How to Implement Your Content Marketing Strategy

Now that we’ve looked at the structure of your content marketing strategy, we need to think about how to implement it.

There’s more to it than just creating a bunch of content and spreading it all over the web and having it all directed to your blog.  You have to create a schedule, but you have to plan it before you can implement it.

How do you create a schedule?

Let me say first of all that this is really not about time. I know that sounds a bit strange.  What I mean is that, it’s not about the amount of time you spend doing it.  It’s about how often you want to publish it.  It’s the frequency that will dictate how much you do.  That will then tell you how long it will take you to do it.  You have to start with how often you want to publish your content.

There are a couple things I need to say about this.  The first one is that you need to remember that your blog is the focal point for everything you do.  In fact, you might want to write that at the top of your plan so that you’ll see it whenever you work on it.  It’s really easy to get drawn away from this because to a certain extent all of the different platforms can appear to be equal.  What I’m saying is that if you’re not paying any attention you can find yourself directing your blog traffic somewhere else.  You always have to remember why you’re doing this.

The second thing is, your primary goal is to demonstrate that you’re the expert in your niche.  That means that besides distributing content at predetermined intervals, the quantity can never supersede the quality.  With those two things in mind, let’s think about how to structure your schedule:

First, how do you want to make your implementation of this strategy look over the next 90 days?  Most businesses make plans for 3 months at a time.  How do I know this?  It’s because they all have quarterly reports.

3 months will give you enough time to identify trends in your niche without getting bogged down in micromanaging it.  It will also give you some flexibility.  I should caution you too not to be too ambitious in this first quarter.  Things have a way of taking a lot longer than you think they will.  You’ll want to use this period of time as a step to help you later on.

Remember that your blog is your primary platform.

Next, you need to pick one more.  That will give you two platforms to start. Three is probably the maximum you can ever expect to do well, once you’re really in the zone, once you’re really able to create content.  You should plan to stick with two as you’re getting started.