There are a number of ways to measure success and growth in business. It may be tracking how well known your brand is, or how many followers you have on various social media accounts. However, for many businesses these statistics are not indicative of success. Earning money is.

One of the most important resources an online business can use to promote growth is content. Blog posts, newsletters, social media updates, videos, podcasts and more can all be used to increase your reputation and your traffic, but you should really be using content to grow the turnover of your business.

Content – The Resource To Leverage

Online, everything revolves around content. Whether you sell products or services your business will need a lot of content to engage, educate, and encourage your prospects to buy from you. If you create information products you need even more content. So, the more you can leverage the content you create and the better you organise it, the more efficiently your business will grow.

Content Formats

There are many different formats of content you can use. It can be text, audio or visual in nature. You can place this content on your own blog, as guest posts and articles on other websites, on social media and in emails and newsletters. Discover which formats your audience prefers and where they are most likely to find it. Then create a combination of different types of content to ensure you reach more of your potential audience.

Create With a Plan in Mind

To leverage your content properly you must have a plan. Don’t create content without deciding on a point of view, voice, and the goals for the content. Ideally each piece should act as part of a path your audience can follow until they reach a destination you can use to increase your income: an opt-in page.

The Email List Is Where Your Business Grows

It’s a cliche, but ‘the money is in the list’, is as true today as it was ten years ago. Okay, some will get pedantic and say it must be a targeted list, or a responsive list, but they’re just trying to appear that bit more clever. The bottom line is you will create more customers from the prospects on your list than from anywhere else. Advertising and social media marketing can produce customers directly, but probably the best way to leverage them is to lead people to your email lists.

Incentives To Join Your List

In the most successful solopreneur businesses the blog posts, social media updates, and sometimes even webinars are designed to recruit people to an email list. Get the right target audience on a list and you can market to them regularly. The key is to have something free or low cost that will persuade your audience to hand over their email addresses while anticipating a valuable and useful reward for doing so.

Joined Up Content

Ideally your content should work together. Start with the product, service or event that you want to promote. Decide what email content your prospects will need to consume to become educated and enthusiastic so they are more likely to purchase from you. Then work backwards again to decide the content you will need to get more email subscribers. The blog posts, articles, etc. that will catch their interest, and the incentive that will persuade them to join your list.

Create a Content Calendar

When you know what content you need to create, it’s important to work out in a calendar when you will create the required content. If you are planning to launch a new product in three months, you have to make sure you can create the promotional and educational material in that time frame. It will be a missed opportunity if you don’t give yourself time to grow and educate your list before launch day.

Create Content For A Purpose

Earlier I said you should really be using content to grow the turnover of your business. With this clear goal you’ll be able to look at how your content works together to recruit prospects and encourage purchases. You’ll be able to identify and fill gaps in your content and thereby create a more efficient way of growing your business.