to Content Marketing: Facebook Part 1

Getting started in online business is not easy. In fact at first it can be completely overwhelming.

Many folks who want to get started in online business start out with a blog. They are not sure how else to start so they pick topics of interest and start blogging.

This is great except that most people, if they are anything like I was, have no idea where to go from there.

Generally speaking content should be marketed in some way, unless you really do not care if anyone sees it or not.

From today I am starting a new series aimed at novices to content marketing: I’ve called it the idiot guide to content marketing. The title is a reflection on me and on the simplicity of my approach – not on those I am writing for!

The purpose of ‘the idiot guide to content marketing’ series I will assume that the basic prerequisite of content marketing is in place: namely that you have completed a piece of content!

How you market your content will depend on your strategy (if you have one) and the purpose of your content in the context of your business as a whole.

The purpose of content is usually to build a personal brand, show authority on a topic or simply to build the volume and quality of your website.

Whatever the purpose of your content, I will cover the following areas of marketing: Social media (going into detail on Facebook) SEO Groups and blogs Guest posting Repurposing Syndication

The Idiot Guide to Content Marketing: Facebook Part 1 Facebook is the obvious place to start due the format and the options available. The huge ad platform also means you can easily track and measure the performance of your posts.

I am familiar with Facebook and I think it is still the best mechanism out there for marketing content – particularly if you have little or no advertising budget.

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As an aside – I advise setting up a separate social media pages for your website, business or personal brand.

Unless you intend to incorporate your professional brand with your personal life, it is often better to leave the two separate.

Posting your content: types of posts You can post your blog content to Facebook in various ways. You can simply create a link post by pasting the link to your content into the status bar on the timeline. You can then add a picture to the link, meaning that if someone clicks on the picture they will be taken to the link.

Or you can create a media post where you upload a photo, picture or video to the timeline. You can then add your link into the description box for the media. This then links back to your content.

The difference between the two types of post listed above is that, in the status update, a click on the picture will take the individual straight to your content page (at your blog). In other words the picture becomes a hyperlink.

If you do a media post, a click on the picture will simply enlarge the picture itself. This means the visitor still has to read your description and choose to click on your link.

People love pictures and photos, especially those which are high quality and include a quote. What happens though is that media posts tend to get high engagement but few link clicks.

Link posts tend to get fewer engagements, but relatively more link clicks. This happens because an enlarged picture (from clicking on a media post) wows people – so they comment or like the post…but they don’t go further and click to read the actual content.

Therefore, you have to decide what kind of engagement you want for your posts. If you actually want people to read your content, often picture posts are not the best option.

Despite the potentially massive engagement a boosted media post can achieve, you may get very few people actually clicking through to your content at your website.

An example To give you an example of this phenomenon in action, take a look at this snapshot of the results of a boosted media post I did. It was a picture post and the boost was only £6 per day:

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As you can see, the engagement on the post was incredible. Over 1,300 likes and 100 shares in just 2 days – yet this post only received 31 link clicks.

This means that, despite the effort going into creating the content, only 31 people ever clicked through to my site to read the content. All the engagement came because people liked the photo and quote. This is very common with social media marketing.

Make sure you know your goal and metrics Now, if the goal of your content is to get people to your site (perhaps to click a link to a sales page or whatever), then the above outcome is pretty disappointing.

Although the engagement with the post was super-high, and the cost per engagement was less than 1 pence, the cost per link click was actually 48 pence. And the click-through rate (% of those who engage with your post and also click through to your blog page) was only 0.17%.

Don’t fall into the trap of chasing page likes and post likes. It is a massive ego massage to get likes of any kind.

But page and post likes do not mean sales or even leads. Don’t confuse a Facebook following with real business results.

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That said, post and page likes do serve their purpose, as does a huge following on Facebook. Even though I didn’t receive many link clicks in the above example, I was still very happy with the outcome.

From the ÂŁ6 boosted post, an engagement cost me less than 1 pence. This is pretty decent. It meant I boosted the social following on my page and I received a high number of shares (shares are more valuable than likes).

Building a large following on Facebook provides you with increased social proof and does build one aspect of your brand. Once your following has been built up it means you have: 1. a)

A base of fans to sell products and services to

2. b)

Lots of people who can talk about you to their friends, family etc

3. c) Proved to Facebook that people like your content (therefore Facebook will show more of your content) All of which serves a purpose and is certainly not detrimental to your business.

Remember you want people to read your content To come back to my original point: the idea of creating content is that people actually read it. Your content should show authority and provide value. It should make people want to work with you or read more of your stuff.

This is all pointless if nobody reads your content.

You must decide what your strategy is going to be on Facebook. My advice is to use a blend of various types of posts and content.

A media post is great to build engagement and get people following you. Yet sometimes a link post is better to get more blog traffic. I like to mix it up sometimes by creating a quick video and throwing it up on Facebook – people like to put a name to a face.

Regardless of the type of post you create, your goal should be to provide constant value. Facebook is not the platform to use for direct selling. For a start, FB will not let you boost affiliate selling posts which go straight to lead capture pages.

Concentrate on creating valuable content and high quality pictures / videos. Then promote them on a variety of ways of Facebook.

With Facebook insights you can even see which posts might do well before deciding to boost them. I will discuss Facebook insights in a later section.

Know your objective and your audience

Coming back to the point about strategy and typology of posts. As I mentioned above, it is important to understand what you are using Facebook for.

If you purely want to drive traffic to your blog posts then high post engagement but a low click through rate is not optimal.

However if your aim is purely to build the biggest Facebook following possible in the shortest amount of time, then high-engagement posts can be a great strategy.

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The other thing to be mindful of is the audience you are targeting. One of the benefits of Facebook advertising is that you can target very specifically who you want to see your ads and posts.

Therefore you should spend some time drawing up a description of your ideal customer. You should be able to write down the following about the type of person your business (and content) is targeting:

Who are they?

What do they do currently?

Where do they hang out (ideally Facebook) What do they want?

What is stopping them from getting it?

This process takes some time and tweaking to get right, but it’s worth it. Doing so means you know who to target your posts to on Facebook. You can target an age, demographic, language, country of residence etc‌but you can also specify who your target audience follows, which websites they visit, pages they like etc.

As you boost more and more posts and garner more page and post likes, you will gain a greater understanding of where your fans come from. I can almost guarantee that you will have some surprises in terms of who follows you.

For example I was trying to aim at people interested in making money through online business. Yet I discovered I was being followed by people interested in spiritualism.

Of course, this kind of data can be incredibly useful. It tells you either who to continue targeting your posts to. Or that you need to change your targeting. Or perhaps you even have to change your content to fit your real target audience.

Either way, you want your followers to represent the type of customer who would buy from your business.

Facebook Insights I mentioned Facebook insights a little earlier. FB insights is a great tool available on the main menu of your Facebook page, which shows detailed information about your following.

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Going into huge detail on Facebook Insights is beyond the scope of this post. However I will cover the topic in detail in a later post. Let’s look at the basics though.

The two tabs which I find most useful are the ‘posts’ and ‘people’ tabs. Here is a quick view of both:

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As you can see on the ‘posts’ tab, I have an overview of all of my posts and how they have performed in terms of reach, clicks and engagement. Remember that ‘clicks’ means a click on the post, not a click through to my actual content link.

You can also change the metrics at the top so that you can see both the ‘engagement rate’ for each post and the type of engagement (share, like, comment etc).

You can also see what percentage of the post reach has been organic or paid. Posts with high organic reach tend to be very visible – which means they show up on people’s news feeds and look interesting enough to click.

There are two very valuable uses to the ‘posts’ tab: One is that you can see which of your boosted posts are doing well so that you can produce more of them.

The other is that you can see which not-yet-boosted posts are doing well and could potentially be winners if you decide to boost them.

The people tab on Insights is just as useful. As you can see from the screenshot above, you can see which demographic your fans come from. As you can see in the example above, the vast majority of my fans and people engaged are female, especially those aged 35-44.

Although this information is undoubtedly useful, you need to be wary about the ‘people’ data. It can be a selfperpetuating cycle. For example you may have more women fans, so you decide to market more to women etc.

This obviously create a greater imbalance in the data over time.

Caution when analysing As I mentioned earlier, you have to be careful to analyse what the data is saying, rather than just seeing what you want or expect to see. Also, take care to regularly revisit your description of your ideal customer (called an

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avatar).

I say this because it is very easy to fall into the trap of marketing your business, service or content to whomever shows an interest in you. Interest is flattering, but are those people liking your page really going to buy what you are selling?

It’s a really important question. Answering it well can be the difference between blindly collecting page likes, or gaining a following who will buy from you.

Remember: it is very easy to be seduced by page and post likes. You will then be tempted to keep marketing to exactly these people. BUT the person who wants to buy may have a different profile.

Ok so this post is longer than I expected and there is still part 2 to come!

In part 2 of the idiot guide to content marketing I will dig into the Facebook graph search and the ad platform. I will provide some tips on how to boost posts and which posts to boost.

In the meantime, if you are not yet in the online business arena and would like to get started, click here for a FREE video series which shows you how.

See you in the next post!

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