As you may well have heard from everyone, content marketing is the new way forward. I find this a preposterous idea, not because I don’t agree that content marketing is the new way forward, but because it has always been the way forward. Content marketing is all about providing quality information and products for your customers.
Sure, there are those that have made great successes from employing low quality techniques, but these people are just modern day snake oil salesmen and whilst they may achieve instant short term successes, their business models and techniques do not have the legs to carry them through to long term sustainable success.
The interesting (or frustrating) thing about content marketing is how many people seem to be afraid of it. They don’t understand what content is, how it can generate traffic and increase their business; and they seem to believe that the creation of content entails sitting down at a desk and laboriously writing, whilst neglecting other profitable activities.
None of these things need be true. In fact, with a slight readjustment to how you think about what content is and where it comes from, creating content could very quickly become the most profitable and least wasteful activity within your business.
Realise that you already produce content (but you waste it)
You already produce valuable content in your day to day activities, regardless of what that activity is. The problem is that not only do you not realise that you are creating this content, you throw it away.
Consider a typical accountant. During the course of their normal working week they probably send a great many emails answering client questions about business taxation and accounting. Once sent, the content of those emails is not used again.
What if the accountant saved up all of these emails over time and created a ‘ten top taxation tips for small businesses”? It would only few minutes to remove any client information and make a generic document that provides valuable information.
Now consider value. If the accountant charges ?25 per hour and spends an hour creating the original email (and dispensed with it after sending), then the email has a finite value of ?25. By reusing the content of the email there is scope for the value of the content to rise infinitely.
You don’t have to be office based either. My brother in law is a bespoke, specialist carpenter and he successfully uses otherwise wasted content that he produces during the day. He does this by taking static photographs of the build process he undergoes and then creates time delay films of the event. He then posts these images to pinterest, his own website and various social media.
Author: Chris Pitt
Courtesy of www.verticalleap.co.uk