If you haven’t heard the term “content marketing” – you soon will. The idea of content marketing is becoming more popular among marketing teams as a result of the growing influence of social media, but it has been around much longer than that. White papers, contributed articles, even infomercials are all forms of content marketing. Essentially, when you create content around a particular subject and then use it to deliver a message that may drive someone toward purchasing or recommending your product or service, you’re doing it. The question is, are you doing it in a strategic way?

Today at 3pm there is a free teleseminar I’ll be participating in along with Brian Clark from CopyBlogger and Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett (founders of Junta42 and authors of Get Content. Get Customers.) all about using content to impact your bottom line. To give you a taste of what we’ll talk about, here is my quick checklist of the questions you should ask yourself as you start to build your own content marketing strategy:

  1. What is the problem you will try to solve? Great content marketing focuses on answering a key challenge or question that relates to your business.
  2. How can you make it about more than you? This is not a sales pitch. It needs to be useful and offer more context beyond just how great your product/service is.
  3. Who’s going to care to read and share it? It needs to be interesting, but the sharing is particularly important, as great content marketing should be something people can’t help sharing.
  4. What’s the best platform and format to use? Think about video versus blogging versus downloadable PDFs and what will be easiest for your audience.
  5. How will you promote it? Plan to spend quite a bit of time thinking about how people will find your content, as it is completely useless if no one can locate it.
  6. How will you know if it’s working? Your metric for success may be directly tied to sales, or awareness, or consideration. Whatever it is, know before you start how you’ll tell if it was successful.

Want to know more? Tune into the teleseminar today at 3pm EST here: http://www.authorteleseminars.com/getcontent2.html

And just in case you can’t make it, there will be a full archive available from our host Elizabeth Marshall at http://www.authorteleseminars.com.

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