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Week 1: Get Specific
Getting online means getting smart about how you manage your business, time, expenses, and other strategies. For that, you need SMART goals. If you are unfamiliar with SMART, it stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable (or Achievable), Realistic, and Time-Bound goals. The process of using SMART has been around for decades and has helped small business, independent contractors, and even internationally renowned enterprises increase productivity and attain their long-term goals. The reason SMART goals are gaining favour amongst internet users is because these goals allow you to track what needs to be done. The first part to SMART goals is specificity. So, let’s discuss getting specific with your goals and how to strengthen the foundation of your business.
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Week 2: Be Actionable
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Week 3: Get Found
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Week 5: Get Better
How to Create Actionable Content
Actionable content varies from industry to industry. However, there are common characteristics to implement, regardless of your niche.
Here are the traits of actionable content:
- Don’t play show-and-tell. Explain how to do something. By articulating how to do something well, you will show your level of knowledge and expertise in that niche, which will increase your trustworthiness. Remember that “how” is just as important as the “what.”
- Add research and quote industry experts or highly-rated personalities. This helps build your reputation and credibility.
- Use visual media, including infographics, videos, and images. Create micro-interactions that will keep people engaged with the content.
- Be innovative your delivery. Well-written content that is not just a copy of previously written content ranks high on the search engine result pages and boosts your credibility.
- Answer common questions and give advice on how to solve dilemmas.
- Write unique content. Don’t be afraid of sharing your own experiences, because real-life examples build trust in your brand.
- Include shareable content.
Now, the key is knowing how to select the right things to make actionable. Don’t add so much sugar that your readers can’t get through to the core of the content.
In other words, your actionable content needs to be done in moderation.
Hypothetically speaking, if you make everything on your website actionable, you are going to create a confusing jumble of misleading content. For example, imagine writing a blog post about how to generate more leads but then you go off on a tangent about how to choose a content management system. Does that add value? Does that answer the question the readers have? No.
You might need to experiment a bit before figuring out how to balance the actionable content, but it will be worthwhile.