So you’ve built your content strategy and you’re seeing first successes. Bounce rates are down, time on site is up, you’re driving your customers to the pages that you want them to see and your call to actions are showing impact. Are you done? Nope. You’re just getting started. Here’s what you should do to make your content strategy work.

1. Be consistent

There’s tremendous value in building consistency in your content. Not just in your brand styles, but in your publishing patterns that will enable your content to be expected where it needs to be expected and helps your content being identifiable. Establish topic buckets that you see deliver best on your core business goals, and standardize the ways and times in which you publish. Remember, it’s not just a strategy to build reader patterns, but helps your SEO as well.

2. Be critical

Your content is not set in stone and should always allow for criticism. Be a friend of critics (especially your analytics software and experts), and appreciate their input. An important rule is that even a single constructive criticism is important enough to be looked at. Sometimes, the seemingly quiet and less important critics will give you the most valuable ideas how to improve your content.

3. Be creative

Be open to new ideas and don’t be afraid to innovate. Nine of your ideas may fail in the real world, but one will win. And this single success will outshine every little error along the way. Of course, being creative works best with the next rule.

4. Be collaborative

It’s a no brainer, but we tend to only see half the story here. Use your resourcesinside your organization to achieve results you and your team alone could not do. Communicate and collaborate with the outside, such as your community, members or customers, on projects to amplify your creative power. Remember, community support is often free to your organization and delivers symbiotic benefits for both sides. Building a community around your product is a really, really good idea.

5. Be conclusive

In short, your content - and I’m not just referring to text and images, but to second tier content such as IX as well – needs to make sense. Yes, you have brand identity, but you have content identity that supports your brand as well. Keep a 30,000 ft view on your content at all times. Your customers have eagle eyes and will notice quickly if your content is awkward and doesn’t make sense, which can result in a dilution of your identity. Walk a fine line between being creative and being conclusive as you build the content on your site.

6. Be considerate

In most cases, your customer is giving her/his time to you, not vice versa, when consuming your content. Be mindful of this circumstance and don’t waste their time. on average, it takes web users less than one second to determine whether they like a website or not, and less than seven seconds to determine whether a certain page will provide value to them or not. This circumstance is especially important if you think about the massive amount of information that is available to use today on many different device types. How much unnecessary time do you want to spend on a website when you are using your mobile device?

7. Be corporate

This one matters above all. It keeps you employed. In the end, you do what you do, because it provides business value to your employer. Even if you are a journalist writing for a newspaper, and you are following the most stringent ethical standards, you won’t get paid, if your employer cannot extract a business benefit from your expertise. Never lose track of the business goals and always know how your content not only helps your readers find what they are looking for, but also helps your employer stay in business.