Author Archives: Amrit Hallan

About Amrit Hallan

Amrit Hallan is a professional content writer who helps businesses improve their conversion rate through credible and compelling content writing. His main strength lies in writing search engine optimized content without compromizing quality and meaningfulness.

Now that Diwali is over

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Diwali is over

They often say there is a general sense of depression after every major festival like Diwali or Christmas. In my case it’s the opposite; I feel super charged-up after such festivals.

Yesterday was Diwali and we had a great time at our parents. Despite the doom-day-scenario-threat from environmentalists (all the power to the environmentalists!) my daughter and I busted crackers, and I also got a bit drunk trying to give my father company, who thinks every festivity is incomplete without good whiskey.

Anyway, by the time we came back this evening we were quite drained, but far away from being depressed. There are so many exciting things awaiting us.

For a few years I have been ignoring many important aspects of my website that I plan to take care of post-Diwali. These include:

  1. Streamlining existing content
  2. Adding more informative content to the blog
  3. Increasing targeted traffic to the website
  4. Regularly publishing newsletter and gaining more subscribers
  5. Networking with more industry-relevant people
  6. Regularly keeping in touch with my existing clients
  7. Improving the overall standard of the project assignments
  8. Uploading Case studies
  9. Completing a few e-books
  10. Creating content targeting specific industries

I need to add more things to this list.

Well, you must be wondering: aren’t these the most fundamental things every business must take care of? Yes, you are right. Especially when I do all these things, with great regularity, for my clients.

Since I have been getting decent amount of work from the way my website is right now, I’ve been ignoring it.

In order to take my business to the next level it’s necessary that I take care of all the things listed above. So pretty excited about all those. Hope to share more with you on this blog regarding my progress.

Differences between Owned, Earned and Paid content marketing channels

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In my previous blog post titled “Content distribution/marketing is as important as writing and publishing content“, I wrote about the importance of using content marketing and distribution channels so that you don’t have to depend on the whims of search engines for targeted traffic.

Some of the prominent channels I talked about were:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Newsletter

Other prominent content marketing and distribution channels that you can use are:

  • Your business blog
  • Improved search engine rankings
  • PPC campaigns on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo
  • Banner advertisements on websites and blogs
  • Your own website content
  • Your articles and blog posts appearing on other blogs and websites, and even online forums
  • Press release websites (but only those of repute, not the spammy sorts)
  • Promoted content on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (there are many more such platforms)

This is not a complete list, this is just to give you an idea of the channels you can target in order to market and distribute your content. Among these channels, they are of the following three broad categories:

  • Owned
  • Earned
  • Paid

Below I briefly explain the difference between these categories of content marketing channels.

Owned, earned and paid content marketing channels

Owned content marketing channels

As the name suggests, you own these channels. These can be

  • Your own website content:
    • Information pages
    • Articles and help pages
    • Company, services, product profile pages
    • FAQs section
  • Your company blog
  • Your newsletter
  • Online forums that you host under your own domain name or various other owned domain names
  • Your social media and social networking platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, etc.
  • The mobile phone apps that you may have to make it easier for people to access your content

You are in full control of these channels. You need to build them up from scratch. They require lots of effort but once you have done enough work, the results can be awesome.

How do you nurture owned content marketing channels? Of course by producing high-quality content on a regular basis. Whether you’re publishing a blog, a series of articles for a newsletter, be persistent. Don’t overtly worry about stuffing keywords here and there in order to improve your search engine rankings because this no longer work. Solely focus on quality. Provide useful information. And provide it consistently.

Earned content marketing channels

These channels manifest due to your authority and expertise and the sort of respect your opinion enjoys. These channels can exist in the form of

  • Bloggers and webmasters linking to your content
  • People writing articles and blog posts in response to what you have published on your website or blog, or even elsewhere
  • Your articles and blog posts appearing on other websites and blogs
  • People sharing your blog posts and articles from their own social media and social networking profiles
  • People talking about your content on various online forums and comment sections
  • People including your links in their own newsletters

Of course, you need to “earn” this channel by establishing your authority and proving your expertise. People should want to link to you. They should want to share your content on their respective timelines. They should find your content relevant enough to respond to it on their own blogs and websites. Your content should be so useful that people link to it in order to add more value to their own content.

Paid content marketing channels

If you have enough money, this is the best approach for you. You pay for the exposure. Some of the well-known paid content marketing channels are

  • Google’s AdWords campaign
  • Bing PPC
  • Promoted updates on Facebook
  • Advertising on Facebook
  • Sponsored tweets on Twitter
  • Submitting your content to paid directories
  • Buying link space on other websites or blogs – this is frowned upon by Google but if you don’t care much about how Google thinks about you, go ahead and do it

There might be more channels in this category, or in fact, in all the categories mentioned above.

Which content marketing channels should your business use? There is no set rule. The best would be earned channels because you will be actually investing time and effort in improving the overall quantity of your content rather than trying to get quick results and end up creating lousy content in the process.

But in order to create a space in earned channels often you have to use a mix of owned plus paid channels. As I recently read somewhere if you don’t invest in paid channel lots of your quality content remains unnoticed, that is, there is no use creating it.

Content distribution/marketing is as important as writing and publishing content

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In the race to creating as much content as possible people often forget that distributing and marketing content is as important as creating and publishing content. Of course if you have little content you must spend lots of time creating as much quality content as possible, but eventually you will need to invest some time and money in making that content available to people who are supposed to be influenced and affected.

Content marketing and distribution

It’s a misconception that create great content and people will find it on their own. This is an ideal situation, but we don’t live in an ideal world. There are many people who can manipulate their search engine rankings despite this update or that update happening at the good old Google. So you need to find channels, you need to CREATE your own channels, and sometimes you need to shell out some money to market your content, and in fact this is what they mean by content marketing – creating high-quality content and then distributing it, broadcasting it.

How do you distribute your content?

Good question. To the uninitiated this might seem quite daunting, especially the world “distribution”, or even “marketing”. I mean, sitting in your dark den, creating content and then publishing it on your website or blog is all well and good, and to be frank, is the easiest part. You can keep doing it for years and wait for the crawlers to bless you with a good crawling and afterwards, hopefully, with a good ranking. This way, although you’re working quite hard, you’re leaving it up to the search engines whether you get traffic or not. Believe me, I have done it myself.

Of course there is nothing wrong in that, and if you want to do that, you are welcome. It is your own business after all and it is up to you how you want to “market” it.

If you want to be proactive, then you need to take the bull by its horns. Instead of waiting for people to reach you, you need to reach the people. This can be done by relentlessly improving your search engine rankings; this is again akin to creating lots of content and then leaving it up to the search engines. This strategy sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t work.

Or you can create your own channels or make use of existing channels (by either spending some money or doing some free work). Here are a few ways you can create your own content marketing and distribution channels:

  • Open a Facebook account: Although not every business can be promoted on Facebook, the platform enjoys quite a diverse audience. Right from CEOs to janitors, from saints to psychopaths and from housewives to ladies of the Marissa Mayer’s category, are using Facebook to share useful and useless information with the world at large. Create a vibrant presence on Facebook by regularly interacting with your contacts and contributing meaningfully to the ongoing discussions and debates. Learn its nuances and etiquette. You can also use its services like “Post Promotion” to highlight your particular pieces of content. The basic idea is becoming so influential that people start paying heed to all that you are saying, including clicking your links and coming to your website or blog to access your content.
  • Open a Twitter account: The audience for Twitter is a bit different from Facebook, and many say that it is noisier and a bit overwhelming. If you haven’t used Twitter much, you may find it overwhelming, but otherwise it makes more sense than Facebook and business-wise, it can be much more profitable because people are more focused. People normally use Twitter to post links from not just all over the web, but also from their own websites and blogs and once you have built up an audience, it is a great way to distribute and market your content
  • Open a Google+ account: Google+ is a fast-growing social networking platform but its audience is slightly different from Twitter and Facebook, in the sense that, as many claim (I haven’t used the service as regularly as the above-mentioned social networking platforms, yet), more business-minded and technology-oriented people use this platform.
  • Invest in PPC programs: By spending money on PPC programs such as the ones offered by Google, Bing and Facebook, you don’t have to solely depend on search engines and you can start getting traffic as fast as 15-20 minutes. Of course you may have to spend some money (in many cases a lot – depending on the competition your keywords face) but if you have a marketing budget, then why not?
  • Publish a regular newsletter: The email marketing experts claim that you can increase traffic to your website or blog by almost 30% by building a list of subscribers and then mailing them the links to your content on a regular basis. This, I have actually seen working. My traffic spikes when I send out my newsletter. Building your own mailing list can be a big pain in the ass but it’s worth it and actually there is no escaping from it. Even if you haven’t got anything planned yet, at least sign up for an email broadcasting service like Mailchimp and put up a form on your website and start collecting email ids. Later on it may save you hell of a time.
  • Write for other publications: In blogging parlance it is called “guest blogging” and everybody from a novice to an A-list blogger does that. When your article or blog post appears on another, reputed website or blog, you gain new audience, you get more clicks, and your search engine rankings are also known to improve.

All these activities take time. These are not one-week or two-week projects. For instance, building an effective broadcasting channel using social networking websites may take you almost a year and that too if you are persistent and perpetually quality conscious. So don’t worry about doing things fast – you may end up spoiling things. Slow and steady actually wins the race here, unless you have loads of dollars to spend. You can simply assign 20-odd minutes to working on your social networking and social media profiles everyday and this should be sufficient. But this is another topic.

It is very important that you take care of the marketing and distribution of your content as you build up more and more of it. Chuck the thought that you need to create and publish content solely for search engines. Many people have had to wound up their businesses due to this. Build your own network of influence. Be known. Create a name for yourself so that people seek you rather than you waiting for them to come to your website. THIS, actually is the entire essence of content marketing.

How do you define “Effective Content” for your business?

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Effective Content

It is all well and good to repeatedly say that you should publish content on your website and you should take content marketing really seriously. I even wrote a lengthy blog post on “20 Reasons Why Your Business Website Needs Fresh Content“. But how do you decide what sort of content you should publish? After all, it’s not merely the targeted traffic that you seek, you seek targeted traffic that converts, that changes your visitors into your paying customers and clients.

The high-quality content that converts is “effective content” for your business and every business has its own definition of effective content.

Although every business may have its own unique definition of what sort of content works for it, there are some universal traits. Effective content has universal definitions that can be applied to any business. Listed below are the most important traits that can accurately help you define what’s “effective content” for your business.

It fills a need or solves a purpose

Why does your content exist? This existential question not just applies to our spiritual lives, it also applies to the content that we publish on our websites (and blogs). Why do you publish content? What is your ultimate motive? The above-linked blog post that gives you 20 reasons why you should publish content on your business website may help you to a great extent, but eventually you have to define the purpose. What purpose does your content solve? Do you simply want to help people who come to your website looking for some advice? Would you like them to buy your product or service someday or immediately? Do you want to establish a rapport with them? Is there a great need for the content that you are publishing?

It communicates on an ongoing basis

Effective content establishes a communication channel. You are communicating your messages, your ideas, your experiences to people who visit your website, and the people who visit your website, your readers, communicate their feedback and there needs to you. They may also communicate to each other if you have established such a platform (such as a comments section in a blog).

Effective content makes you use your unique voice with a human touch

Businesses are normally faceless. Customers and clients don’t get to see the human side of people who provide them products and services. Even at slightest pretext, they give rise to doubts and suspicions. On the other hand your content allows you to give a human voice to your business and talk to your current and prospective customers and clients in a friendly, familiar manner. This is the reason when you’re trying to create effective content for your website or blog, use the language used by your customers. Avoid using jargon unless it is unavoidable. Talk in the first person as much as possible.

Here is what you should do in order to talk with an individual voice: imagine that you’re talking to a single person sitting across you. Don’t worry about your content being read by one person, by 10 people, or even by 10,000 people. Just focus on that one particular individual and write as if you’re talking to him or her. This will give you a conversational style and you will appear friendlier and more approachable.

Effective content expresses a clearly defined, focused view

There should be no ambiguity when you are publishing content on your website. Don’t beat around the bush. Be clear about what you intend to say. Take for instance this blog post – you may think that I’m writing something about content writing, but I’m precisely talking about creating effective content particularly for your website. I have a clear idea of what I’m writing, and I have a clear idea of what you should get after reading this blog post. This sort of clarity must be there in every webpage and every blog post you publish.

Your effective content should be devoid of “sales speak”

When you try to sell, you impose your views on people, and nobody likes that. For instance, if you want to hire me as your content writer, it should be your decision. Although on my main pages you may find me trying to highlight my strengths and hence, trying to convince you into giving your content writing work to me, you will also find 100s of articles and blog posts that plainly talk about how to create direct content for your website. You can create a super effective content marketing strategy just by going through the articles and blog posts published on this website and you may never need to hire me for your business. I’m fine with that.

The quality of your content must be unmatched

This may not be always possible, but whenever you are publishing content on your website, give it your best shot. When I’m writing content for my own blog or website, I write it with same seriousness and dedication as I write for someone who pays me (after all sooner or later, the content that I publish helps me get more business, so in a sense, I’m being paid for this). So quantity is good, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of quality. Publish just one blog post every week, but it should be par excellence.

As a mentioned above, effective content may have different meanings for different businesses, it has a universal characteristic and the points contained within that characteristic are the ones I have listed above. What do you think about the best content for your business? Have some interesting points that you would like me to cover? Do let me know in the comments section.

20 reasons why your business website needs fresh content

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There is no ambiguity about the fact that your business website constantly needs new content. Zillions of articles and blog posts have been written so far trying to explain marketers and business owners why they should have content publishing as one of the main marketing tools. You may already be focusing lots of effort on creating content for your website.

Reasons for fresh content on website

But do you really know why your business website needs fresh content on an ongoing basis? You may have a basic idea. Most of the people see fresh content as a doorway to better search engine rankings. Yes, sure, your rankings can tremendously improve if you go on publishing valuable and quality content on your website, but most confuse it with increasing the overall keyword density. With the latest Hummingbird update Google no longer just focuses on the keywords. It ranks your pages for the real meaning they contain, the real value they deliver. Keywords matter, but not that much. It is the essence of the content that you publish. So the conventional wisdom behind constantly publishing fresh content stands defeated to a great extent.

Listed below are 20 reasons why your business website needs fresh content.

  1. Give people a reason to visit your website repeatedly: People don’t do business with you on their first visit, especially when you are not a known brand or personality. You need to create a rapport and for that you need to encourage people to come to your website as frequently as possible. How do you achieve that? By constantly providing them the content they seek. May it be information, may it be humor, may it be useful tips and tricks, whatever, your fresh content should be able to draw them to your website again and again.
  2. Educate your visitors: Educating them doesn’t mean raising their literacy level, it means they should be able to learn as much as possible about products and services you are offering them so that they can make an educated decision. This way they feel empowered. They don’t want your marketing message thrust down upon their throats. They want to make their own decision. When they buy from you, it should be their decision, not your constant prompting. This can only happen if you properly educate them. After that, even if they are not happy with your product or service, they won’t hold a grudge against you.
  3. Keep your visitors informed: Fresh content on an ongoing basis keeps your visitors informed. They know when you are making changes to your offerings. When you launch new products or services, they instantly get to know about them. In case some new developments are happening within your organization and you would like to share them with your business, this can be a good content publishing opportunity.
  4. Generate content for your newsletter: You don’t need to separately create content for your newsletter – I hope you are publishing a regular newsletter for your business. Once you have built yourself a nice mailing list, you can always send the highlights – they can be weekly highlights or monthly highlights – with these highlights linking back to the actual webpages, articles and blog posts on your website.
  5. Establish your authority: What is authority, especially in the business world? It’s not just having the knowledge of your field, but also the ability to share your knowledge in such a manner that it is also useful to people who have access to that knowledge. They should be able to use that knowledge for the betterment of their business as well as personal lives. Only then they see you as an authority figure and once they begin to see you as an authority figure, they begin to trust you and when they begin to trust you, they don’t hesitate before doing business with you.
  6. Generate direct traffic from social media: Although you may decide to follow your own pattern, the conventional wisdom says that there should be a 70-30 ratio when you post content on social media and social networking websites. Of all the links that you post, 70% should come from other websites publishing valuable content that you would like to share with your friends and followers, and 30% should come from your own blog and website. There are many websites that get more traffic from Facebook and Twitter than from Google and other search engines.
  7. Create content targeting different devices: People may be accessing your content using their computers, laptops, LCD TVs, tablets and mobile phones. One way is to scale your existing content according to the screen being used at that particular moment. Another way is creating multiple versions (without duplicating) for different devices. You don’t need to create unique content for every device under the sun, but you can definitely create content for computers, laptops and TVs on one hand and tablets and phones on the other.
  8. Develop community around your brand: When people repeatedly come across your content – on your own website/blog or on other social media websites – a vibrant exchange of ideas takes place and when you share your opinions through your content, people too like to share their opinions regarding your content. When they regularly start talking about your content in general and your brand in particular a community begins to develop around your brand.
  9. Target different groups: Often it is not possible to target all prospective groups through a single page or blog post. For instance, as a content writer I would like to target as many niche businesses as possible because every business that wants to sell needs compelling content, which I can provide. So why not create pages and blog posts targeting web designers (who may need content for themselves as well as their own clients), SEO marketing experts who want to use content as an SEO tool, hospitality industry, lawyers and attorneys, accountants, interior decorators, and so on. They can all use my content writing services and I can create specialized pages for them. You can achieve the same for your business and different niche groups you cater to.
  10. Establish yourself as an expert: Would you like to do business with a novice or an expert? Of course if you are looking for professional services that really perform well for your business, you go for an expert. But how do you know if a person is an expert? When he or she repeatedly shares his or her knowledge and experience with you. As a professional content writer I should have lots of things to say about content writing, whether it’s about writing content for my clients or about writing on various topics and for various mediums. I should be able to tell you what sort of content performs well for my clients. Through my writings I should be able to differentiate between lousy content and quality content. The more I share with you, the more you appreciate my content and use it to improve your own content on your website and blog, the greater is my impact as an expert content writer. This can be applied to any field.
  11. Create link building opportunities: Although according to the latest grapevine your page rank may no longer depend on the number of quality links coming to your website, links still matter. They help search engines decide how valuable your content is. This is especially true in the times of social media where individual endorsements are preferred over algorithmic ratings. In fact this is a reason why more and more search engines are incorporating social media and social networking updates into their generic search result pages. Anyway, people are not going to link to you unless they find value in what you have published. You need to provide lots of quality content on an ongoing basis so that they have a greater choice.
  12. Encourage engagement on social networking websites: You can interact with people without posting content from your own website and blog but then you are always talking about other people. Engagement maybe there but this engagement may not lead people to anywhere. On the other hand, if you post content from your own website or blog and if people talk about your content and then you interact with them, the engagement level is totally different.
  13. Show your visitors that one thing or another is always happening at your business: You publish content on your business website primarily for two reasons: to educate your visitors about your products and services and to inform them of the latest developments happening at your end. Launching a new product or service? Opening a new branch in a different city or in a different country? Attending or hosting a business conference? Releasing an upgrade of your product? Doing some charity work? Just hired a great talent? Added a new section to your website? You can share all these things on your website so that people know that there is always something cooking up in your company or organization – in a positive manner.
  14. Get your employees involved: Encouraging your employees to create content and publish it regularly on your website or blog is a great way to keep them motivated and charged up. When they can articulate themselves they feel more a part of the entire process. It also shows your visitors that your workforce is communicative and full of ideas.
  15. Give search engines more content to crawl and index: The search engines love to crawl and index new content. The more you publish, with greater frequency they visit your website. The added benefit of this is, you set a pattern in such a manner that whenever you add something really useful that you think should be indexed and ranked as soon as possible, it is done. I have personally seen blog posts appearing in Google within a few minutes of their publishing. Publish fresh content on your website as much as possible to make search engine crawlers more and more greedy.
  16. Attract traffic for longtail keywords: The Hummingbird Google update has rendered targeted keyword optimization redundant. It is more about longtail keywords – complete sentences and phrases, just the way we speak, rather than just keywords. Create lots of content that provides answers to questions your prospective customers and clients have. For instance, if somebody searches for “where can I find a competent content writer for my web design company?” he or she should be able to find my website. This is the way people normally talk to each other.
  17. Give people a reason to spend more time on your website: The longer they stay, the greater is the chance of them doing business with you. You need to engage your visitors with interactive and useful content. This can be achieved by adhering to a uniform quality standard. If you like this blog post, and if you find it useful, then you will think, hey, this website may have more content that I can use and apply on my own website. What happens? You stay longer on the website. Some of you may even think, well, if this guy knows so much about content writing and content marketing, I might as well hire him for writing content for my own website.
  18. Cover every possible keyword in your niche, legitimately: Keywords of late may seem to be losing their sheen, especially after the Hummingbird update, they still do matter. There are many people who are still going to use your keywords. For instance, there are people who are still going to use terms like “content writer” and “web writer” to look for the services I provide. Continuously publishing fresh content gives you an opportunity to cover all the necessary keywords belonging to your niche.
  19. Create an ultimate information resource: Create an information resource for yourself as well as for your visitors. As you work on various projects you will go on learning new things and gaining experience, and in the hub of various activities, many things may slip out of your mind. Not if you record them on your blog or on your website. You can always keep coming back to your content and check out how you handled a particular situation a couple of years ago.
  20. Create material for your book: The guys at 37 Signals created a book out of their blog posts. Why not? You have already compiled so much information and you have already received feedback from your ardent followers, why not compile that information, based on all that positive feedback that you have obtained, into a book? Even if you don’t want to sell that book, you can offer it for free to your visitors. You can ask them to subscribe to your email updates in lieu of downloading your book.

These are some compelling reasons why your business website needs fresh content on an ongoing basis. Can you think of more reasons? Do share your opinion in the comments section.

A quick note for people who may have already read a blog post titled “15 Reasons Your Business Website Needs Fresh Content” – a scraper website had hijacked that blog post. So I deleted that blog post, rewrote, added five more reasons and published it again.