Think Like a Reader When Creating Your Content Plan

Your goal when writing an article or adding content to your blog is to create something that is relevant and useful for your audience. This will increase the odds that people engage with it and take other actions like signing up for an email list or buying a product. Let's take a look at how you can organize and track your content's performance to get the most from each piece that is published to your online properties.

Cody

Textbroker Marketing and Communications

Planning Your Content

Different pieces of content are going to be more or less effective depending on the time of year or the life cycle of a given product. For instance, if you sold video games, you would want to post content hyping up a new release in the weeks before or after it comes out. It may also be worthwhile to publish content talking up new features within the game or interviews with its developers as it is being made.

By understanding what your audience wants, you can increase engagement with each post and convert more readers into paying customers. Readers may also take steps such as signing up for an email list or following your social media accounts if you offer content that best fits their needs. Fortunately, you need nothing more than a calendar to create your content schedule. Whether you use a physical calendar, the one on your phone or a Google calendar that can be shared among team members depends on your needs and preferences.

Budgeting for Your Content

Content isn’t free. Even if you write your own content, there will be a cost associated with doing so. Furthermore, it can be easier to promote that content by purchasing a sponsored hashtag on Twitter or by purchasing advertising on Google search results pages.

How much should you spend on a given piece of content? The answer to that question depends on the potential return on investment (ROI). It also depends on whether you can create quality content on your own or if you need to hire a copywriter for a given project.

Let’s say that you have a conversion rate of 5 percent and that each customer who makes a purchase spends $10. If you pay for 1,000 ad clicks, you will get 50 purchases and a total of $500 in revenue. In such a scenario, you would want to spend less than $500 to create and market your content in order to profit from your endeavor.

Aiming for a Mix of Fresh and Evergreen Content

To keep costs down and speed up the content creation process, it may be worthwhile to use evergreen content. Evergreen content contains information that won’t become outdated in the next five to 10 years. In many cases, any facts or figures cited will never become outdated or otherwise be seen as inaccurate.

For example, the fact that Earth revolves around the sun will never be seen as incorrect. Such content can be useful because you won’t have to spend time or money updating or revising old posts when you could be spending time creating new ones.

Evergreen content is ideal because it can be recycled and posted on different social media platforms and other marketing channels. It is also possible to turn blog posts into e-books or other long-form content without having to do a lot of research to create them.

Fresh content is important because it tells Google and other search engines that your blog or website is active. As a general rule, new content is seen as relevant content, and this will help it achieve a higher ranking. Publishing content regularly also provides your audience with an incentive to return to your website or social media page.

Organizing Content and Tracking Performance

It is critical that content is created with your intended budget in mind and published in a timely manner. However, it is also important that you are able track the performance of a blog post, article or video after it has been published. This can help you better understand what type of content works best for your audience. It can also provide insight into how you can better manage your costs or improve the overall ROI going forward.

Organizing and tracking your content can be as easy as creating a spreadsheet. There are many different tools out there, such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are convenient for tracking data because they allow you to label the columns and rows for easy scanning. They also come with a variety of shortcuts that make it easier to insert data or calculate the projected ROI on a given piece.

You can track the performance of your content by using analytic tools. Tools like Google Analytics will tell you how many people saw the content, where they found it and how long they spent on a given page before leaving. You can also check to see where traffic is coming from and what devices your audience uses the most.

Creating quality content is just one part of being a content marketer. In addition, you have to be sure that the content is something that your audience will find relevant and be enthusiastic about. By creating a schedule and budget ahead of time, it increases the odds of greater audience engagement and a higher return on your investment.

Join our over 53,000 customers worldwide
and use Textbroker for your Content Marketing.

Register for Free!