I have mentioned in one of my previous blog posts that 94% B2B small businesses on the Internet are using content marketing in one form or another. So naturally, if so many people are using content marketing more people want to use it. But the problem is, there are some beginners’ mistakes that people commit when they don’t understand the true meaning of content marketing and simply try to ape people who might, to be frank, be aping someone else. Listed below are the 5 major beginners’ mistakes in content marketing.
- When you are publishing blog posts and articles, you’re doing content marketing. Publishing blog posts and articles means you are creating content, which is good, which is a first step in the direction of content marketing. If you don’t have content, what do you market? And marketing here doesn’t mean that you are trying to sell content, it means through your content you’re drawing people to your website. You publish high-quality content so that people come to your website to make use of it. But by merely publishing that content doesn’t turn you into a marketer. For that you need to use various channels to distribute your content and make sure it gets found on social networking websites as well as search engines.
- Just focusing on SEO content. Don’t publish content just because you want to improve your search engine rankings. There is nothing wrong in trying to improve your SEO, but if that is the only motive behind publishing content, you are not going to experience much success. So what do you do if you don’t publish content for your SEO? Publish content for the sake of its quality, for the sake of the value it provides to your audience, for the sake of helping your prospective customers and clients. Once you can create useful content, it automatically becomes SEO content. After that, what remains is, making sure that there is no excessive code on your website that stops the search engine crawlers from accessing the actual content.
- Not being consistent with content publishing and distribution. Content marketing is an ongoing activity. It is not a “campaign”. It is a strategy. Strategy is always long-term. You may have a one-week goal, but you normally have a one-year or a five-year strategy. The search engines are constantly looking for new content to crawl and index and relegate the existing content to lower rankings. Millions of updates are posted on various social networking websites on a daily basis. This is the reality of our times. With so much content constantly being pumped into the Internet, if you are not producing content on an ongoing basis, you’re going to be run over by the content being published and promoted by your competitors.
- Neglecting search engine and social media optimization. Fully focusing on the quality of your content without overtly worrying about search engine optimization doesn’t mean that you totally neglect it. Remember that most of your traffic will come from search engines and social networking websites. Better make them an integral part of your content marketing. Pay attention to the sort of keywords you use within your blog posts and articles. Use the language used by your prospective customers and clients. Create compelling titles that can attract people on social media and social networking websites. Wherever possible, use attractive images or videos. Create your social media updates in such a manner that it is easier to share them.
- Neglecting your existing content. If you have had a website for a few years then you already have some content on it. You have the homepage. You have the company page. You have the products and services page. There might be an about us page. There might be big and small articles that you may have gotten yourself written a couple of years ago that still hang around. Whether they are performing well or not, they are your existing assets and you shouldn’t ignore them. Carry out an audit of your existing content and see what all improvements you can incorporate. Can you optimize your titles? Can you make your content crisp? Can you incorporate more keywords without indulging in keyword-spamming? Can you put a couple of more photographs? Can you improve the language? Can you add more content – maybe a couple of more paragraphs – to existing pages and blog posts? There is no sense in carrying out new content marketing activities if you haven’t gone through your existing content and worked on it.
There is an exhaustive list of content marketing mistakes that one can commit but these are basically beginners’ mistakes. If you can take care of these mistakes in the beginning, you are not going to encounter the crushing problems that many people encounter later on.