Creating content is critical for any business with an online presence. Master content creation and you increase your chances of successfully engaging audiences and triggering more sales.

After all, we all want that, right?

3 Mistakes – Big. Huge.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been creating content for ages or just starting out. Falling foul of these errors will derail your efforts big time..

1.  Never Getting Started. The mind is willing but we trip ourselves up. It has to be the perfect content idea, or perhaps we should put off and do a bit more research, or, it won’t be good enough compared to others. Fear is a powerful demotivator.

Instead,  as Nike say, just do it. It will never be perfect, it will never be the right time, you will never have enough information – just go with what you’ve got and you can always come back later and refresh it. Put it out there and get the benefit of people reading, using, commenting and being helped by your content.

2. Ignoring your audience.  I realise you wouldn’t deliberately ignore them but if you write in a way that is boring or difficult to read then you are unintentionally ignoring them.

To prevent that there are things you can do. Have someone proofread or view your content and give you some feedback. Add some highlights to your material by using anecdotes, stories, examples. Use shorter sentences. Always think about your audience and what they need.

3.  Not including a call to action.  I know I’m guilty of this. It’s easy to get caught up in content creation mode and forget the purpose you’re ultimately doing it for.

Never be shy about summing up your content and giving the audience a next step. Think about what call to action you can include, ideally before you create the content – that way you will create it with the outcome in mind. Do you want to send them to another related blog post of yours? Direct them to a free offer? Send them to a buy button? Comment? Have them do a task and report back? Share or like your content on social media? Consider the CTA before you write/create and the content will naturally lead to that.

Pay attention to these mistakes and make sure you make better choices that will enhance your business efforts.