Let’s face it: content marketing is an art, and a delicate one at that. Unfortunately, many business owners tend to make mistakes which can render their content marketing efforts useless.  Content marketing has tremendous potential to promote your online business… but very few entrepreneurs are able to successfully tap into its full potential.

Check out these 5 deadly mistakes in content marketing strategy that may be costing you a great deal of time, money AND potential customers.

Mistake#1: Not Researching Enough

Often times, business owners fail to properly research their target audiences. It’s VERY important to find out the demographics of your customers, as well as their exact needs, so you can position your business in such a way that demonstrates you have what they are looking for. Once you uncover their needs, it is important to properly research the subject matter so you are able to create unique, engaging content… and not just the same regurgitated content available elsewhere on the web.

Mistake #2: Not Employing SEO Best Practices

To get the search engines to notice you, you must thoroughly research your target keywords, which are the greatest marketing arms on the Internet. Keywords, simply put, are what people use to find your business online. Sadly, even many so-called experts get SEO wrong. Your SEO strategy MUST include determining the level of competition for selected keywords and then formulating a plan to rank high for those specific keywords.

Mistake #3: Writing Long Articles with Heavy Vocabulary

Short, digestible bits of text that are informative, yet not heavily loaded with information, are the key to getting your article marketing strategy right. Remember: people have very little attention and time spans when online – meaning they will spend an average of 4 seconds to skim over a page to get what they need. Naturally, too much content with heavy vocabulary is intimidating and they are bound to feel irritated enough to leave immediately. Remember to also proofread your articles, since the last thing you want is grammatical mistakes and typos.

Mistake#4: Not Knowing the Difference between Marketing and Advertising

Often times, small business owners believe article marketing is the same as article advertising so they try and push their product in their reader’s face. Unfortunately, this approach will kill your content marketing strategy faster than you can say “why are my marketing efforts falling short?”.  Content marketing pulls readers to your site by offering to solve their problems.  Thisin turn, gets them interested in your product/services.

Mistake #5: Losing Focus

To keep the traffic trickling to your site, simply producing 10 or 20 articles isn’t going to work. Content marketing requires a long term strategy where you are constantly producing new content to keep customers interested. Unfortunately, many business owners go wrong here by losing focus of their content. They churn out weekly articles, not bearing in mind that the entire intent of the strategy is not being followed. It’s important that your article marketing efforts have a common thread with the core of your business with articles that are laser focused on your products/services.

Worried that your content marketing efforts are falling a little short?  If so, we have a solution for you. Contact us today to get more tips, tricks and marketing you won’t find elsewhere.