136: Content That Clicks: Avoiding Common Content Mistakes with Heather Richie
In this episode, certified content marketing strategist, Heather Richie, shares her expertise on creating content that resonates with an audience.
With valuable insights on common mistakes businesses make when creating a content plan, Heather provides actionable tips on researching and understanding audience needs, developing a content strategy that aligns with business goals, and optimizing content for different channels.
Whether you're a seasoned content creator or just starting out, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone looking to create content that engages their audience and achieves business success.
Specifically, we discuss:
Common mistakes business owners make when creating a content plan and how to avoid them
How to align your content plan with your overall business goals and objectives
Effective ways to track the success of your content plan and measure progress toward your goals
Different ways to brainstorm and generate content ideas
How to optimize your content for different channels, such as social media, email, and your website
Summary:
Creating content that resonates with an audience is not as easy as it sounds, according to Heather Richie, a former police officer who stumbled upon freelance writing in 2017 and now works as a certified content marketing strategist. During a recent episode of the Course Creator's MBA podcast, Heather discussed common mistakes that business owners make when creating a content plan.
One of the most common mistakes is not getting to know the audience well enough. Heather stressed the importance of researching and understanding what keeps the audience up at night and what problems they have. She recommended going into Facebook groups where the ideal audience hangs out, doing competitor research, and using the Google ABC search to generate content ideas. Richie also suggested looking at the comments section on YouTube videos to see what questions and problems the audience has.
Another mistake is not having a content strategy. A content strategy is the vision, while the content plan is the roadmap to get there. Without a strategy, the content won't be helpful to the audience. To avoid this mistake, business owners need to dig into their audience's needs, figure out what type of content they like to consume, whether they prefer videos or short form content, and set up a content schedule that matches their business goals.
Heather emphasized that content goals must align with business goals. For instance, if the business goal is to sell more courses or get more clients, the content should focus on the audience's needs and position the business as an expert in the niche. To achieve this, business owners must create content that is optimized for different channels.
Different channels require different optimization strategies. For example, email content may need to be rephrased to be more helpful to subscribers, while social media content may need to be tailored to fit different character limits and image sizes. Heather recommended using the language of the ideal customer or avatar in content, which can be found in YouTube comments and testimonials. This helps to make the content more relatable and engaging.
To create content that generates revenue and achieves business goals, it's important to have a system in place for content planning and to systemize the business. This allows business owners to plan ahead and remain consistent with their content. Consistency is key when it comes to publishing content, but it's important to only publish as much as can be handled. Choosing a system that works for the business and sticking to it is crucial.
In conclusion, creating content that resonates with an audience takes time and effort. To avoid common mistakes, business owners must research and understand their audience's needs, create a content strategy that aligns with business goals, and optimize content for different channels. By following these steps, business owners can create content that engages their audience and achieves business goals.
Mentioned In This Episode
Where you can find Heather: Website and Instagram
Heather's free gift: 20 Questions to Ask Yourself When Creating a Content Strategy and Plan
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Transcript:
[0:00:00] Destini Copp: Thank you. And my special guest today is Heather Richie. Heather is a certified content marketing strategist. She's a coach for content creators and the blogger behind Writers Life For you. As a content marketing strategist, it's her goal to make content creation and understanding your audience easier so that you can make more money with the content you create. And Heather, I am so excited to jump into this topic with you because we definitely want to make more money with our content, for sure, right? I mean, that's why we're here. That's why we create the content. But before we get into all the questions that I have for you and the title or basically what we're going to be talking about today, which is creating a content plan that aligns with your goals. So before we get into all of that, can you tell the good audience just a little bit about you, how you help people and how you got into all of this?
[0:01:03] Heather Richie: So thank you for having me, Destini. First of all, this is a topic near and dear to my heart, so I actually funny story that not everybody knows. I was a police officer for about 20 years and I basically had to go out on disability and wanted to do something working from home. And so I ended up stumbling upon freelance writing back in 2017, started a blog in 2018, and I still do write SEO, optimized content for other bloggers. So that's kind of how I got started. And then content creation just kind of became my jam since I do it all day every day for myself and other people. So that's how I kind of got into being a certified content marketing strategist. And then I feel like there are so many. In theory, it sounds easy to create content your audience loves, but I feel like there's so many things that can trip you up in pitfalls, which is why I like talking about this topic, to kind of help people get to know their audience so that they can create content that people love and sells their offers.
[0:02:11] Destini Copp: And so I didn't know that about you, a police officer for 20 years. I just want to go ahead and say I'm thoroughly impressed. I don't think I could have ever have done anything like that. So kudos to you.
[0:02:25] Heather Richie: It was my only adult job, so doing that and then switching to working online is completely different. I use a lot of the same personality traits and I do problem solving. I mean, there's a lot of things that I can apply, but yeah, it's a totally different job from being a police officer to writing content.
[0:02:49] Destini Copp: Well. And one thing that you said, you said it sounds easy to create content that your audience loves, but we know that that's not the case. I know I've been doing this for a long time and I've been in marketing for over 25 years. It's not as easy as I think it is. Sometimes when I go in there to create something and put out in the marketplace, I'm like, why didn't anybody like that? So can you kind of go into some of the common mistakes that business owners like me, like the people who are listening make when creating a content plan, and maybe how they can avoid those mistakes?
[0:03:24] Heather Richie: Yes. So for instance, we've all made these mistakes because face it, when you're starting to create content, you're likely learning a lot of other things. So I don't ever want people to ever feel bad for making any of these mistakes because I've probably made like a gazillion of the ones I'm about to list. One of the first ones is not getting to know your audience well enough. And I feel sometimes we think we know what our audience wants, but sometimes we're creating the content that we want and we're not really researching or digging into what keeps them up at night, what problems do they have. So it's really important to do some audience research, whether that's going into Facebook groups where your ideal people hang out, or just doing research online. Looking on YouTube, I find that comments and YouTube videos are some of my favorite places to get questions and different things that people in your audience are having questions about or have problems about. So that's one mistake. And then also not having a content strategy. And I know I was guilty of this for probably the first three years. I always like to say that the content strategy is your vision, while the content plan is like the roadmap to get you there. So without a strategy, your content won't be that helpful to your audience. So you kind of need to sit down and figure out, okay, what are their needs, what type of content do they like to consume, what problems do they have, do they like videos, do they like short form content? It's really digging into those things and then setting up how you're going to deliver that, setting up a content schedule, and making sure that you set content goals as well, because your content goals need to match with your business goals too. And then one other one I'll throw in because I could be on this topic all day, and that would be ignoring SEO best practices.
[0:05:30] Heather Richie: Now I know when I first started I was like, I do not have time to learn SEO. And now I wish that was the first thing I had focused on. So if you're not finding keywords you can actually rank for, and you're just picking a random keyword, you may show up on like page ten of Google, and that's not going to do anything for you. So really learning at least on page SEO and different strategies that you can use to apply your content is also really important if you want to rank higher.
[0:05:58] Destini Copp: Let's dig into this. You said, your content goals need to align with your business goals. So let's talk about a little bit how we can align that. So how can we align our content plan with our overall business goals and objectives? Let's just say our business goal, right, is to sell or to bring on five new clients in the next month. How do we lay out a content plan for that and align it with that?
[0:06:30] Heather Richie: So actually, if you don't mind, I have another example or two.
[0:06:34] Destini Copp: Yeah, go in.
[0:06:35] Heather Richie: So, first of all, if you have business goals like you said, if you want to bring five new clients on, or if you want to rank higher on Google and make money from your content, or if you want to spread brand awareness and have people get to know your brand, then you want to make sure your content goals align with that. So for instance, if I want to increase my brand awareness, then you would want to create content that really showcases your brand's personality and values. And then if you want to get more website traffic, then you're going to want to create more written content that leads people back to your site, like blog posts. Or you could put resources in your social media bio link that lead back to your website, anything like that. It's really looking at what your goal is and specifically prioritizing doing that type of content to meet those goals. And you can have more than one goal, but just make sure that you are producing content that matches each one of those goals, if that makes sense.
[0:07:40] Destini Copp: It does. So for sure. I'm kind of thinking about people who are listening this podcast, which are a lot of people who have either online courses or digital products or memberships. And I think overall, right, I mean their end goal is to get more sales, get more clients. So how would you suggest they kind of back into that? What would be some good content goals or business goals that they could focus on to get to that?
[0:08:10] Heather Richie: If you want to sell more of your course or get more clients, you really want to focus on what your audience needs are so that you can show up in front of them with solutions that are going to lead back. So you want to position yourself as an expert. And I know a lot of people fall into that impostor syndrome trap. We all feel that way at times. Like, who's going to believe me? I'm not an expert. But you likely aren't giving yourself enough credit. So when you get out there, you're going to position yourself as the go to person in your niche, which is why it's important to niche down. I know that's not a very popular topic, but niching down makes your content creation easier and it makes it easier to talk to your ideal audience. So you're putting that content out there, you're coming at them with helpful tips. And then along the way you're going to be positioning your product, your course or your service as the solution to some of the things that they're dealing with.
[0:09:13] Destini Copp: So let's say that we know that we need to position ourselves as an expert to attract ideal customers. What are some ways that how do we go about kind of brainstorming and generating content ideas that would help us do that? Where will we go to find that?
[0:09:33] Heather Richie: So I'm all about finding new ways to come up with content ideas because I remember back in the day, this was something I really struggled with. So first you of course want to know what your audience, what their needs and their wants are. So if for instance, I'm selling my membership or my course and it is on and we'll say like content creation, like I have one, then what type of content, what questions do people have about content creation? What are the issues they have? Well, for instance, they have issues like understanding their audience and getting their audience to engage with their content. So you would want to put tips out there like that you can think of, go into those Facebook groups that I mentioned earlier where your ideal people hang out and then see what questions they're asking in there. And then create content that answers those questions. And then you can do good old fashioned competitor research, which I love because when you're brand new at this, you likely don't have a lot of an audience to ask or send surveys to. So I like to look for topics that my competitors are talking about. Now I'm not saying like steal their ideas, but I'm just saying you can see what content they're talking about that maybe you're not. And you might want to write a blog post or put social media content out there like that. You might find stuff that's not working well for them that you want to avoid. So that would be another way. And then I call it like the Google ABC search. I think there's something a little bit better than that.
[0:11:13] Heather Richie: But I like to go to good old Google and not only type in your keyword to start like you do good old fashioned Google searches and you'll see questions that the section that says people also ask. Those are good ideas for content to create content on because people are actually searching for those questions on the Internet. And then if say my keyword is freelance writing, then I could type in starting with the beginning of the alphabet A. So you might find, and I did this the other day, I've got to remember what came out. But like freelance writing for actors and you can keep going like go to B, freelance writing for beginners and go to C and you can see what content ideas will come up. And the keywords, because Google auto fills what people are already searching for. So those are easy things too. Like, oh, you know, people are already searching for the things so you can write content on them.
[0:12:10] Destini Copp: I love that and I know you brought it up just a few minutes ago about going to YouTube and looking in the comments. Yeah, I have not done that and I don't know why. Right? That seems so brilliant and why didn't I think of that before? Go in there and look at that.
[0:12:26] Heather Richie: I stumbled on it honestly by accident. And then a lot of what I like to use too is for your sales pages and things like that. If you can speak your ideal avatar or person's language. I like to pull what people are actually saying and use their wording. Like, I had somebody one day send me and I'll just say like a testimonial that said before my course, they felt like they were just winging it. And that's what I feel like. A lot of content creators think they're like just winging their content. They have no plan. They're doing stuff willy nilly. So that's another thing you can get from those YouTube comments too. It's actually pretty fun.
[0:13:08] Destini Copp: I love that. I love that and getting some of those words that they're actually using that you could take back to your content or your sales page or your social media captions or whatever the so let's say that we have a piece of content. We've done our research, we know it's something that our ideal customer is asking about. It's going to help them. How do we make sure that it is optimized for different channels? Like we're going to put it on our website, right? We're going to maybe even email it out to our list or post it on social media. Do we have to do anything different for all of those different channels or what is your recommendation there?
[0:13:53] Heather Richie: Yes, both, fortunately. And unfortunately, each platform has its own different how do I say, requirements. Or for instance, if you're emailing your list, it's going to be different than putting keywords in a blog post so you can take that blog post and maybe pull sections out SEO, optimize your blog post so that people can find you on the internet. And then when you send it out to your list, kind of pull sections or rephrase things in a way that would be helpful to your email subscribers. And I've been bad at this in the past. I've definitely gotten much better. But when you're trying to do all your social media, it can be really hard to not just copy and paste everything to every channel. But what I put on Instagram is going to be completely different than what I put on Twitter. Like the caption limit is different, character limits different, the image sizes are different. So you just want to make sure that A, you're only choosing the channels that your people hang out on so you want to go look at. You can probably just Google. I'm trying to remember what I googled back in the day for this, but Facebook caption requirements or something and it'll tell you the caption limits and it'll tell you image sizes. You could say Facebook Post image size if you search that in Google and it'll come up with the different image sizes and that way you're optimizing it for each channel and you're more likely to get engagement and that channel is more likely to show it to other people.
[0:15:32] Destini Copp: I think that's something that I personally struggle with is what do I put out on social media that's not just something that people will just look at and say oh, that's nice, but something that they will actually engage with. Do you have any tips on that?
[0:15:50] Heather Richie: So again, it just really comes down to knowing your audience. And I actually use social media templates from the viral marketing stars because the have a whole content strategy where they have the 80% value and the 20% selling basically. And so there's different types of content like quotes and stuff that people will comment on. You want to pick things that your audience is going to relate to. I'm trying to think of an example here. Like for instance, I like picking up email templates because copywriting, even though I'm a writer, copywriting is just not my forte. So when I can get 27 email templates for $25, I'm going to snag that that's just an example. But you could post something like that, like a picture of somebody getting money out of their wallet and throwing it. Like just take my money. When you see that sale on like funny things like that, that relate to them and then serious things or tips, things that are really going to help them, that they're going to be like, oh wow, it's like she's reading my mind.
[0:17:01] Destini Copp: I love that I'm right there with you. I ever see templates, I'm like, yes please, I want the to take my money. I'm all for the templates there. So Heather, before we wrap it up here, do you have any last minute tips for the audience when they're working on their content plan and they really want to make sure that the content that they're creating actually helps the generate revenue or achieve their business goals.
[0:17:32] Heather Richie: So what I really try to do, content planning failed me for a long time and part of that was that I didn't have my business organized well enough and systemized so that I could look ahead, if that makes sense. Now I could plan my content almost for the whole year. But you have to be set up the systems in your business and the processes like the content creation process so that you can look ahead. And if I know that I'm going to launch my course four times a year, then you could pick the months that you're going to launch your course. And then I like to use my Trello board because none of us are mind readers. Like, I don't know what course I'm going to create, most likely in September. So try to make it I say make it flexible. And that works with your brain because like with my Trello board, for instance, I can move things around. So if I end up, oh, there's this affiliate promotion that I clearly didn't know was going to happen. I want to switch this topic around or I'm going to launch my course in a different place. That's what will really help you is finding a system that works with your brain and the way you think and then making it flexible so that you can adapt it and really systemizing your business. I really get behind that. And I was one of those people that said, I don't have time to stop and organize my business. Well, a friend of mine said you don't have time not to because me taking those several days out to do that has made me be able to write like my Black Friday email six weeks in advance. It's insane.
[0:19:03] Heather Richie: The difference just getting organized will do. Which not everybody thinks about. That when you teach about content planning.
[0:19:10] Destini Copp: And I like that tip. So you use Charlotte. Are there any other systems that you have found work for folks and it.
[0:19:19] Heather Richie: Honestly depends on who you are. I know notion is really popular. Notion just doesn't work for me. So you may have to try systems like I've tried Asana evernote. I really, like, ClickUp. Click up is my second favorite. In fact, I was using Trello and ClickUp together, but it was just too much. I really love Click Up for task management too, but Trello can do all of that for you and send you reminders and notifications. So it's really just finding the system that works for you Asana. I worked for a woman that made templates in Asana that were amazing. So you can take any system that works for you and then make that your content planning system, basically, and create a content schedule. I have people ask me all the time, how often should I publish content? And I'm like, only as much as you can. Remain consistent because we all hear consistency is key. Consistency is key.
[0:20:16] Heather Richie: If you can't post on Instagram seven days a week, don't set that as a goal. Try doing three or four and then you can bump up over time, but only do what you can do and then choose a system that works for you.
[0:20:30] Destini Copp: And Heather, those are some great tips. Before we hang up here, can you let the audience know where they can find you? And also I believe you have a free gift for them.
[0:20:41] Heather Richie: I do. So I think there's going to be a link under the podcast episode that will show you my website and the different social media channels I'm on my blog is Writers Life for you and I write about working from home, freelance writing, and then content creation is a big topic on my blog. And the freebie I have is 20 questions to ask yourself when you're creating a content strategy and plan. And basically these are, some are focused on audience, some are focused on logistics, but these are the things that really tie to your content strategy and that they're going to help you set that up and the that is going to be able to help you create that content plan. And when you have a strategy and plan together, it's like magic. So those questions will really help you.
[0:21:30] Destini Copp: With the process and I want to know what those questions are.
[0:21:34] Heather Richie: They're good ones.
[0:21:34] Destini Copp: Heather, thank you so much for joining of me. I absolutely love chatting with you about content marketing.
[0:21:45] Heather Richie: Well, thank you so much for having me. This has been really fun myself. Love it.