I wanted a new website, but I didn’t just want to recreate what I had. If my day job in content marketing taught me anything, it is to make a plan, set goals, and define your audience. Here is how these skills contributed to the creation of Kathryn Called KT.

Marketing Lesson 1: What Do You Want to Accomplish?

When thinking about content marketing, it doesn’t help to write articles for the sake of writing articles (same with press releases, social media posts, newsletters, and everything else considered content). What should those articles accomplish? Are you educating your audience or do you want to engage with them? Don’t adopt a new trend for the sake of adopting it. Use it effectively by defining what you are using it for.

For me, I wanted a single place on the internet for my blog and professional portfolio. A single website, preferably away from WordPress.com’s WYSIWYG, to showcase my writing chops to strangers on the internet. I wanted a place to gather a following, show off where else I can be found on the internet, and hopefully present myself as someone others want to work with.

So I purchased a domain (finally), and played around on multiple website builders, including Squarespace and Wix. Ultimately, I went back to WordPress (the .org one) because it offered the most freedoms in terms of pricing and customizations. 

Marketing Lesson 2: Who is Your Audience?

Defining the members of your audience is crucial. You could be writing great content and no one will see it because you are not reaching the people who should actually read it. Are you writing blog posts when you should be writing newsletters? Are you on Instagram when you should be on Facebook? As soon as you figure out who your audience is (i.e. married women, aged 25-50, with at least one child), do some research as to where they are online. Then start catering your marketing content to them.

At least, that’s what I would do if I were writing for a company or organization. Since this is my personal blog and my personal website, I am more worried about how I am presenting myself to the world. The people who come here either like what I write already, want to get to know my online persona, or I applied to a job at their organization and they want to make sure I am cool enough to work with them.

Demographically speaking, I don’t know who you are, dear reader. I never bothered to pay attention to that in the old iteration of my blog, something I plan to rectify here. Until that gets going in a month or so, I’ll worry about how I present myself to complete strangers.

Marketing Lesson 3: Define Your Goals

This plays into Lesson 1 but at a more detailed level. If your intention is to create a way for your audience to interact with you, getting active in a social media account is the way to go. If you want to educate your audience about something, then a blog or newsletter is a better option.

Even then, make your goal specific. “Increase newsletter subscribers by 500 in three months” is a goal. It has a marker that defines what should be accomplished and when. This lets you know whether your aspiration was successful or not.

An aspiration sounds more like “Create a place for writers to talk about the plot structure of the Locked Tomb Trilogy by Tamsyn Muir.” It tells you what you want to do, but it doesn’t define what success looks like.

That being said, my goal for this website is less of a goal and more of an aspiration: Show off my writing skills to help me nab a new day job and/or some freelancing gigs. What this site will look like in 2021, I’m not sure.

If you would like to learn more about content marketing, I learned a lot of valuable lessons from Copyblogger, an online community and resource for copywriters and digital marketers.