Most people confuse content marketing with writing and publishing tons of what they call “SEO content” on their blog or website. Regularly publishing content – whether good quality or bad quality – is just one aspect of content marketing. So a person merely providing content cannot call himself or herself a content marketer – even I don’t do that. Yes, I do provide content marketing services but since I understand the sort of resources needed I don’t exclusively promote myself as a content marketing expert. I call myself a professional content writer and I’m fine with that. If you also want to hire me for your content marketing requirements, I can help you.
Content marketing includes the following:
- Publishing high-quality content on your website or blog
- Publishing high-quality content on other websites and blogs linking back to your own website or blog
- Promoting your content using various channels available to you
The last point is as important as writing and publishing content. Without this, there is no content marketing, there is just content publishing. Once you have started publishing content you need to let people know what you’re doing because unless they can find your content, it’s of no use.
So when you talk about content marketing strategy it doesn’t just mean publishing lots of keyword-centric content. Of course this is important because unless you have content you got nothing to promote but it’s like your favourite TV serial. Unless you know about the serial, you are not going to watch it and if you don’t watch it there is no use producing it. So what do they do? The company that produces the serial lets it be known by advertising on the same channel, on different other channels and also using print and Internet publications. The content is there: it needs to be promoted.
You may say that once you start ranking well on search engines you will automatically start getting traffic. Yes, it works for some, but for most it doesn’t. This is because there is too much competition. People who had to rank are already ranking well. Maybe they got some advantage or maybe they used some black hat SEO tactics, whatever, the point is, they are ranking better than you and they might be getting lots of traffic due to that. No use ruing over it. You can either leave it at that or start exploring other options, like promoting your content using whatever channel is available to you. Want to know what those channels are? Stay tuned.