The Weekly Authority #51
By: Digital Authority Co
Tags: Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Content

Top 5 Content Marketing Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

Content marketing can offer a powerful way to connect with an audience. It can also empower brands to build authority and turn more readers into new clients.

So how do you do it for your brand?

How do you create “interesting” content that people will want to read (and engage with)?

And how do you start developing content that will develop authority, a following and (ideally) more leads for your business?

This week, I’ll start answering these questions by pointing out some of the most common content marketing mistakes brands make. Knowing how to avoid these mistakes (or fix them) can help you position your content for more traffic, engagement and conversions.

Common Content Marketing Mistakes

1. Sloppily written content — Typos, poor grammar, sentence fragments and other mistakes can kill your content. Sloppy content can be a turnoff to an audience (because it’s a red flag that a source is NOT an authority on a topic). It can also free fall in search (because search engines don’t usually rank sloppy content well).

Fix: Make sure to edit your content at least once before publishing it. Ideally, perform this edit with a “fresh” set of eyes so any and all mistakes are caught and fixed before the content goes live.

2. Regurgitated content — This refers to content that just repeats information that’s already widely available online. If content offers no new insights, it’s simply not valuable to an audience.

Fix: Make sure that your content provides value, educates your audience and/or shares something new. If you’re finding that you can’t share anything new or insightful about a given topic, choose another topic that you can say something new about.

3. Poorly formatted content — Blocks of text on a page, no subheadings, no bullets, etc. can make a piece of content visually unappealing. In fact, without nice formatting that draws a reader in, content (even really interesting and well written content) is far more likely to get overlooked.

Fix: Keep your paragraphs short (like 2 to 3 sentences). Make sure there’s a new heading (or subheading) after every few paragraphs. Put lists in bullets. These formatting changes can make good content great!

4. Dated content — Content that focuses on out-of-date topics provides little to no value to an audience. And that means that the content will fall flat in search and see minimal (if any) engagement.

Fix: Do some research before you dive into writing. While it’s great to focus your content on current topics, evergreen topics can be even better (because they can give your content a longer shelf life).

5. Content that’s not optimized — Content that doesn’t target a relevant keyword (or keyword phrase) won’t see good rankings. And that can mean that no one finds or sees the piece.

Fix: In the research phase (before the writing starts), choose the best keyword phrase to target in a piece of content. Then, strategically use that phrase in the piece (and the associated meta data) to properly optimize it.

And don’t forget about the images! While images can be visually appealing and engaging, they can also provide SEO benefits. In other words, images can satisfy and appeal to both readers and search engines.

Common Content Marketing Mistakes: A Final Word

Every now and again, mistakes can trip up even the best laid plans. We are human after all.

So, try to keep a positive perspective about isolated mistakes. Consider them learning opportunities to refine your content and/or content marketing processes.

What have your experiences with content marketing been? Have you made — or successfully avoided — any mistakes?

Tell me about your content marketing experiences, challenges and successes on Facebook and LinkedIn. And don’t hesitate to get a hold of me on social media to ask any digital marketing question or just to say ‘hi.’ I look forward to hearing from you!