Project Dogfood June Progress – Refining a Content Marketing Plan

4th in a series of 6 planned posts that discusses the internal project to grow the audience to this blog site.   This month’s post reports on efforts to create a content marketing plan, based on information learned at a recent Mesh conference session presented by Joe Pulizzi >(@juntajoe) of the Content Marketing Institute.  To view other posts in the series visit http://demandaccelerator.com/project-dogfood/

I started this blog in a bootstrap fashion.  I began the activity with a loose plan, with the primary purpose of demonstrate my skills and experience. It’s now time to become more focused on my target audience and to establish a fuller Content Marketing Plan to support my consulting business.  While at the Mesh conference in May, I attended a session by Joe Pulizzi, of the Content Marketing Institute, that provided me with a toolkit to create this plan.  Joe’s slideshow from the event can be found on Slideshare at the following link >http://www.slideshare.net/juntajoe/rise-above-with-content-marketing-workshop-mesh-conference

There were 3 main takeaways from the presentation:

• Define a Mission Statement for your content marketing plan
• Share content that comes from your peers, competitors and mentors.  Create a list of 20-40 influencers that you can regular source for content.
• Plan your content production for each channel that you use.  Tailor the content for each channel.

Once you have these three things defined, a schedule of content can more easily be produced.

I’ve been begun to apply this to my blog.   For the Mission Statement, Joe recommends that it contain three things: definition of your core target audience; what will be delivered to them; and the outcome for the audience.   My original tag line – For companies that want to use technology to increase their business reach – did contain some elements of this but was too vague.  My now refined mission is as follows:

An educational resource for business executives, who want to better understand modern business organization and practices as well as the latest digital tools for sales and marketing to put them to use, so that they can build a customer focused company and sustain a profitable increase in revenue.

For some time I have been re-tweeting other content that would be relevant to an audience reading my blog. I am also using this other content as further recommended reading in my weekly newsletter.  I had been trolling twitter and the net for other content.  Since the Mesh session, I have started to build a list of what I consider to be my influencers.  (In fact, I am building that list as a twitter list).  It has made pulling together this information much more efficient.

I am also planning on implementing the 3^rd point.  At this point in time my unique content is in my blog – then I produce status updates in twitter, linkedIn, facebook and google.  What I want to add next is to create presentations (for Slideshare) and infographics (for Pinterest) that complement my blog posts.   I believe this will actually aid in producing relevant content, as the action of putting the ideas presented into other content will be a way to make sure the ideas are complete and hang together.

A note on my Traffic Stats

Mar15-Apr15 remains as the busiest cycle that I’ve had since deciding to report on the progress of my efforts to build an audience to this blog.

As with the last cycle, what seems to have dipped is the number of referrers from Twitter.  I continue to investigate why twitter referrers have fallen since April.  I am looking at 1) the topics of my posts and corresponding #hashtags used 2) the time I am tweeting 3) the community I am building on twitter.

At the same time, my referrers from Google are growing, specifically for certain posts.

My blog is a WordPress hosted blog. I recently queried WordPress support concerning the stats because I had a number of WordPress likes of my post without seeing corresponding views in the stats.  I found out that people who view the post from WordPress reader are not recorded in the view stats, and there isn’t a way to capture that traffic.  There is an audience there I am not able to track.  If one of them is you, please let me know you have read this post by a like or by leaving a comment!