One of the most valuable advices I learned while being in college is to work smarter not harder.
It’s one thing to toil, give your best and dedicate a huge amount of time for your work. But to find the most effective way to tackle a problem, enjoy the work you do and plan the best time for your work is the key to succeeding.
When you think of work as an obligation, you will feel stressed, encumbered with tasks and tired. Instead, think of work as an opportunity to learn, and a chance to hone your skills. Do your work with passion and love – then the rest will be easy. So how does one work smarter?
#1. Work With A Goal
Life is sometimes a trial and error experience. You first make mistakes then later on you find out what things work, and then you succeed. Without goals, you would be stuck in confusion. You wouldn’t know your limits, and will blindly follow a path to failure.
In content marketing, you have to set a few goals for every of your projects. See how your team can work in the first strategy, then evaluate. If it doesn’t produce good enough results, then switch your strategy.
Common Content Marketing Goals:-
- Establish Trust with Your Readers – by providing useful content
- Increase Search Engine Rank and Build Reputation – by creating interesting content
- Attract New Clients To Your System – by writing convincing content
#2. Learn To Categorize and Prioritize Work
I have a secret love for organization. There’s something about planning and categorizing that helps me do my work best. You can say I’m a control freak. But to be in control doesn’t mean you have to do all the work.
The best way to get work done is to designate and prioritize tasks (especially if you’re hard pressed for time and have to meet deadlines).
When you designate work, you give your teammates responsibility. It will also help foster teamwork and creativity. Remember that four brains are always better than one.
When prioritizing tasks, identify the most important and do that first. The best way to prioritize is to list your entire task and order them by using this formula:
- Priority-A Tasks / Urgent Tasks / Daily Tasks – These tasks are most important. Damaging consequences will happen if these tasks are not done.
- Priority-B Tasks / Weekly Tasks – They are secondary tasks which has mildly negative consequences if not done.
- Priority- C Tasks – Tasks that has no penalty if not done.
There will come times when you have to be flexible. You might even scrap your work plan because something bigger came your way. Don’t lose focus. Learn to adapt, always make a Plan B.
#3. Use Your Time wisely
Time is money. You are investing your own energy and time for the development of your project. You must find a way to get more things done at a short time. While seeking help from an online marketing consultant and outsourcing will cost you money, a simple revamping of your strategy may be the needed change for your strategy to work out.
- Schedule – If you have a team, you can provide them with guidelines and updated plans to work out every week. Use your list of goals to guide you in making a schedule. Remember that a work done well is a work planned well.
- Time Management Apps – Technology has made everything easier, especially managing time. There are many time management apps that can help you track of your work to make sure you are using your time well. Try ezClocker, Toggl, Harvest, or Everhour.
#4. Build Your Audience
So you’ve build a great blog with top notch content, the problem is nobody’s reading it. Successful strategy not only plans its content, but also the second most important factor – the audience.
- Find the right audience for your content. Nothing is more frustrating than a misdirected content to a non-catering market. With the overload of information on the web, it’s hard to market to people who aren’t interested.
- Understand your audience. As a content marketer you have to understand your audience like how you understand your family. Don’t make the mistake of creating content that focuses on things that only you care about.
#5. Improve Your Site
Nowadays, it’s more than just intelligent content. Though you may have a great strategy and dedicated readers, a crucial factor that can affect your content strategy is the overall appearance of your site. People like images, fresh new visuals, and interactive content.
- Clear Site design: Readers quickly click the x button when they cannot navigate properly on a site. And if you bore them long enough to confusion, there’s this big chance that they may not be coming back again.
- Great Visuals: Content works best when it is paired with images. If there’s a chance to get images into your article, then use this opportunity to provide some stunning visuals for your readers. But don’t be like other sites that put images for the sake of providing an image to the article. Focus on adding more infographics, graphs, charts, and relevant images.
#6. Create Useful Content
Customers love content that has a way of benefiting them. It may be in the form of information, products, services or entertainment. The purpose of your content should always be marketing, but you must offer something in return for your customers. As a content strategist, you must focus on how you can market a product that will make your people’s life easier by solving a common problem.
#7. Track Your Success
Are you producing good results? How will you know if you don’t keep these things on record? There are many ways to measure the results of your content. You can measure traffic, likes, shares, new follower requests and comments your content have earned after a month of posting. Once you know what content performed best, you can re-work your strategy to achieve the same results.
Images “ content strategy concept chart handwriting on whiteboard / Shutterstock.com“
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