Is Content Marketing with a business blog like a hungry dragon you must constantly keep feeding?
Denise and I were teaching better business blogging to a group of savvy professionals at Kim Duke's Prosperity Cafe yesterday. Kim, the Sales Diva, mentioned many of her people are intimidated by taking up blogging because of the fear of not being able to come up with good content on a regular basis.
When you think about it that way, yes, I can see where someone might imagine facing the daunting task of feeding the hungry blogging dragon every morning. You must write frequently, and provide valuable content otherwise your blog doesn't work like it should.
Denise and I tried to explain, it's really not that bad. And yes, you do have to feed the damn beast if you want your biz blog readers to keep coming back for more.
And then I read a superb post by the brilliantly talented Sonia Simone over on Copyblogger, The Matrix Guide to Content Marketing. Even if you're not a fan of The Matrix, think of the four quadrants used by consulting firms to look at 4 aspects of your business.
Everything you do with your blog and your business goes into one of these sectors:
- Quadrant 1: What you're good at and what's important to your readers/clients
- Quadrant 2: Things you're not good at but that are important to your readers
- Quadrant 3: Things you're really good at but that don't matter to your readers
- Quadrant 4: Things you're not good at and that aren't important anyway to your readers
Makes sense, doesn't it? Where will you come up with a continual stream of content ideas? Quadrants 1 and 2, of course.
What's the key here, the most important thing about content marketing? Knowing what your customers and readers find important.
Hopefully you're asking them and providing survey and voting tools like the Vizu poll here on the right.
How should you write about the things you're not doing well but are important? The idea is to be transparent and authentic, and that requires some courage to admit you're not fabulous on all counts. This is easier to do if you can inform readers you're working on fixing the problems.
Of course, this is much easier to do when the issue isn't all that important (Quadrant 4). And as Sonia's blog post points out, admitting to mistakes is a great way to build trust.
I loved this post. Sonia does an amazing job of personalizing the quadrants with the characters from the movie Matrix, worth the read.
If you want to harness the hungry beast and turn your business blog into a Content Marketing Machine, then take a look at your quadrants. Do you know what topics go into which box? Are you asking your readers what's important?
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