Just incase you aren’t familiar with the 80:20 rule it says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions. This is an amazing rule you can apply to all areas of your life. I particularly like to apply it to my business activities to help me streamline and work out where I should be placing most of my focus in terms of generating revenue.
I also think it is how we should all be thinking about our Content Marketing.
I’ve seen your content marketing plans, I’ve seen the pure volume of content that is being
produced, it’s kind of crazy. As an entrepreneur it is sometimes overwhelming the pure
volume of information being produced, my email box is inundated even though I regularly clean it and unsubscribe.
I feel like there is a consensus that content production is very important.
Almost as if entrepreneurs feel like they have to produce post after post after post.
Image after image, tweet after tweet etc etc on a never ending wheel of content.
And then this content gets pumped out through various channels. Maybe it is scheduled into the future as well if you are super clever! And the content gets a couple of tweets and shares, maybe a few subscribes, but then it is pretty much lost for ever.
In terms of content volume, as a community we are there, no-one is going to run out of things to read whilst they having their cup of tea, good job!
But in terms of results, we are not.
A huge study conducted by Moz & Buzzsumo found that over 50% of posts had 2 or less Facebook interactions and over 75% had zero external links.
What I read from this is that the majority of content is barely even read. And most website owners don’t prioritise promotion of content in their Marketing Plans.
There is ALOT of wasted energy going on. And this is starting to really upset me.
I feel like there are thousands of entrepreneurs desperately trying to create
as much content as possible, needing to keep up with a self created content strategy
which feels more like torture than it does enjoyment. No longer able to be creative or to shine their light bright because they are chained down to this never ending wheel of content creation.
And, despite all of this discipline & hard work they aren’t seeing the results they were expecting.
This literally breaks my heart. Maybe I am being over dramatic & emotional about the whole thing but I’m a creative and that is me!
By applying this simple 80:20 rule I think we can have more time for creativity, get better results and still have more than enough content to read with our cups of tea..
Let’s start by looking at the word Content Marketing and notice there are two bits here;
CONTENT – The creation of content (we got that dooooown!)
MARKETING – P R O M O T I O N
I propose that the split that most business owners have is:
Content – 80%
Marketing – 20%
What would happen if we flipped this on its head?
Content – 20%
Marketing – 80%
Imagine if you created a piece of content. And then spent 4x as much energy and time
into driving traffic to it. Imagine the difference in your results and also the improvement in your happiness levels and creativity.
You, as a business owner are not a content farm or a content generating machine.
You have a business to run!! A life to live and enjoy. To think that you can compete
with the Huffington Post or some big content publication like that in terms of volume (which I swear by the looks of some marketing plans I have seen that is what some of you guys are going for is craaazy. Commendable for sure, but crazy in equal measures)
Bring some balance into your strategy.
Make sure that every piece of content you produce gets the results it deserves. And this is possible.
It’s not publish, shout and hope. Its publish, shout, market.
One very simple shift you could start adopting right now is this. If your goal is
to create 3 blog posts per week for your blog. See what happens if you create one blog post for your blog per week and then the other two posts submit them to websites with a community you want to get in front of.
Ideally I would recommend one blog post per month and 10 guest posts per month. All of the guest posts linking back to your content helping it to rank. Giving it the best chance possible to bring you results week after week.
I urge you to try this out and see what you think! Stop being a content farm and start
seeing results from your Content Marketing with this simple shift.
