Tag Archives: Content Marketing Success

This is why your content marketing is not working

Why your content marketing is not working

ReadWrite has published 6 reasons why your content marketing might not be working.

You know what? Content marketing is like any other undertaking in your life – it is replete with unpredictable outcomes. Hence, if you have been publishing blog post after blog post and have been keeping yourself busy (or one of your representatives) on social media and still haven’t experienced any significant improvement in your targeted traffic, some signs of disappointment and disenchantment are understandable.

The above post rightly says that “in the majority of the cases, it is not the content that is to be blamed. It is rather the content strategy.”

What exactly is content strategy?

It is

What content you need to publish.
Whom you should target.
Which format of content gives you the biggest leverage.
What platforms you should nurture to promote your content.

The author also says that most people wanting to use content marketing to promote their businesses do the bare minimum. They will just write 300 words because this is what Google recommends (minimum). They will use keywords to “optimize” their content writing rather than writing something meaningful and then using the keywords contextually.

Should you always publish long content? The Post says that you should write at least 1890 words. This number was discovered by Backlinko after analysing 11.8 million Google search results.

How many words you write depends on how much competition your face. About 1 ½ years ago I was working with a client who had hired an SEO company in the UK and this company was using SEMRush to figure out what must be the titles of the web pages and how many words individual web page must have according to the competition faced by that particular keyword or title.

Due to some communication gap, for many webpages I ended up writing more than required. They were upset because they thought that the time was wasted because if those many words were not needed, I shouldn’t have spent time writing them. Whereas, I was focusing on the necessity of the information rather than the word limit.

Why I’m writing this here is because I want to say that how many words you use when writing content for your web pages and blog posts depends on many, and often, weird factors.

When writing for my own blog, I don’t get bogged down by the number of words I must write. Hence, sometimes my blog posts have more than 2000 words, and sometimes they have merely 500 words. It depends on what I want to say at that time.

Bigger content marketing companies come up with surveys, statistics and numbers to aim for because they make big bucks flaunting these numbers.

Personally, what I have experienced is that it is the regularity that matters, coupled with quality and relevance.

Your audience doesn’t respond if your content is not relevant to what they are expecting. I provide content writing services. Sometimes I get obsessed with SEO-related topics but if I write too much on SEO, I will end up attracting the wrong audience because I’m not offering search engine optimization services. For me, SEO is intertwined with quality and relevant content writing.

Regularity is very important because even if you provide great content people need to come across your content on an ongoing basis. Thousands of businesses are continuously publishing content. Even if it is not great content, this content manages to occupy space in people’s minds as well as on the web. Hence you need to remain visible.

Here is my personal advice:

Don’t worry much about words and instead, focus on providing as much “useful” information as possible.
Maintain quality and relevance and give it precedence over regularity.
Be regular.

I know, explaining this to clients who want to pay according to the number of words their blog posts and web pages must have, can be difficult. Although most of them except that it is the quality that matters, they all aim for a certain number of words.

I can understand their worry. If they don’t give their content writer a “word-target” the writer may not spend much time on each topic.

Something to ponder on for me in the coming weeks.

Want to know why your content marketing isn’t performing well?

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Why is your content marketing failing?

You are regularly publishing blog posts. You have also tried your hand at publishing guest posts on other websites and blogs. You regularly send out your email campaigns. Then why isn’t your content marketing performing the way you think it should?

You may like to read 12 rules to make your content marketing successful.

Here is a thought-provoking post on why your content marketing might be failing.

The author rightly mentions some of the reasons:

No definition of success: Having no clue what exactly you are trying to achieve through content marketing.
Bad content: Publishing content without paying attention to the quality and relevance of your content.
No commitment: You publish and broadcast content randomly and according to your convenience, without committing yourself to a content publishing calendar.
No promotion: You think that by just publishing content you’re going to generate traffic.

Many people mistakenly think that content marketing is a cheaper and faster way to online success, whereas, this is not the case.

Just like any other venture that needs hard work and focus to succeed, so does content marketing.

Content marketing is not a quick fix.

It is just another form of marketing.

It requires long-term effort and commitment.

It requires you to spend money although, not as much as you spend on conventional marketing and advertising.

If content marketing is hard work, persistence and even expense, then why use it?

It is more effective than other forms of marketing available to you.

It is cheaper, comparatively, and its success is long lasting.

Content marketing is a holistic approach to educating and informing your prospective customers and clients so that they come your website on their own rather than being tricked through an advertisement or a marketing campaign.

You may also like to read What is content marketing? Explained in detail.

Since in content marketing you promote your business through the strength of your content, your content is the backbone of the entire campaign.

If your content is lousy then so is your campaign and then so is the outcome.

You want good outcome?

You need good, high-quality content.

Then comes persistence.

Attention span is low on the Internet.

No matter how great that particular piece of content that you published is, after a couple of days, it is going to fall off the radar.

You have to remain in front of your audience.

But, despite having great content, unless you aggressively promote your content and push it in front of your audience (without annoying or offending them), it is going to be difficult for people to find it.

I suggest the following actions if you want to promote your content without going the conventional advertising route:

Publish regularly so that the Google crawler begins to crawl and index your content with greater speed.
Publish SEO friendly content so that you enjoy higher search engine rankings that in turn makes more people find your content and come to your website.
Build a mailing list to distribute your content.
Remain active on social media.

I would like to stress again, merely publishing content doesn’t make your content marketing successful.

You need to follow a multifaceted approach.

Importance of email marketing for content marketing success

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Email marketing is important for content marketing success

In this blog post you will learn why email marketing is an integral part of content marketing and your content marketing is in complete without email marketing.

Although there are many reputable email marketing services, including MailChimp which I use, an average person relates email marketing to spamming.

Even those who want to use email marketing think that it means sending promotional and marketing messages to a bunch of email ids hoping that some of the recipients would purchase.

Since this approach rarely works, people conclude that email marketing doesn’t work.

For whom email marketing works, they know how to do it.

Content marketing works

They know that email marketing is not about promotion, it is about nurturing relationships and providing valuable content in people’s inboxes.

These people understand that content marketing and email marketing are inseparable.

Why you can’t ignore email marketing for your content marketing to be successful?

Because it is one of the most potent content distribution tools.

According to this Radicati report, by 2020 (this is January 2019) 3 billion people will be using email.

Do you think everybody is on Facebook and hence, people aren’t quite crazy about hearing from you via email?

According to this Forrester report, people are twice as likely to sign up for your email list as staying in touch with you via Facebook.

This Smart Insights report reveals that the email marketing conversion rate is higher than conversion rate from search engine traffic and social media marketing, combined.

Anyway the purpose of these links is not to throw numbers at your face, it is just to prove that there is a reason why businesses use email marketing even when everyone seems to be crazy about social media and social networking.

Coming back to the topic of the relevance of email marketing for successful content marketing.

Have a look at these statistics from Emarketer:

Email marketing ROI is much greater

As you can see, the ROI of email marketing is far greater than the combined ROI of social media, direct mail, paid search and online display advertising.

One of the biggest challenges of content marketing (aside from creating high-quality content on an ongoing basis) is delivering your content to your target audience.

No matter how awesome your content is, unless it reaches its target audience, it isn’t much effective.

Hence, content publishing and content distribution go hand-in-hand. One doesn’t exist without the other.

People won’t come to your website on their own.

One way is to make it possible for people to find your content on various platforms including search engines and social media and social networking websites.

The other way, more effective way, is broadcasting your content using email marketing, the mailing list that you have created.

The key phrase here is “the mailing list that you have created”. This is very important. Unless you build your own mailing list, there isn’t much content marketing success to be experienced through email marketing.

Building your own mailing list for content marketing success

Now, you may think, how are you going to build your own mailing list unless you get traffic and for traffic, you need your content marketing to succeed, and here I am writing that for successful content marketing, you need to depend on email marketing.

Yup, I know, it sounds like a vicious loop.

How to build your mailing list for content marketing success

These days lots of start-up companies approach me for quality content writing and content marketing.

I tell them that they should start gathering email ids from their website as soon as possible and for that, they must open up an account with one of the renowned email marketing services as soon as possible.

As goes a Chinese proverb, “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the second best time is now,” if you haven’t already put up a sign up form on your website or blog, now is the time to do so.

As you persistently publish high-quality content on your website and you use the available channels with you – search engine optimization, social media marketing – other forms of promotion – you will draw people to your website.

These people would like to subscribe to your updates in case they don’t want to miss out on the wonderful information you are publishing.

They can’t be tracking your website all the time. They would like to receive an update from you whenever you publish valuable content.

For example, if you want to keep a tab on what I am publishing on my blog or website, you must subscribe to my updates because whenever I publish something new, I use my mailing list to broadcast it.

This is how your mailing list grows. People come to your website. They see what a wonderful job you’re doing with your content. They don’t want to miss your content. They subscribe. You build your mailing list.

Why email marketing is the most effective content distribution tool?

More than 85% of adults in the US send or read email every day.

When you check your email in the morning, you are in the right frame of mind. You are expecting to receive emails and this is why you are checking emails.

Of course, some emails are annoying, especially when you’re expecting business related messages and your inbox is full of promotional messages.

This is why, it is highly advised that you refrain from sending promotional messages unless they are very specific (an offer you wouldn’t like people to miss).

Content marketing means publishing and distributing valuable content – content that helps people. Hence, automatically, when you use email marketing for content marketing, the content that you broadcast through your emails, must also be content that helps people.

When you broadcast helpful content (or content desired by the recipients), naturally they are pleased to get your messages in their inboxes.

Are you using email marketing for experiencing content marketing success?

If you are, well done.

If you’re not, you should start right now.

It is not very difficult.

And forget about spamming people. Spammers are totally a different breed.

As long as you are broadcasting quality content, content that helps people, nobody is going to mind hearing from you.

Besides, you will be sending your messages to only those people who have opted to receive messages from you. Remember your mailing list, above?

Even if you don’t want to use any email marketing service, there are many add-ons even in Gmail that allow you to broadcast your messages using regular email.

For collecting email ids, you can use a normal form and put it on your website.

The success of your content marketing depends on ensuring your content reaches your target audience, and using email marketing is the best way of doing it.

Content marketing success stories: blog posts and articles

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Content marketing success stories

Everybody these days raves about content marketing.

But sometimes it feels like a gold rush thing – you know, the only people who made money were those who sold tools to those going to dig gold.

With content marketing it’s not like that, and those who feel like that, they haven’t experienced success themselves, or they haven’t really understood the power of content marketing.

Many businesses have. Big businesses.

Take for example Coca-Cola. Long time back, the beverage company stopped promoting its products on its website.

In fact, the Coca-Cola 2020 content marketing strategy is quite famous now.

Another good example is Open Forum from American Express. Previously it was called Open Forum, now it is called Trends and Insights.

While doing research for my own content writing and content marketing blog writing and even sometimes for my clients, I come across many interesting links content marketing success stories.

Some links, although excellent, have repetitive information on them, and some links are really unique and present a completely new perspective.

Recently I wrote about how to use the scrum methodology to work on longer blog posts.

Well, I’m going to use the scrum methodology for content writing, for this blog post.

I’m going to create a long list of blog posts and articles on content marketing success stories.

The purpose of this blog post is not to create a keyword-rich content piece, though, no harm in doing that.

I will be putting only the best links that I come across.

If you come across a link that you think should be featured on this post, do let me know. If you have your own blog post that you think is a fit for this space, then also do let me know.

Blog posts and articles on content marketing success stories:

Content marketing strategies that always work

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Content marketing strategies that always work

In this blog post you will read about content marketing strategies that always work and bring you success.

Want to ensure that your content marketing does not fail and always succeeds?

Here is a nice blog post published in Entrepreneur that lists a few strategic approaches that you can follow when carrying out your content marketing strategy.

Before proceeding, you may like to read 11 things that make your content marketing successful.

The above listed Entrepreneur blog post talks about the following strategic approaches when writing and publishing content:

Write authoritative content: I have written a lot on my blog what authoritative content is and how it benefits your business. Writing and publishing authoritative content means conveying to people that you have full knowledge of your business or your stream and you are the right person to do business with.
Write and publish evergreen content: This type of content lasts. Of course, you should also write on topical trends but write high-quality content that can be used by people for many months, many years. This way, your content is always relevant. You can also keep it relevant and evergreen by constantly updating it.
Write in an easy-to-understand language: Write in a manner that freely flows. When you’re writing for a business website, you’re not writing a literary novel. Keep your sentences short and simple. Focus on the benefits. Be conversational. Stay to the point.
Give your readers something significant: Give them something that really solves their problem like no one else does. As the above blog post says, “focus on one big idea”, which means, give them something that is irresistible.
Connect with influencers in your field: Influencers are those who have already built an audience for themselves, who have built a platform. They can influence people. People listen to them. If they promote your content or one of your links, you can get lots of attention.