Content marketing is a cost effective way to build your brand, develop a customer base and drive sales. Unfortunately, despite their best intentions, most marketers and content creators commit one or more sins.

Here are thirteen common content marketing sins and actionable content marketing advice to fix them. [INFOGRAPHIC]

1. For the sin of stealing and promoting other people’s content as your own, you will document the content’s origin and make amends where appropriate (including public apologies and usage fees).
2. For the sin of boring, lifeless content, thou shalt dress up your content with attention getting eye candy including images and videos.
3. For the sin of blocks of text that causes readers’ eyes to glaze over, thou shalt make your content easy-to-consume with visually attractive formatting. This includes the use of color, bolding and bullet points to guide readers through your content
4. For the sin of confusing corporate-speak that obfuscates communications, thou shalt use customer-friendly language.
5. For the sin of not integrating your brand into newer content formats, thou shalt extend your 360° brand in a way that it’s recognizable.
6. For the sin of not optimizing your content (including images and videos) for search, thou shalt focus each piece of content on a keyword phrase. Further, you will include relevant links (both internal and external), use English words in your post URLs, and add text to your non-text content.
7. For the sin of only creating content when you have time so that it appears as if no one’s home, thou shalt create an editorial calendar and publish regularly.
8. For the sin of ending your content before it sells your offering, thou shalt ensure that each element of content contains a contextually appropriate call-to-action.
9. For the sin of typos and poor grammar that cause potential readers to leave without reading, thou shalt have a professional copy editor to correct these careless errors.
10. For the sin of not extending each content marketing project, thou shalt assess how to maximize your content marketing efforts across different platforms in different unique ways. (Here are 56 ways to recycle your content marketing and 15 Ways to Use Blog Posts To Create Content Marketing.)
11. For the sin of not socializing your content, thou shalt wear social media jewelry in the form of social sharing.
12. For the sin of not promoting your content, thou shalt share your content across your owned and social media entities. Where appropriate, you shall integrate content promotion into other communications such as customer service and billing emails.
13. For the sin of not tracking your content marketing efforts, thou shalt determine relevant metrics based on your goals and include promotion codes to measure results.

To avoid these thirteen content marketing sins, you must have a solid content marketing plan that’s consistently implemented. Of course, this can’t happen without sufficient resources, both human and financial.

What is Content Curation? Content: A broad term that refers to anything created and uploaded to a website-the words, images, tools and other things that reside there. (Handley-Content Rules) Curation: The care and maintenance of a body of work. Content Curation: All of the content that is published and shared through an organization.

• As we open the conversations on the seven deadly sins and virtues, memories of how eleven years ago I laid myself naked to the readers of my earlier blog. Throughout the month of May, we will be discussing the teachings promulgated by the Church in modern times and you are invited to reflect on how your life might have been affected by them.
• California OKs expansion of who can get COVID-19 vaccine to avoid doses going to waste. To forecast when California’s deadly COVID-19 surge will end. And content curation for Disney’s.
• While social media can support spreading information and content, like any other marketing campaign, social media requires promotion to get the word out. The most cost-effective options are using social media itself and your own internal communications.

What content marketing sins have you committed and what did you do to fix them?

3 Deadly Content Curation Sins To Avoid Boredom

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen

3 Deadly Content Curation Sins To Avoid Crowds

Here are some related articles you may find of interest.

3 Deadly Content Curation Sins To Avoid Plagiarism

Infographic and image: Heidi Cohen (Usage permitted but requires link to this post.)