Your Content Profit Plan

Your content should always have a purpose, and it helps to have a profit plan. This will keep you on track so that every time you publish new content, you have a plan that will lead to more sales and income for you.

 Sometimes the profit will come directly through a product promotion, other times you might use content to build a mailing list for future profits. The point is, most of the content you publish should have a very specific purpose.

In other words – every article or piece of content should have some type of “call-to-action”. You’ve probably heard that phrase before but if not, it simply means telling your reader what you want them to do. (ie – sign up for free, join now, reader further, download something).

Whatever you want them to do need to be stated clearly. If you don’t tell your readers about your list, product or whatever it is, how do you expect them to do what you want?

Plan Your Content to Educate Your Audience

All of your content leads to a sale. The way to get there is to educate your audience about your niche, the problems and hurdles that are out there, and how you have the solution that will get them there.

You can accomplish this with free content in the form of articles, guest posts, and posts on your own site.  Here is how to use content to educate your audience into buying:

During a Product Launch:

• When you’re getting ready to launch a product, plan related content well in advance. That way, you can release a little bit every few days or each week to really build excitement for the product.
• As you release your content, invite your readers to sign up for a notification list so they can get more content and get advanced notice of the new product.
• Try to provide content in a variety of formats through the process. We’re talking PDFs, blog posts, audio, worksheets, video, etc. This will help you reach a wider audience and increase the perceived value of the content when your audience sees you releasing all this great and varied stuff.
• Ask for feedback/questions through the content process. This allows you to overcome any objections to purchasing the product. Publish the answers to questions publicly so others can benefit from the answers too. It will also get more people interested in your product.

Profits from Everyday Content:

• Every article should recommended related products or invite people to sign up for your mailing list.
• Videos should have your website or some type of offer at the end.
• Reports and ebooks should include a promotion of your business
• Audios should always include product, website and/or mailing list information.

In short, always give your readers the opportunity to get more information that they are seeking or buy a product to further help them solve their problem. Think about it – when you do that, you’re doing your audience a favor… and you build your business at the same time. You both deserve it!

Distributing Your Content for Maximum Exposure

There are endless ways to get your content out there to be ready and acted upon by your target audience. Here are just a handful of ideas:

1. Announce your new content on social media. A great way to get the word out about your new content is to announce it on social media via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.  Be sure to include a link back to your site to build traffic and readers.
2. Give content to your affiliates to rebrand and add their affiliate links. Webmasters love great content and when they stand to profit from it, they are more than willing to share your content. Allow and encourage your affiliates to publish your articles, reports and more.
3. Post your videos to sites like YouTube. These busy sites will show your videos, plus they provide their users the copy-and-paste code so they can put your videos on their websites too.
4. Announce your new content on your blog. This is a no-brainer way to create a new blog post and also alerts your regular readers to new content.
5. Submit content to offline publications like magazines, community organizations, etc. It’s not just websites that are in need of content. Larger magazines and publications might want more exclusive or first-rights (they publish it before it appears anywhere else) to your content, but smaller local publications might just be happy for the extra content.
6. Contact targeted website owners directly to publish your content. Submitting to directories can be effective, but if you want targeted publishers to publish your content, contact them directly. Once they’ve agreed to publish some, be sure to notify them when you have new relevant stuff to share. IF they like your stuff, they’ll keep publishing.
7. Make it a press release. Turn your informative content to a more formal press release and submit it to the media.
8. Submit your podcasts where appropriate. Add your podcasts to Itunes.com and other audio-related sites.
9. Use an RSS feed not only for your blog but for your regular website content, forum, etc. A lot of content-management systems come with RSS feeds built-in. Use this method of content distribute to its fullest.
10. Email your list. Keep your mailing list up-to-date on all your great content… always.

Reuse Your Content

Content is not a send-it-out-once-and-forget- about-it thing. You can get more out of your content profit plan when you utilize content that you have already created and use it in another form. Content can be used over and over, reworked and repurposed.

When you’re getting ready to create a new report, conduct a teleseminar or create any type of content, always think, about what previous content could help in this particular project. You might want to take snippets here and there, put the content into a new format or simply reuse the content again. There’s no sense in doing the work all over again when a lot of it might already be done.

How you reuse your content will depend on the content available and what type of projects you’re working on. Here are some ideas to help you start thinking more efficiently when it comes to creating new stuff.

• Add previously published content into an autoresponder series
• Turn a content piece you broadcasted to your mailing list into a permanent article on your website.
• Give previously shared content to affiliates to redistribute.
• Turn your audio transcriptions from blah to a nicely organized and informative ebook or report
• Package a few related articles into a report
• Take a glossary you created as part of an ebook and turn it into a searchable and freely available online dictionary.
• Take the content from an instructional piece and make a workbook to help your readers put the content to use
• Make a detailed blog posts into a more formal article and distribute it to publishers.
• Make an easy-to-follow checklist from a tutorial you previously created
• Make a printable pattern for a craft project you included in your newsletter.
• Refer and link to previous articles when making new content.
• Offer your podcast for purchase on CD
• Put a checklist onto a laminated wallet card that your readers can carry around with them.
• Put a live teleseminar series into CD format with a workbook and sell it as a home study course.

… you get the picture. Always think of how you can do MORE with the content you already have.

Get Started

Your content marketing  plan is now laid out for you. Some of the ideas you may already be doing and some may be new to you. Or perhaps you are just at the beginning of your content creation journey. The important thing is to take it one step at a time. If you didn’t take notes the first read through, I encourage you to read through it again and start writing down some action steps to take… because without action, unfortunately, nothing happens.

The first thing to do is really start spending more time getting to know your audience. An intimate understanding of the people you sell to is going to help you guide all your other decisions in the content creation process.

But remember, the learning process is never done and your market will change and mature. It is up to you to know exactly what they want, deliver it and keep the profits rolling at the same time. And with the help of this guide, it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds.

All the best to you on the road to unleashing the true marketing power of content.

Go from zero content, zero ideas to being the hero of your family and friends by creating your own in-demand profitable info product ready to take orders in the next month! How is that even possible? Read on…