It’s time to up your content marketing game!

How do you attract potential customers and make them know, like and trust you? By creating kickass content, of course!

While some people see this as incredibly time consuming, it really is the fast track to position yourself as an expert. This could take years if you’re trying to build a profile the old fashioned way, waiting to get elusive speaking gigs or an appearance on TV.

There are a few extra things you can do along the way to make sure that time spent creating the content is going to pay off.

1. Post consistently

Consistency is vital in marketing. Any business who has created a large audience will confirm that this is true. Even unsuccessful marketers know that this is true, but they haven’t been able to crack the code to help them get it done. It’s all about systems.

That’s why creating a content marketing calendar is a vital part of sticking to producing content. This allows you to visualise when content needs to be created and set up a process to make sure this content becomes a reality.

By producing content consistently and on particular days, you’re also conditioning your audience to tune in to what you have to say.

While it’s nice to think that you can write content on a whim, even with the best intentions, it doesn’t happen. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience! You need a content calendar, create a system, and reap the rewards. It’s the only way.

2. Know what your audience wants

Do you know what your audience really wants to read about?

If not, it's time to get down to research. If you’re not really sure how to go about this, offer some coaching sessions (free or paid, that’s up to you) and really dig in deep about what they’re struggling with and what their goals are.

You could also send out a survey, although I find conversations in everyday situations is where the real gold is. If you’ve got clients asking you questions, it’s likely there are others out there that also want to know the answer. So use this knowledge that you have to your advantage.

Be an observer and pick up all the little clues on what people really want…and need.

Another trick is to join communities (like Facebook groups) and watch what issues people are posting about. Be an observer and pick up all the little clues on what people really want…and need.

3. Send your new content to your email list

People are so busy these days, and they’re being pulled in a million different directions. It’s not always guaranteed that those who already follow you on social media are also going to see your latest blog, but they might really want to see it. So make sure you distribute it in a few different ways.

Sending out blog posts or your latest video to your existing email list is a great way to do this. It gets your existing followers back to your site, and these types of highly engaged visitors are more likely to share your post and it can even result in more backlinks to your website.

Read how Neil Patel uses email marketing to dramatically increase his organic traffic.

4. Share your posts on social media more than once

Do you share your content more than once?

Or do you share it once and tick it off the to do list?

With Facebook reach the way it is, and Twitter moving at the speed of light, the reality is that a very minimal part of your audience will have seen your post if you only share it once. So it's vital that you keep sharing it

So here’s how to do this without annoying your followers:

On Twitter, you could pull a number of different points out of your blog post and use that as the basis for multiple tweets. You can push these out over the next 1 – 4 weeks, and keep sharing at a lower frequency over the months to come.

On Facebook, you could create 4 different images or memes from the blog topic and share one post a week for the next 4 weeks. Just make sure you intersperse this with other content, and suddenly you’re getting a lot more eyes on the same blog post.

Ultimately it's vital that you're spending more time promoting your content than you are spending on production. Otherwise all that time is going to be for nothing. If you build it, people will not come – you have to get it out in front of as many people as possible!

A good rule of thumb is to spend 20% of your time creating content, and 80% of your time promoting it.

It doesn't matter if you're producing a podcast, a YouTube channel or doing Facebook lives. It's all about taking the time to put your best foot forward and providing your audience with what they really need.

Be a producer, not a consumer!

Something that I often remind myself is to be a producer, not a consumer. This is always the basis of any business success story, and the same applies for content too.

So start putting your stuff out there for others to enjoy, make sure you spend more time promoting it than you do creating it, and you'll enjoy the rewards.