Creating A Content Strategy

A few days ago we talked about creating an email marketing plan. You looked at where you’re at right now and where you want to be at the end of the 28 Day Masterclass and beyond. You have and overall idea and strategy of what it will take to get there. Now it’s time to take the next step and come up with ideas for the content of the emails you’ll be sending in the coming days and weeks.
Sure, you could just sit down every morning and decide what you want to mail about that day. This certainly works and it is how many email marketers operate. This “fly by the seat of your pants” attitude has a couple of big drawbacks though. It makes it harder to fit everything you want to share and promote in and more importantly it gives you fewer opportunities to create anticipation for what’s to come.

Why is this important? Because it can greatly affect your email open rates and with that ever single other conversion metric you’re tracking from click through rates to sales. If you take the time to come up with a content strategy, you can start to hint at what’s to come. You can share content around a certain topic long before you present an offer to your readers. This creates anticipation and they will actively look for your emails and open them as soon as they hit their inbox if you do this well.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re getting ready to launch a new product on how to publish a Kindle book (or you’re getting ready to promote the launch of one as an affiliate). In the days and weeks leading up to the launch, you could share information on how profitable kindle books can be. You may interview a successful author or share industry sales stats. You may also create some content around challenges kindle authors face when it comes to formatting and marketing to name a couple. You give them some helpful hints here and there to get them interested and started thinking about this idea of kindle authorship. You talk about how it creates another stream of income and how being a published author can be leveraged to grow your reach and get new subscribers and customers.

Then once your readers are interested in the topic and read to get started writing and publishing their own book, you drop the offer for the product that will show them how to do exactly that. Do you see how a well mapped out content strategy will help with sales conversions?

Get out a calendar or planner, grab a notebook, or open a document on your computer and map out your content strategy for the next week or even the next month. Start with the end in mind. What are your biggest goals for that time frame? From there come up with a few different pieces of content that will support your end goal. Think about where your readers are at right now, and where you need to lead them so they are open to the offer you’re getting ready to present to them. Map out your strategy and then get to work writing the content for it.