I'll also review SEO, self promotion, and email marketing
Congratulations! We're on to part 2 of this series all about content marketing. I want to do a quick recap of the previous post. 1.) There's a ton of content to create 2.) You should have a core location to drive your traffic to 3.) Inspiration is everywhere. So now I think it's time to dive on in.
Let's start out with my specialty, design. Good design can make or break your content. Users won't trust your site/channel/product if it doesn't look professionally designed. So my recommendation is to either sink some time into learning about good design practices, or sink some money into hiring a designer. You want your audience, no matter who they may be, to trust you and whatever it is that you're creating. This little paragraph was not overly emphasized in the skillshare class, but I feel like it's super important and not thought about very often.
If you have a site, SEO is another important tool. I'd recommend watching the masterclass since Brad does a really good job of breaking it down and laying it out. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's the gigantic system of how sites, like Google and Bing, find and rank you. There's a couple of key factors that go into building SEO for your site.
1. Titles and Meta Descriptions - this has to do with your url. It should be simple and include relevant information such as the post title. The meta description is the little paragraph of text that you see under a page title when you search.
2. Breadcrumbs - this is your site navigation. A lot of bigger sites work this into the navigation of the site. Through wordpress, there's a several plugins you can use to add them into the navigation. Sadly, wix is not on that level yet, so no breadcrumbs for me.
3. Alt tags - this is a big one for me because it has to do with WAS guidelines. It's not talked about very much in the masterclass and I won't get into it too much but it has to do with the alternate tags on your images. So if your image doesn't show up, it's the little text box that does. Here's a little medium post about it.
4. Keywords - this is one of the more confusing concepts for me. It helps bots figure out what the content on your site is about but it can also harm your site's ranking in Google. This is because back in the early days of SEO, people abused keywords to increase their ranking.
So now let's bounce over something in the title. Timing & Strategy. I haven't come across this yet in the class, but it's one of the first things I thought of when it came to content marketing. There's certain times during the day that people are just more active on social media and email. Lunch break, as soon as people get up in the morning, and after work are the top 3 times to post on social media. Don't forget about time zones either! For example, on my instagram 80-90% of my followers live on the east coast. They're friends, family, and other business contacts that I've made throughout the years. However, I'm currently living on the west coast. A 3 hour difference. So obviously, posting in the morning for them, is not optimal for me. I like to focus on posting during their lunch break there, my morning here. 9am PST for me and 12pm EST for them! One of the things I've started to do as well is put together a schedule for my different social medias for my stream.
For twitter, I post everyday evenly throughout the day. some of the content I include are retweets from other streamers and game companies, reaction gifs, stream updates, and quotes or callouts from the stream.
For instagram, I post 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. These are in between the days that I stream. Content for IG focuses more on stream highlights and short funny clips or quotes.
For youtube, I upload twice a week, Friday and Saturday. I originally started out uploading my full stream but have decided to pair down the content to drive to my source, twitch. So I only post a few 5 minute highlight videos with my channel link in the description.
Email marketing is apparently still pretty big. This is kind of foreign for me since I don't really click on links in emails and often lists that I'm subscribed to go pretty quickly to spam. Maybe it's the millennial in me, but using email marketing technique applies an older audience. This isn't bad, but it's not my target for my stream. It is, on the other hand, a potential audience for my blog which is why I have an email list and a popup that asks people to opt in to my email list.
The masterclass goes more in depth into email campaigns such as pop ups, opt-in forms, and subscription lists. For the most part, they all cover the same idea. Finding the balance. No one wants to be spammed. It's a pretty simple concept that a lot of people ignore and end up driving traffic away from their site because its annoying. There's a metaphor that Brad uses in the class, "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook". Give, give, give, and then ask. Give your audience as much useful content as possible, before asking for anything in return.
TLDR; Design beautifully. Get good at SEO. Set a schedule. Don't be a spammer.
That's it for today friends. It's a lot but hopefully you find this stuff as interesting as I do! Stay tuned for another Content Marketing blog next week as I wrap up this series and deliver the down low on everything I've learned.