30 Day Content Marketing Blueprint
Content marketing is an integral part of almost every business model in the world of online marketing. You need content to represent your brand, communicate ideas and expertise with your audience and encourage them to take action.
But you can’t just create and slap content up on the Internet and expect to get great results. You have to know how to use it strategically, which means understanding what kind of content to use – when to use it, and where.
Below, you’ll find a list of daily tasks that should last you a full month with your content marketing efforts. You’ll be able to build a brand and a list, engage with your audience and see an increase in traffic and sales.
Day 1: Know Exactly Who You’re Targeting
Pinpointing your demographic is something many marketers fail to do. They cast a wide net with broad, generic content, hoping someone will eventually spend money with them.
There’s a better way to do this. You want to choose an audience to cater to. It might be by age group, gender, or some other criteria like interests or experience levels, finances and more.
You want your content to cater to a specific audience, so your messaging can be on point. Create a customer avatar, which is a representation of who you plan to target with your online efforts, and this will be something you can refer to when you create content to ensure it meets their needs.
Day 2: Put Yourself on a Workable Schedule
Content creation can be exhausting. If you’re doing it all yourself, or even outsourcing and editing it to your liking, it can absorb many hours of your day. Instead of trying to do too much, you want to be selective with what you create, for which platform.
A few stellar pieces that have viral potential are better than dozens of pieces of content your readers will yawn at. Think of how long it takes you to put together a content piece that you’re proud of and set a schedule for the week based on your other tasks.
Use tools and automate content creation if possible, such as having templates to work off of. There are free and paid tools that will shorten the creation and publishing process for your content.
Day 3: Make a Decision About DIY Versus Outsourcing
There’s no shame in handing over some of your online marketing tasks to others who can specialize in this for you. Because of the sheer volume of content needed, it makes sense to hand some of it over to a pro.
Pick the content you struggle with most, whether it’s graphics, video or audio, and allow someone to step in and deliver a readymade version for you to upload. You can find freelancers for graphics, videos and writing on sites like Fiverr or Upwork.
If you do want full control over the creation of your content, then you need to learn how to master the production of it so that both your speed and quality improve over time. You don’t want to be releasing subpar content that could have been flawless with a little extra knowledge and polishing up of the draft.
Day 4: Learn SEO for Your Site Content
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to your site’s success if you plan on relying on any organic traffic measures. This is especially important for those without a steep budget for paid ads.
Every piece of content that you create, whether it’s written or recorded, needs to be optimized for search bots. When these bots crawl your site, they look at everything to see how to index it for their users.
They also look for leadership qualities such as how often you post to your site, how relevant the content piece is, and its quality. Some people mistakenly aim for a certain length, but it’s more about the value you bring to your audience.
Learn how to effectively use keywords and phrases with your content, including weaving it into your posts as well as using it to tag your content or categorize it for easy navigation.
Day 5: Master Motivating and Inspiring Content
You always want to ensure your audience feels gratified when they land on your site and consume content. There’s an easy way to do this when you realize they’re there seeking a solution to a problem or pain point.
All you have to do is make sure your content inspires and motivates your readers. They need to feel like their obstacles aren’t insurmountable, and that they have what it takes to succeed or overcome a struggle.
Day 6: Brainstorm and Create a No Brainer Lead Magnet
Your lead magnet can be a report or email series (among other option), but if it’s not something that makes the visitor feel it’s irresistible, they may click out without handing over their content information.
Many people think any freebie is a good freebie, but that’s not true. There is so much free information already on the Internet, that your lead magnet has to be something they feel a strong desire to know more about.
Create one that caters to their biggest needs or struggles, so they can experience your guidance and see if you’re the kind of expert who will lead them to great achievements in their life.
Day 7: Monetize Your Content Pieces
One of the main reasons you’re building a business online is to make money. But oddly enough, many marketers are so focused on the tasks they have to complete, that they forget to monetize their content.
Make sure, before publishing anything, that you have a final step where you analyze if and how you can monetize the content you’re about to post. It might be something direct like using a link to your product or someone else’s as an affiliate – or it could be indirect, such as building a list where you’ll monetize later.
Day 8: Come Up with a Product Review Template
Templates are such a great tool to have at your disposal when it comes to content creation. You want to quickly and easily pump out good content such as articles, product reviews, and images.
You can download some templates (or use them in tools like Canva). Or, you can make your own template to work from every time to sit down to create something new. With product reviews, your template might include the order in which you cover aspects like features, benefits and drawbacks – and it could also include positioning of clickable product images.
Day 9: Start Amassing a Swipe File of Copy Headlines
Another great shortcut you can use is a swipe file. Whenever you’re creating sales copy, which is a specific type of content you’ll use for your own digital products, it helps to open a swipe file for examples of effective, high-converting headlines.
You can download existing swipe files of headline copy. But you should also focus on creating one yourself. Pull from sales pages that you felt were effective at converting you into a buyer, and from pages you create that end up converting high so you’ll know what worked (and what didn’t).
Day 10: Brainstorm Some Low Content Pieces for Your Brand
Length of content is not an indicator of effectiveness. Sometimes, the short content, also know as low content, can be a great tool to serve your audience. There are many forms of low content you can choose to create, too.
These include journals, checklists, templates, cheat sheets and printables like trackers for certain goals or habits. You can use templates for these, create them from scratch or even buy low content pieces with private label rights.
Day 11: Inform, Inspire and Amuse Your Audience
The best forms of content are able to affect your audience in different ways. Sometimes, you need to teach them something that helps them achieve a goal or better their personal or professional life.
Other times, your content needs to simply inspire or motivate people to take action. There are many instances where they know what needs to be done, but need the extra mindset fortification to push through.
And there are times when your content goal should be nothing more than to amuse or entertain your audience. Moments of levity, where you make your readers relax and smile are much appreciated even in niches where the content is usually very serious.
Day 12: Add Socialization Measures to Your Content
Social sharing is an important part of seeing your content succeed. You want something measurable – more than just guessing whether or not people appreciated what you published.
By installing a social share plugin on your blog, you’ll be able to see how many people are liking and sharing your content, and where they’re sharing it to – such as Facebook, Pinterest, email and more.
Day 13: Become a Master of Storytelling
Creating content isn’t just a matter of regurgitating facts to your target audience. Instead, you need to be able to put your opinions into the content, and guide them with some attention-grabbing storytelling.
Stories that you share might be those of your own life in terms of being relevant to the niche topic. It might be someone you know, like an experience a loved one had. It can even be something you make up as a hypothetical.
The key is to paint a picture of what’s happening by tapping into their emotions and getting them to see how the story pertains to their own efforts to succeed with a goal or overcome an obstacle.
Day 14: Create Content Goals to Achieve
Goal setting isn’t just for income or productivity with a massive to do list. It’s for all of your strategic efforts, including content marketing. Each piece of content that you publish should have a goal that you can track to see if it worked.
Give it a job. Do you want it to help build your list? Should it convert into a number of sales for you? Do you want it to go viral and help spread awareness about your brand? Be specific with your goals.
Give it a number, such as adding 100 new subscribers, earning you $1,000 or something else like being shared 500 times on social media. You might even double up on the goals you set, but be sure to analyze the results later to see if what you aimed for really happened.
Day 15: Go to Facebook and Add a Link to Your Site Content
Facebook is great for almost any niche. You definitely want to be publishing content there, either on your profile, page or in a group that you created and control for your target audience.
You can share links to your blog posts, create content specific to your Facebook audience, share text or video, and more. You can even go live if it’s applicable for your niche, which creates a more engaging form of content.
Day 16: Hashtag Your Content for Other Social Sites
Using hashtags is a big part of getting your content found on social media. Hashtags are trending keywords and phrases that people use to search for information they want on sites and apps like TikTok and Instagram.
Make sure you include a list of hashtags for your niche that is relevant to the exact piece of content you’re sharing. That way, whenever someone searches for a specific hashtag, your post will show up for them.
Day 17: Have an Outsourcing Budget for Your Content Needs
If content creation is taking too much time away from your day, consider creating a budget for your outsourcing needs. You don’t have to spend a fortune. You can spend it on tools or services such as for a good freelancer or editor.
Some tools like software editors can do the work that a person would normally handle, at a fraction of the cost. Other tools might seem pricey at first, but you’ll quickly get your money’s worth by being able to perfect your content.
Day 18: Try to Create Content Using Online Tools
Online tools can not only spiff up the content that you create, but they can help you create it from scratch, too. Camtasia can capture your screen and record for you before the editing process.
Canva has tons of templates, images and fonts you can use to create graphics. You can make eCovers, banner ads, headers and more using this free or paid version of the tool. Audio tools like Audacity are good for helping you generate better content, too.
Day 19: Analyze the Success of Your Online Content
At some point after you’ve been sharing content online, you want to log in and look at the exact metrics to see how each piece is performing. You want to check certain things, such as whether or not people engaged with it or shared it.
It’s not all about numbers, though. The comments themselves will tell you how your message is being received. You can also get ideas about content performance from things like your site’s bounce rate.
Day 20: Create a Publishing Plan for Your Content Releases
Having a publishing schedule isn’t just about time. It’s about knowing what types of content, what slants and other specifics you’ll be releasing – as well as where. You want to put yourself on a publishing schedule for things like product reviews, informative pieces, product releases, subscriber gifts and more.
You want to make sure you’re rotating the topics a bit and not hammering the same narrow topics for several times in a row. For example, if you’re doing a gardening blog, you don’t want a dozen posts in a row about tomatoes with no other focus.
Day 21: Go Through the Editing Process of Your Content
Editing content is something that may seem like a bore, but it actually shows your audience that you care about presenting yourself as an expert in your niche. You can use tools for proofing your content for typos and grammar.
But you also want to edit for accuracy. Don’t just assume something is a fact before researching it. Spend time verifying things and citing sources if needed to assure your audience that everything is factual.
Day 22: Learn How to Curate Content from Others
Content curation can help alleviate the pressure you feel to churn out large pieces of content, yet they still deliver a lot of value to your readers. Curating is akin to being head a museum, where you gather exhibits for a themed presentation.
You’ll be pulling in all kinds of content snippets (not the entire thing) and linking out to where the reader can find more on that item. You want to give full credit to the original creator, but you also want to give your own insight and opinion about the content snippets you’ve pulled into your blog post.
Day 23: Add a Dash of Personality to Your Content
Never forget that when you’re creating content for your audience, you want to put in a piece of you so that your content is different from everyone else’s. Your stories are specific to you, your way of sharing the information is unique, etc.
The personality you weave into your content pieces will endear them to you – make them feel a close connection. This makes them want to stay on your list and buy things through your link.
Day 24: Discover the Importance of Split Testing Content
Sometimes, you’ll want to create two versions of a piece of content, such as sales copy, and pit them against one another to see which one comes out on top. This is known as split testing, and you’ll often test one small variant against another until you have a high-performing content piece.
Day 25: Eliminate Ineffective Content Efforts
Not everything is going to work well for you. It might be the way you create content (such as media format), the slants you use, the platform or even the topics. You want to weed out what’s not working so you have time for more high-performing pieces.
Take time today to look for anything that does poorly and make note of it so you can either tweak it or stop using it entirely. If it’s a social media platform, check to see if your audience is even there and if not, scratch it off your list.
Day 26: Work on Audience Engagement for Your Content
Are your content pieces getting any reaction from those who see it? If not, make sure you have a strong call to action. Does the piece stand out among others in a feed on social media?
Look for ways you can get the audience to comment, like and share your content with their own followers. Try different strategies to see if it gets people engaging, such as humor or serious questions.
Day 27: Purchase and Use a Private Label Rights Content Pack
PLR (private label rights) is a great way to get content published in your niche without you having to create it yourself. While freelance ghostwriters can be expensive, PLR can be as little as $0.50 to a $1 per page or piece.
You just want to make sure the quality is good, so be careful who you buy from. With PLR, you can use it as is or edit it and put your own name on it. This gives you a lot of flexibility and it can be used on your blog, in emails, on social sites, and even as info products or lead magnets.
Day 28: Repurpose a Piece of Content You’ve Created
The concept of repurposing is a way of making sure you get more benefits from your original efforts. When you create content, don’t just think about where else you can share it.
Think about what you can turn it into as well. For example, a video can be transcribed and used as a blog post. You can extract the audio and turn it into a podcast episode, and vice versa!
Day 29: Check the Mobile View of Your Content
You want your content to be absorbed by everyone who wishes to view it. If you fail to make sure it works on various platforms, then you’ll be missing out on subscribers, sales and engagement.
One thing you really have to be careful with is making sure your content is easily viewed on mobile devices. Whether it’s a sales letter or blog post, you need to access it from a smart phone and check to make sure the viewer sees it accurately and not in a distorted manner.
Day 30: Take Stock of Your Current Content Strategy and Tweak It
Once a month, you’ll want to sit down and see what’s working as a whole so you can tweak your next month’s efforts. Your publishing schedule might need to be improved with more content, or fewer, but better pieces.
You might see that competitors are getting more engagement by focusing on trending or newsworthy information, while you were bogged down in more evergreen data. Or, you could see that your video content is doing very well, while text is struggling to get any reaction from your audience.
Try going more in depth or finding other ways to improve your content marketing strategy. It will always be evolving, such as the way attention spans have gone from lengthy to short, making short form videos one of the more popular content strategies you can employ.