Understanding Your Audience

While your content can appeal to a variety of different audience groups, your goal should be connecting with your regular readers. Tailored content makes your audience feel important and valued. This means that these readers can become promoters of your brand. 

You need to truly understand your audiences and create buyer personas for targeted content marketing. For instance, if you are selling beachwear, you may want to write different content for those who live close to beaches (and visit frequently) and those who live far from beaches (and visit only a few times a year). Curate your content based on your buyer’s persona. 

By creating a buyer’s persona with your customers’ characteristics like profession, age, gender, industry, daily tasks, etc., you can target your messaging to different groups of audiences. 

Assessing Content Quality

1. Relevant KPIs – You can assess the quality of your content by looking at the relevant KPIs, including dwell time, search visibility, and reader engagement. Search visibility shows the website’s content ranking amongst a variety of keyword combinations. Dwell time refers to the amount of time a person spends looking at your website’s content. Reader engagement measures your readers’ interests, thoughts, and opinions. 

2. Use Data Analytics Tools – Instead of assuming what your audience likes or not, use the various data analytics tools to uncover the patterns of content sharing and engagement. Different data analysis tools can tell you how your content is being shared across various social media channels against your competitors. Find out what kind of content is the most successful and tap into that space to create more relevant content for your readers. 

3. Content Audit – Conduct a thorough content audit to reveal the strength and weaknesses of your incumbent content strategy to make improvements moving forward. A complete audit assesses your link structure, current topics, metadata, etc. An audit helps you figure out the shortcomings of your current strategy, thus, allowing you to improve future content marketing campaigns. It is important to note that content strategy is not static, i.e., it should change with changes in market conditions, audience interests, and so on. Therefore, you might need to conduct content audits frequently throughout the year. 

4. Engagement Statistics – The best way to assess the quality of your content is by monitoring your engagement statistics, including views, likes, subscribers, and comments. If you are new to the content creation space, look at what your competition is posting. What generates the most audience attention? Understanding what customers want will help you create content that will cater to their interests. 

5. Check Page Traffic and Rankings – Use Google Analytics to check your page’s organic traffic, the number of keywords, and the ranking of those associated keywords. If you have written something that is of high value for your readers, your page traffic and rankings will organically go up. 
6. Look at Your Competition – One way to assess your content quality is by comparing your content with your biggest competitors. See what your competition is putting out there and what kind of content is trending. Try to make content around similar topics by adding your unique touch to it.

Creating a Sense of Community and Belonging

Creating a sense of community and belonging is crucial to successful content creation and marketing. Your audience should not just be passive consumers of your content. They should feel as though they are a part of a community. One of the ways to make audience members feel a sense of community is by involving them in the process of content creation. Make the channels of communication transparent and incorporate their inputs. Acknowledge and appreciate your readers from time to time for their valuable time. Share content in a way that makes them feel they belong. This can be done with high-quality personalization and customization. Share content that makes them feel seen and heard. Use different ways to ask for your customer’s feedback and opinions in crucial business decisions. For instance, asking them in a poll what they think the next post should be about. This gives them a sense of belonging to a community where their opinion is valued. 
Content creation is an effective marketing practice that publicizes your brand and allows you to reach new readers. A good content creation strategy includes understanding your audience, assessing content quality, and creating a sense of community and belonging. As experts in the programmatic advertising market, Publir offers a one-of-a-kind unified platform specifically built to maximize earnings for digital content creators. We provide complete solutions for Ad Optimization, Subscriptions, Crowdfunding, QuickShop, and AdBlock Recovery.

The post Growing Your Paid Readership: A Guide to Content Creation first appeared on Publir.

Benefits of Monetization

There are several benefits of monetizing your business in addition to making a monetary profit:

1. Increased Prestige – Monetizing your content can make your readers feel more important. Readers get a sense of exclusivity if some of your content is behind a paywall. Oftentimes, they are happy to pay for exclusive content. Additionally, even a small charge for your content makes it seem higher in value in the eyes of the readers.

2. Higher Quality Content – If you are charging money for your content, you have constantly strive for better quality. People can quickly cancel their subscriptions if they find the content sub-par. When you start monetizing your content, you have to invest more time and energy into content quality. Subscribers usually get exclusive access to quality content and premium perks which makes the subscription more attractive to them.

3. Increased Income – Monetizing your content creates multiple streams of revenue. Instead of just relying on advertisements on your website, creating a subscription-based or membership model can help you diversify your revenue sources.

4. Increase Reader Loyalty – By switching to subscription-based paid models, you can actually increase your readers’ loyalty. Readers who invest their time and money in a business are more loyal to it than those who don’t. Readers who have paid for your content want your business to do well.

Planning and Providing High-Quality Content

As mentioned above, subscription-based businesses have to commit to high-quality content to sustain the interest of their readers. Content is an asset for your business, so you must invest in high-quality content writers and editors. Good content should be clear, consistent, user-centered, concise, useful, and supported by references. Here are some things that you should keep in mind while creating content:

1. Having a Purpose – Your content should have a clear purpose, i.e., why are we creating this content? If you can’t answer this question, you might need to re-evaluate your content strategy.

2. Having a Measurable Goal – When you have a purpose for your content, you can measure the effectiveness and ROI of the content.

3. Keeping the Audience in Mind – It is important to keep your audience in mind. You need to understand whom you are creating this content for. You might have to use customer research, drive personas and conduct user analysis.

4. Using Specific Channels – You should know what channels your audience is using to create content tailored for that specific channel. Rather than just creating one type of content and sharing it across different channels, you can cater to your audience’s needs better if you tailor your content according to the channel.

Structuring Your Subscription Model

Building a subscription model is a multi-step strategy that requires prior planning. Consider the following:

1. See if Your Business Will Benefit from Subscriptions – Before switching to a subscription-based model, figure out if it is actually beneficial for your company and content. For instance, is your content something that readers have to access continuously within a period of time?

2. Choose a Pricing Strategy – There are different kinds of pricing strategies to choose from, like tiered, flat-rate, usage-based, module-based, and per user. You should choose the strategy depending on your goal. You can create different levels of subscription packages and levels.

3. Focus on User Experience – Improve the user experience by making the sign-up process easy and fun. You do not want your users to get confused about how to sign up once they browse your website. The sign up option should be clear and bold.

4. Simplify the Billing Process – You should have a robust billing process to make sure that it is set up to accept recurring payments. Your payment gateway should be simple and clear so that customers do not have to navigate a number of links to make a simple renewal. Make the interface as simple as possible. Offer the payment gateways your customers prefer, including various international and local payment methods. 

Marketing Your Content 

In modern times, there are a variety of avenues for marketing your content. For instance, you can offer a “freemium” option for your customers, i.e., they can access the basic version of your content for free, but they have to pay to get access to premium content. For example, Spotify uses such a subscription model. Utilize email marketing to reach your customers. Start making an email list if you do not have it already. Regularly post on your social media platforms to remind your customers of the value of your content. Finally, you can partner with trusted influencers to create mutually beneficial partnerships. You will gain more popularity and trust when a reputed influencer talks about your content. 

Nurturing Your Audience

There are many tactics to nurture your audience to your subscription-based content. For instance, you can reach your audience with uniquely targeted content that leverages their personas. Use multi-channel nurturing tactics that go beyond email marketing. Modern marketers use a combination of different social media channels, dynamic website content, email marketing, paid retargeting, and direct sales outreach. 

Building a paid readership is not a simple process; it is a multi-step, complicated strategy, as described above. However, the transition to this model is inevitable in the current economy. As experts in the programmatic advertising market, Publir offers a one-of-a-kind unified platform specifically built to maximize earnings for digital content creators. We provide complete solutions for Ad Optimization, Subscriptions, Crowdfunding, QuickShop, and AdBlock Recovery.

The post How to Build a Paid Readership? first appeared on Publir.