Content marketing is one of the best ways to attract potential customers or clients. It allows your brand to deliver value in a way that people seek. When created correctly, quality content can and will drive a lot of organic traffic to your website or product offering; the only issue is that it takes a lot of time to create. With such an investment, you want to ensure that you’re doing it correctly and with your best interests in mind. The following are some of the mistakes that content marketers make. If you know these, you can avoid them and develop a strategy that delivers results.

Mistake #1 – Not Having a Strategy

Beginners in the space (and even so-called “experts”) often make this common mistake.

“Let’s just write this and post it on our blog.”

You must discover the best way to captivate and deliver value to your audience and prospective customers. To do this, you need to know what topics you will cover and why they are relevant to your business. Instead of targeting specific keywords, prioritize an entire topic cluster and build around it.

Each topic cluster is composed of Pillar Content and Cluster Content. Pillar content is content that contains a wide range of keywords for which you want to rank. You would write cluster content that thoroughly discusses the keywords you would find on the pillar content page to surround this content. To simplify the strategy, here’s what you need to know:

  • The Pillar Content should link to all cluster content once
  • Cluster content should relate to pillar content once
  • Cluster Content, where applicable, should link to other pieces of cluster content

Of course, when writing content, you should always follow the best SEO practices to ensure that you’re following the algorithms set forth by the algorithms.

Mistake #2 – Not Knowing Your Audience 

One of the most challenging parts of a business is defining your audience and knowing who they are. This takes a lot of trial and error to find out who is willing to purchase from you and who isn’t so that you can double down on the former. However, it’s still an issue that many businesses don’t know who their audience is, even after numerous attempts to define it.

To find your audience, you need to develop an Ideal Customer Profile or ICP and only focus on your best customers so you’re as specific as possible. To create the profile, focus on developing their persona and journey to you. Then, ask your best customers these questions and develop a story around their answers. This will allow you to answer the who, what, when, where, why, and how of their pain points and enable you to serve others with content they want to consume.

Mistake #3 – Publishing Too Often

There’s no magic formula to content creation, and publishing frequency is no different. Unfortunately, once many businesses begin publishing content on the web, they believe that they can’t stop, which means posting content daily, even if it’s not very good. This massive mistake can harm organic traffic rather than help it. With only a tiny percentage of written content being shared online by readers, publishing more doesn’t make much of an impact. To really stand out, deliver quality content that resonates with your readers and do it on a schedule that works - once a week, biweekly, or even monthly. The key is always about quality, not quantity.

Mistake #4 – Using Cheap Content Creators

Using cheap content creators is one of the most detrimental mistakes that a business could make when hiring a content creator. Websites like Upwork and Fiverr make it easy to look for content creators that will write for you for a fraction of the price you would pay someone in more developed countries. The problem isn’t price but value. If you want to hire someone to create content for you cheaply, it’s better not to do it at all. Often there are language barriers and an even more significant investment of time and money to correct content that didn’t meet your criteria.

As a business owner, If you don’t want to hire someone “in-house” to be in charge of your content marketing, your best alternative is to hire a content creator who is just starting their career or breaking into the industry. Depending on your budget, an experienced content creator can get expensive fast, but a junior creator could be just what you need. Once you’ve hired for this role, make sure you set them up with systems, spreadsheets, and checklists that outline precisely what you’re looking for so that there are no surprises in the result; don’t make the mistake of hiring the least expensive creator just for the sake of creating content. Instead, take the endeavor seriously and see the rewards compound over time.

Mistake #5 – Not Having Patience 

To gain traction in content marketing, you must be willing to pursue it over the long term. You’re mistaken if you think creating quality content for three to four months will yield great results. Like SEO, content marketing is a marathon business opportunity to drive traffic and eyeballs to your website or product offering over the long term. It builds slowly, but with more time, the results begin to compound, and when done right, the investment begins to yield a return on investment. So don’t give up and focus on consistency, quality, and an efficient schedule that helps you earn this compounding effect.

Content marketers don’t need to make mistakes when deciding to publish content. There is always a method to all the madness. However, there is also the concept of just taking action. Marketing is and always will be a game of psychology where you have to play both sides of the equation. Avoid costly mistakes and be open to failure while giving your audience exactly what they want. It sounds simple and should be treated as such. But, on the other hand, don’t overcomplicate your content marketing, and let the algorithms of today’s technology reward you for following best practices.