8 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Your Content
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We’re all bound to make mistakes here and there as we hone our content-creation skills. They call it trial-and-error for a reason! But you can save yourself a great deal of time and frustration by steering clear of the most common content mistakes.
Savvy content creators know a solid method can spare you plenty of madness. Below are eight common content mistakes to avoid so you can maximize your reach and build an outstanding reputation as a high-quality creator.
Not Focusing on Your Target Audience
In theory, making content for everyone sounds like a great idea. But in reality, you want to know and focus on a specific target audience. Monitor feedback, comments, and engagements to understand your audience better and discover what they want.
You can familiarize yourself with your target audience using these steps:
Identify and create buyer personas. Look over your analytics to identify specifics like stage of life, spending power, and patterns. Don’t limit yourself to a single persona.
Look at your competitors. Analyze your competitors to determine their voice, study their hashtags, and see who engages with them on what topics.
Know where your audience is most active. Prioritize platforms by learning where your audience is most active—for example, TikTok and Twitter for younger users, Facebook for older users.
Survey your customers. Go directly to the source! Survey your customers to learn more about them and discover what content they consume.
Not Optimizing For SEO
Content optimization is essential because it helps both users and search engines understand your content. Benefits of optimization include increased visibility, improved user experience, and generating more organic traffic. Optimization will look different for blogs and videos, but the idea is the same across platforms – to rank higher and get more eyes on your content.
Best practices for optimizing your content might include:
Including the right keywords
Covering your topic in depth
Incorporating keywords in the meta descriptions and titles
Managing keyword density
“Pruning” your content, removing any distracting or irrelevant content
Updating your content regularly
Not Substantiating Claims with Evidence
It’s critical to use correct data, cite your sources, and prioritize quality to instill confidence in your audience and build credibility. Whether you’re creating a blog, YouTube video, or podcast, your reputation will suffer if you consistently make unsubstantiated claims. Do your due diligence with research and always give credit where credit is due.
Not Having A Clear Goal
Goals are funny. We always think we know exactly what they are until we realize we don’t! The best way to ensure you’re clear on your goal is to be as specific as possible. Without a clearly defined goal, content – like anything else – can quickly go off the rails.
Each piece of content you create should have a goal. You can sometimes hone in on the piece’s goal by exploring the call to action. What action do you want people to take after reading, watching, or listening to this content? Make sure you have a cohesive story or message that supports your goal.
Example goals might be:
Educating current and future customers
Engaging with your customers
Building brand loyalty
Increasing brand awareness
Attracting new customers
Generating new customer revenue
Gaining and nurturing email subscribers
Being Inconsistent
Life happens, and creating consistent content can often feel like an uphill battle. But batching and scheduling your content can make you much more efficient. Batching simply means creating a lot of content at once so you don’t have to make time every week.
Posting inconsistently causes you to lose credibility. It also results in your audience losing interest. People like routines and predictability. They also like knowing you’re reliable and trustworthy! Consistent content posting helps you check all these boxes.
Not Engaging with Your Audience
Engaging with comments can be time-consuming, but it’s essential! People are eager to see their questions answered and their feedback acknowledged. If you don’t bother to respond, it makes a poor impression and turns people off.
When users take the time to reach out with inquiries, praise, or requests, you can build a great rapport by responding thoughtfully. Getting a timely reply makes people feel validated and seen. It also builds community and loyalty, two things you can never have too much of!
Not Maximizing Your Content
Making outstanding content is time and energy-consuming. It’s also worth it. But there are plenty of ways to streamline your processes and create more efficiently. Repurposing is just one way to maximize the high-quality content you’ve already got.
Repurpose and reuse your best content in creative ways to save both time and energy. For example, you can take an existing E-Book and turn it into multiple blog posts, an email, or an infographic. Or, you can turn a blog into a series of short video clips.
Not Reviewing Your Performance
Reviewing your content’s performance might not sound exciting, but it can be! After all, it shows the fruits of your labor. Plus, it’s one of the best ways to gauge what’s working and what isn’t so you can create more successful content in the future.
Try sitting down once a month to review your content marketing performance. If something doesn’t seem to be working, this could be a tactic you want to shelve. If something is performing well, celebrate, then make sure to prioritize the use of this tactic in the future.
