Terrible Mistakes You May Be Making With Your Content Creation Efforts

If you are a business owner, and you do not have a big budget to hire a content creator to work with your business, you most likely do it yourself.

The truth, however, is that YOU ARE GETTING TIRED OF THE WHOLE THING BECAUSE IT IS NOT WORKING.

People do not engage with your content, and when they do, it’s just a handful of people.

Well, before you give up on creating content for your business/brand because you believe it does not work, HAVE YOU STOPPED TO THINK THAT THIS COULD BE BECAUSE YOU ARE MAKING SOME TERRIBLE MISTAKES WITH YOUR CONTENT CREATION GAME?

Are you ready to find out these hidden mistakes, and what you can do to stop making them?

Let’s take a walk through the top four I have gathered for you.

1. YOU PROBABLY HAVE NOT ANSWERED THE BIG “W” QUESTIONS.

This is one of the worst mistakes you may be making.

Before you begin creating content, there are definite questions you must ask yourself, and answer them completely. Here;

A. “WHAT” is my brand all about?

This is where you get to define what your business/brand is all about. Your message needs to be CLEAR to you, or else, you will end up;

I. Being all over the place with your content creation efforts. Today, you will be a relationship coach, tomorrow, you will be a business consultant. The day after, you will become a branding expert — and this is how you will keep CONFUSING your audience with great content

(For the records, it is possible to confuse your audience with amazing content).

With this in view, they will NEVER come to you when they have decided to take a buying action. Because you have not built credibility in a subject area over time, they will not be able to trust your business to be the solution they need.

B. “WHY” am I creating this content piece?

Many business owners create content for all the wrong reasons.

• Coach A says content creation is now the real deal for businesses.
• Everybody is doing it on Facebook. My business no fit carry last (my business can’t take the back seat).

Uhmmm, if these are your reasons for creating content, you will not make a lot of progress with your efforts (no offense).

This, however, is EXACTLY why you should create content for your business;

Create content because you have set CLEAR business goals, and you are making use of the content pieces you are creating to get yourself closer to the actualization of those goals.

Clear business goals + a clear plan of action for your content = a great reason for you to create content.

P/s; as a pro-tip, understand that your content creation game is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Content are tools to guide you to a SPECIFIED business location. If that location is vague, you’ll be frustrated soon enough.

2. YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT ‘CONVERSION’ MEANS FOR YOUR CONTENT PIECES

Social media has created the impression that “conversion” means likes and comments (once your post is getting likes and comments, it has converted).

Well…

While that may be true (in some cases), focusing on just likes and comments is one way to get frustrated immediately. 🤷‍♂️

To better understand what it means for your content to CONVERT, you need to know what you were planning to achieve with it in the first place (see why we had number one first, right?)

Here’s a classical example;

If you write a copy to sell one of your products/services, attach a fine picture of yourself and post it on social media, only to get 1000 likes, 230 comments, and 6 shares, with just one person actually buying the product you were selling; WILL YOU SAT THAT CONTENT PIECE CONVERTED?

Here’s a pro-tip; set clear goals for your content and refer to those goals as proof of whether or not your content is converting. DO NOT USE THE GENERIC SOCIAL MEDIA CONVERSION METRIC OF LIKES AND COMMENTS; you will be frustrated soon enough if you do.

Another practical example;

I once made a post on one of the Facebook communities I belong to. In the post, I shared helpful tricks that you can employ immediately to ALWAYS smash your reading goals.

I decided not to share it on my personal Facebook wall, but to dust it up a bit, and post it on my blog(in the meantime, find the post here).

After doing this, I took an excerpt from the blog post and shared it on my Facebook wall (linking the blog in the comments section).

Guess what.

The post I made on my Facebook wall only got about 19 likes and NO comments. However, I kept an eye on the backend to see if it really converted, and it did (at least to an extent).

Tens of people clicked the link and headed over to the blog post (the first action I wanted them to take), and even when they were done with the blog post, a good number of them subscribed (the second action I wanted them to take).

Here’s the thing; if I had stuck to the social media metrics of monitoring likes and comments only, I would have retired to bed that night with a cup of sad juice in hand, thinking of what I did to make people hate me so much.

REMEMBER, CONVERSION IS ABOUT PEOPLE TAKING THE ACTION YOU WANTED THEM TO TAKE FROM THE START, NOT JUST ABOUT THE GENERIC LIKES AND COMMENTS WE ALL LOOK OUT FOR.

3. YOU HAVE A CONTENT CREATION STRATEGY (probably), WHERE IS YOUR CONTENT PROMOTIONAL STRATEGY?

This is another place where you have been making a costly mistake.

If you aren’t yet Beyonce, then you need to develop a promotional plan for your content pieces.

Don’t you think it is a bit too costly to create amazing content, only to leave it to chance, believing that people will stumble into it, and engage with it?

Carry the content you have created on your head, and make sure that you put in in the faces of as many people as need to see it.

Here are a few ideas for you to try out;

A. For longer-form content (like this and blog posts), you may want to repurpose them to tweetables and share these on Twitter (if you have an audience there). Remember to link back to the full content piece (maybe your blog or wherever you have hosted the full content piece).

B. Repurpose your long-form content into a short newsletter which includes a link to the full content piece. You can send this to those on your mailing list (The Hubspot Academy uses this method to drive engagement to the Hubspot blog).

The idea is to make sure that everywhere you have an audience (no matter how small), they all get to see what you have been up to.

C. Try paid advertising (on Facebook and Instagram, at least).

NEVER SKIP OUT ON PROMOTING YOUR CONTENT; no one will do this for you.

4. YOUR CALLS TO ACTION ARE TERRIBLE

Mm-hmm, you heard me well.

They are either too vague or too complicated.

Check this out; I am participating in a beauty contest in GGG community and I need your vote to win. Vote for me by following @VVV on Instagram, tag seven of your friends to do the same, and tell them to comment that they vote for me under the post. — No sir. This is not a call to action, it is a project.

Or

Vote for me sir. — How? How is the person supposed to vote for you? Comment on a post, tag you in something? What? This CTA is bad news because it is terribly vague.

On the other hand

Subscribe to this channel by hitting the subscribe button below. — that’s more like it; easy to execute on, and definitely not vague. It doesn’t leave the audience wondering what they should do with the content piece they have come across.

Your CTAs should be something that your target audience can do without breaking a sweat. Don’t stress them out unnecessarily with a lot of jumbled action points.

Also, have this in mind; your CTAs should be in line with the purpose of creating that content piece. You cannot be telling people to leave a comment when you make a promotional post that should get them to swipe their cards from their pockets or make a transfer immediately.

See why you should not skip point one?

Content creation is not just all about writing and feeling good. There is an exact skill that can help you make the most out of your efforts.

Try out all these strategies that have been discussed, and watch your next content piece smile.

P/S; The Extra Podcast has been launched. This is a platform where I get to share more business, life and productivity tips and tricks to help you stay on top of your game — continuously.

Best of all, you can access it for FREE. Head over to the channel now, and listen to the first episode that went live yesterday. Click here to visit the Extra Podcast on Anchor Fm.

CIAO.