By definition, content marketing is about creating online material and sharing it with the intention of promoting a brand, business, services, or product without doing it directly. In a sense, it’s like a pseudo-advertisement. But instead of having a clear call to action, content marketing aims to stimulate interest.
Content marketing is a great way to earn money as a sideline career, especially if you’re knowledgeable or skilled in the use of social media, words, and creating graphic material. So how to be successful in it? Let this article be your guide.
1. Have the knowledge and skill of modern technologies
The interests of people and styles of advertising change all the time. Today, digital marketing is the most effective strategy to employ. And tomorrow it might be traditional marketing. What’s important is that you know how to adjust your tactics by learning the changes or new things in the digital and marketing space.
Great content marketers don’t need to be tech-savvies or prodigies in programming. If you know some SEO techniques, proper WordPress, and Google Analytics usage, you already have an advantage over most of your competitors. It’s even better if you know how to program using simple web development languages such as CSS and HTML.
2. Have a sense of creativity
Having technical skills is good. It’s even better if you supplement that with creativity. By doing so, you can create almost any kind of content marketing style that nobody has discovered yet. If you’re not a creative person, don’t worry. You can start developing your creativity today. What you’ll need is the motivation and time to learn and practice.
3. Research your industry well
Some marketing strategies work well for a specific niche product or service while others won’t. For example, you can’t sell a product that’s intended to be used discreetly by announcing it using a megaphone on the sidewalk. Nobody in their right mind would show interest that way. Know how to evoke a strong positive emotion from the audience.
It falls to your responsibility to do so on the advertising platform of your choice. To give you an idea, let’s use Instagram as a hypothetical marketing platform. We all know that IG users are very particular when it comes to photos and images. So instead of using the general approach as most do on Facebook, you need to edit and present photos that are colorful, bright, and clear if you want to attract attention.
4. Brainstorm and plan before anything else
Seeing your competitors do well with their marketing strategies and following them doesn’t drive success. This is because you don’t know the essence of their approach. You’re also limiting your potential. In advertising, uniqueness is the key to an increase in sales.
We’re not talking about the uniqueness of your marketing approach in the industry your product belongs to. What we mean is that your marketing content is solely unique to what you’re promoting and that it works well. So what do you need to do? Take the time to brainstorm and plan before producing any content.
The most important and effective tip to be successful as a part-time content marketer is time management. Learning, researching, developing creativity, brainstorming, and planning takes a lot of your time, especially if you have a day job. This is why you must allocate a specific hour(s) of your day to do your content marketing tasks.
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