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.

Is content marketing losing its sheen?

Leave a reply
Is content marketing losing its sheen?

Is content marketing losing its sheen?

One of those phases.

During a particular period of the year, you start coming across articles and blog posts evincing the end, or at least a steep decline, in your profession. It also happens in content marketing.

Yesterday I came across an article on Forbes telling how content marketing has overstretched itself and consequently, is killing itself. It also insinuates that many renowned content marketing companies are borderline scams.

Today I received a newsletter update from someone that conducts writers’ workshops and he says blogging seems to be on the wane.

My personal experience is the opposite.

The number of content writing queries from my website has almost doubled. I’m getting more queries from India, Malaysia, China and The Philippines. I’m even getting more queries from Europe and America.

Yes, the quality of the queries has changed. It has improved. People now understand what they want.

The Indian clients, or rather, the Asian clients, are the same: they cringe at the thought of having to pay to a lowly content writer, and they assume that most of the writing, no matter how well it is done, should be either provided free of cost, or dirt cheap.

But there has been a marked, a welcome change.

Once they have received a few documents, once they have experienced the quality, they are more or less, even if reluctantly, ready to pay what I ask. This didn’t happen before.

Not just my personal experience, this Forbes article says that 89% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing to increase their leads and branding.

One of the biggest companies, Coca-Cola, as totally turned its corporate website into the content publishing platform.

American Express uses its OPEN Forum content publishing platform to use content marketing to drive traffic to its website.

77% of Internet users read blogs in one way or another.

Why do some people think content marketing in general and blogging in particular are dying

It’s all about where you stand. I will tell you a story.

In the early 2000s I used to design websites. For some time I did great. There was a dot com boom and everybody wanted a website.

People weren’t aware of the concept of the phrase “content marketing” but there were some entrepreneurs, including yours truly, who were using articles and tutorials to promote themselves.

Anyway, just as everybody wanted a website, everybody started designing websites after a while.

If you live in India you must have come across poor tailors sitting at the roadsides, under shady trees if lucky, working with their sewing machines.

You could see web designers just like that, those days, there were so many. I mean, they were not sitting under trees by the roadsides like tailors, but you get my point.

Microsoft had launched a tool called Front Page, if I’m not forgetting, that would allow you to make websites using a GUI. It was notorious for generating junk code, but neither the clients cared, nor the designers who would charge Rs. 2500 for a 10-page website.

I used to hand code my websites. When I designed and developed websites, there was not a single line of code extra.

Naturally I couldn’t make websites for Rs. 2500. When I insisted on hand coding my websites, clients thought I was crazy. All the assignments dried up. I switched to promoting web hosting plans.

One day I was sitting in the front room that I used as my office and a person dropped by. It was 10 a.m., early March, if I’m not forgetting. His white shirt was torn at the seams, and was dirty. He was unshaven, sweaty, and with hair that hadn’t been combed or washed for a few days.

I thought he was some construction worker, or a sweeper, or some poor person who had stopped by to get a glass of water.

He wanted to design a website for me. He had come across my ad in the local newspaper. He collected addresses from the classifieds and then did door to door marketing for his web design business. He told me that he visited 30-40 business establishments every month and got 3-4 projects every month. He used Front Page to design websites. He charged Rs. 2500. He didn’t have a computer (laptops were mostly unheard of during those days). He used to design the websites in an Internet café.

I don’t remember now why I hadn’t published my website URL in the ad because I would never go into a business without having a website, being a web designer myself and having had 3-4 websites even by the early 2000’s. Anyway, I turned him away.

With my own experience and after having seen that person, I had the same feeling that web designing as a profession was dead, or at least, it was not a good way of making money.

Still, since then, I have come across, and I’m not exaggerating, hundreds of websites promoting web design services, doing great. They charge thousands of dollars and clients gladly pay them.

In fact, that was a time when most of the businesses didn’t even have websites, and now every business has a website and still, web design and web development companies charge a premium.

The problem was not with web design as a profession, the problem was the way I was promoting my service and the way I was targeting my clients. I wasn’t targeting the right clients. I was targeting clients who were okay with having Front Page websites. I wasn’t targeting clients who appreciated hand-coded websites. There were many, and they were ready to pay for the effort. I just didn’t look for them. Somehow I wasn’t able to reach out to clients who would gladly pay for quality.

Why am I telling this story?

It happens in every business.

Take for example the restaurant business. Does every restaurant owner get to start a franchisee? I’m pretty sure if 100 entrepreneurs start a restaurant business every year, 98 don’t succeed. It doesn’t mean the restaurant business is a dead business. Some people succeed, most don’t, and that’s fine. It happens in every business.

The same holds true for content marketing.

As it was bound to happen, when people started claiming great success with content marketing, everybody wanted a piece of the pie. And as it was bound to happen, there was a no holds barred rush to create and publish content.

So, why do some people believe that content marketing doesn’t work?

Because they don’t know how it works.

People to content marketing all wrong

People to content marketing all wrong

You see, you have to understand what content is. Most think that content is a way to improve your search engine rankings.

Although there is nothing wrong in wanting to publish content to improve one’s search engine rankings – I get lots of business due to this approach – eventually, it is an improved level of engagement that does the trick. And this is why, some businesses are doing great with content marketing, but most don’t. Maybe the problem is with the “marketing” part. I don’t know.

Publishing content on your website or blog is all about helping people make a decision, and provide them timely help when they need it.

Even if you are able to generate lots of traffic from search engines by publishing “optimized” content, if people don’t feel motivated once they come to your website, they are not going to buy from you.

Do I mean to say you shouldn’t publish content for traffic? I don’t mean that. Every business needs traffic and content marketing is the best way of generating targeted traffic to your website.

In fact, a big reason why people use content marketing is because they don’t want to solely depend on search engine traffic. Search engines can be whimsical. If you are a serious business, you cannot afford to completely depend on search engines for qualified traffic. You need to create your own sources, and content marketing is the best way. You become known for your quality content and authoritative insights.

The problem is not with wanting to generate targeted traffic. The problem is using content marketing just for generating targeted traffic.

This sort of content marketing doesn’t work, it has never worked and it is never going to work.

Sure, you need to publish content to draw targeted traffic to your website. But the primary purpose of your content must be to provide quality information to your visitors so that they can make up their mind regarding doing business with you.

This is exactly why the newspaper industry is failing. There was a time when content – journalism – used to be the primary content. Now it is advertising. Journalism is almost dead. Mostly it is either propaganda or traffic-oriented content to earn advertising revenue.

The primary purpose of content marketing should be to become a valuable part of your customers’ and clients’ lives.

You need to become an information hub, and believe me, even if you are a very small business, you can become an information hub within your niche. Don’t think that only big businesses can become information hubs.

All the businesses who have understood this are doing great with content marketing. The ones who are just greedy for targeted traffic aren’t succeeding.

Why do people get trapped in the traffic trap? Because it’s easier to generate traffic than generate business. Content that gets you search engine traffic is very cheap. It is very easy to create such content. Hire a jobless writer or someone who simply wants to make a few extra bucks and isn’t bothered whether your business benefits or not, and you can get scores of blog posts and articles without even realizing you are spending money.

And when you are able to publish 50 articles or blog posts every month, the quantity reassures you. The traffic DOES begin to manifest and you begin to feel that eventually, this is going to lead to more business.

It doesn’t.

What gives you more business is the quality of your content, the meaningfulness, and the level of engagement it can generate.

Search engine traffic should be a byproduct. When people begin to understand this, content marketing will work wonders for them.

How to use LinkedIn for B2B content marketing

Leave a reply
Use LinkedIn for B2B content marketing

Use LinkedIn for B2B content marketing

LinkedIn, as I’m sure you know, is a social network for professionals. An interesting fact about LinkedIn is that it was launched back in 2003. People were not even aware of the concept of social media and social networking.

Although exceptions are always there, people often have a LinkedIn account to find business opportunities. Whether you’re looking for a job, business leads, or business partners, LinkedIn allows you to create a presence that provides all the relevant information your prospective employers and business partners might be looking for.

There are two reasons why people are on LinkedIn:

  1. Seek new job opportunities
  2. Seek new business partners/customers/clients

The second point is the focus of this blog post.

Just like any channel or any network, when there are too many people vying for attention, you need to stand out. How do you stand out? You market yourself. You promote yourself. You do something that makes people notice you for the right reasons.

For example, I provide content writing and content marketing services and I would like to draw attention of people on LinkedIn who are looking for businesses and individuals providing these services (and preferably, find my profile).

The problem is, just as I want to attract these clients, there might be hundreds of content writers and content marketers trying to achieve the same. I need to compete with them.

On social media as well as search engines, when you are vying for targeted attention, you’re not just competing with your competitors, you are also competing with numerous other distractions that may prevent your prospective customers and clients from taking note of your presence even if your presence is right in front of their eyes.

Sure, on LinkedIn people may search for keywords and tags associated with your business and they may be able to find your profile for the right reasons, but if your competitors are aggressively marketing themselves on the platform, even if your prospects come across your profile, they may get distracted by more aggressive professionals who are constantly posting highly valuable content on their timelines, conveying in the process that they are proactively promoting themselves.

But why focus on LinkedIn for B2B content marketing?

As mentioned above, LinkedIn is a business networking platform. These days, it is also evolving as a high-quality content publishing platform – content mostly catering to businesses. This Content Marketing Institute report says that 94% B2B companies that were surveyed for the report find LinkedIn as their preferred content marketing platform.

Among the top five networking platforms, when it comes to doing business, people trust LinkedIn the most. The report was published in Business Insider. Somehow, the web page has vanished, but here is the Twitter update posted by the publication and in case you cannot access even that, I have also put a screenshot of the Twitter update.

LinkedIn B2B content marketing screenshot

LinkedIn B2B content marketing screenshot

Facebook comes second, then Instagram, then Snapchat and then Twitter.

This is mostly because when people are browsing their timelines on LinkedIn they know that LinkedIn users are not interested in sharing what they had for breakfast or what new cute cat video they have stumbled upon. Most probably they are going to publish some business-related information that can be directly or indirectly used.

Why people trust content, on LinkedIn and elsewhere?

When I talk of content I don’t mean junk content published only to improve search engine rankings (they no longer improve, but that’s a different topic). Good quality content means you are sharing your knowledge and you are sharing it not just to prove how good you are, but also in such a manner that the knowledge that you share helps people.

For example, if in this blog post I talk about how to use LinkedIn for B2B content marketing, one of the bigger aims is to tell you something that you can use to grow your business. The more I help, the more you trust me.

When you trust me, it doesn’t mean I have succeeded in manipulating you. I’m not forcing you to do business with me. I’m just sharing with you something that I know. Through sharing, I let it be known to you that when I work for you, I’m going to use the same expertise, the same knowledge, to help you grow your business through my content writing and content marketing services. If I were a lawyer, I would like to talk about the cases I have worked on (of course, without revealing confidential information) and how much knowledge of law I have.

Content breeds familiarity and no, such familiarity does not breed contempt. Again, not just content, good, useful, relevant content.

It is the familiarity factor that makes people work with you. If you’re constantly publishing junk content people lose respect for you and if they don’t have respect for you, how do you expect them to do business with you?

Good content, even if it is of no use to them, builds trust. Your presence on their timelines isn’t just a nuisance they are too lazy to get rid of, it’s a value addition. They pay attention to your content whenever you post it on LinkedIn or elsewhere. They share your content with people who may find it useful.

This, of course, also helps your search engine rankings. Google has built advanced algorithms that can actually gauge the quality of your content. Also, it matters how many people are linking to it and sharing it.

Using LinkedIn for B2B content marketing

First, understand, what is B2B content marketing and how it is different from B2C content marketing. Is it really different?

In theory they are not, but in practice they might be.

In B2C, even cute cat videos may do the trick, although, you may have to create a presence on another networking platform like Facebook or Instagram. B2C content marketing is mostly for brand awareness. In B2B, people want information they can use to do business with you. In both the cases you publish valuable content – although the definition of value may change with the sort of audience you are trying to target. B2B content marketing is mostly about lead generation.

It doesn’t mean every piece of content that you publish on LinkedIn or distribute through LinkedIn needs to be a lead generating magnet – some pieces of content are simply published to raise awareness about one’s business.

But generally, when you post content on LinkedIn to attract B2B opportunities, people should be immediately able to make out what business you are in. For example, if I am promoting my content writing and content marketing services on LinkedIn, I shouldn’t be posting coffee making tips all the time, unless I specifically provide my services to this niche. Even then, the primary focus needs to be on content writing and content marketing instead of simply coffee making.

There are two ways you can market content on LinkedIn for B2B opportunities:

  1. Publish blog posts and articles directly on LinkedIn
  2. Publish blog posts and articles elsewhere (preferably on your own website) and then publish the link in a LinkedIn update

There are different reasons why you should publish content directly on LinkedIn and why you should publish it on your own website because both the platforms have their individual merits.

LinkedIn is a ready-made publishing platform with its own content promotion mechanism. There is a greater chance of more people coming across your content on LinkedIn rather than on your own website if it isn’t yet very popular and it doesn’t get much traffic from search engines.

On the other hand, unless you publish quality content on your website, you are not going to improve your search engine rankings and you cannot build your brand through quality content if the content does not exist on your own website.

You need to maintain a balance. For example, for every three blog posts that you publish on your own website, publish at least one on LinkedIn.

Grapevine has it that LinkedIn gives preference to content published on its own platform over content published somewhere else and then simply the link posted on LinkedIn.

What sort of content you should publish on LinkedIn for B2B marketing?

Mostly, informative content written in a casual manner. Remember that most of the people will be accessing your LinkedIn content from their mobile phones. They don’t want to read heavy text. Write in the format of case studies. Present a problem, then present a solution and present the solution in such a manner that you should be providing that solution.

You can also publish content to display your proactive approach towards your business. Suppose, recently you attended a conference. You can write about the observations you made, the new ideas you got and things you agreed and disagreed with.

Or maybe there is a blog post written by another authority figure in your niche and you want to add your own point or you want to contradict that person with your side of the story. Go ahead, people are going to find it interesting.

You can also post shorter tutorials. For example, how to optimize the title of your blog post so that your blog post enjoys higher search engine rankings. Or, if you provide accounting services you can write about how to do effective bookkeeping for certain transactions.

The basic idea is, publish something that people will find useful and relevant.

Content writing: why strategy is important

Leave a reply
Why your business needs a content writing strategy

Why your business needs a content writing strategy

Almost everyone these days acknowledges that quality content writing is needed to improve search engine rankings and conversion rate. As a very small-time content writer and content marketer, the quality of content assignments that I get these days has markedly improved. Even my clients from India are sometimes ready to pay the price that I ask because I know that what I provide can help them improve their business.

It shows that more clients now have a clearer perspective of how important content writing is for their business.

But there are very few who think about content writing in terms of strategy. Without strategy, you are simply publishing content hoping that writing about certain topics will help you improve your search engine rankings and if you can improve your search engine rankings, getting more business is a natural next step.

It is not.

B2B with documented content marketing strategy

B2B with documented content marketing strategy

Source

The above link also reveals that whereas 89% B2B marketers use content marketing (use content to promote their business, in our case, content writing), only 37% organizations use documented content marketing strategy.

This number might be according to the target audience of Content Marketing Institute, the generic status is much worse.

Business depends on how many people you can convince into doing business with you through content writing

Just because you have improved your search engine rankings doesn’t mean you’re going to get more business. This is because business doesn’t depend on how many people you can get to your website. Business depends on how many people you can convince into doing business with you.

And this job happens on your website. The way your content delivers your message.

In fact, if you take into consideration the RankBrain algorithm, these days even your search engine rankings depend on how people engage with your content when they are already on your website.

For more information on how RainkBrain analyses your content, you may like to read How to write content for the Google RankBrain System.

What does strategy mean?

There are many definitions of strategy on the Internet, but the closest definition that is relevant to our topic goes something like this:

The art and science of planning and marshalling resources for their most efficient and effective use.

Even this is not a full definition in the current context., I would also like to add

The art and science of knowing exactly what you want to achieve, knowing what resources you have at hand, and then planning and marshalling these resources for their most efficient and effective use.

Content writing and the concept of strategy

Content writing and strategy

Content writing and strategy

According to the current definition of strategy, the resource here is content writing.

You may think why I’m just writing about content writing and not content in general because when you want to use content marketing, there can be various sorts of content, and I totally agree.

But for this blog post, I just want to focus on content writing because this is what I provide, currently.

So, the resource that we have is content writing.

How do we use this resource to accomplish what we want to accomplish?

What do you want to accomplish?

Through content writing you want to accomplish two things:

  1. Improve your search engine rankings to increase targeted traffic to your website.
  2. Improve the conversion rate of your website.

Both these are very important and there is no use focusing on one and neglecting the other.

Where does strategy come in?

Strategy in the context of content writing means

  1. Knowing what sort of content you should be writing/publishing.
  2. Knowing what format is most suitable to draw targeted traffic to your website – general website pages, informative articles, blog posts, social media updates, guest blog posts, email campaigns, e-books, white papers, slides, PDFs, and so on.
  3. Knowing what channels to use to promote your content.
  4. Knowing what people should do once they are on your website, what path they should follow.

The biggest attribute of strategy is knowing what you are doing, what you should be doing, and what the outcome is going to be.

Similarly, when you are publishing a blog post, you should know exactly what you are trying to achieve. You should know what sort of people are going to read it, how they are going to interpret it and what they’re going to do after reading it.

Goals and KPIs for strategic content writing

Content writing goals and KPIs

Content writing goals and KPIs

Goals and KPIs are different.

Goals are normally long-term. You want to get more business. You want to generate more ad revenue. You want to get more subscribers to your newsletter. You want to achieve your sales goals for the chosen region.

Goals take place in months, even years.

KPIs – key performance indicators – are, as the name suggests, indicators.

They tell you how your content is performing.

Is your search engine traffic for the intended keywords and search terms increasing day by day?

Has the frequency with which people subscribe to your newsletter improved ever since you published those five blog posts?

Are more people using your contact form?

Key performance indicators tell you if you are moving in the right direction with your content writing. Unless you get more targeted traffic you can’t know whether your content is performing well or not (simply getting traffic isn’t performing, getting new business is).

Web analytics, strategy and content writing

Content writing with strategy is incomplete without web analytics. Having hard data is very essential to a successful content writing strategy.

Web analytics tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics (I’m mentioning just these two because they are free but very potent) can tell you what sort of traffic your content is drawing.

If you want to try out a paid traffic analytics tool, these days I’m using LongtailPro. You may like to read Why I’m recommending LongtailPro to my clients.

LongtailPro tells you which longtail keywords you should target (according to the authority of your own website) and it also tracks the current position of your individual keywords – how much higher and lower they have moved compared to the previous positions.

This can help you streamline your content writing.

These tools will also tell you how much time people spend on your website. They tell you what web pages and blog posts they visit once they have entered your website through a web page or a blog post.

Suppose there is a web page (or URL) that draws lots of traffic from Google but people don’t stay on the web page for more than three seconds. They immediately leave.

Then there is something really wrong with this web page even if it enjoys higher search engine rankings. More than doing good, it is doing harm to your cause because it is telling more people why they should leave your website and why it is not relevant to what they’re looking for.

It also begins to negatively affect your search engine rankings because when people leave your website after immediately finding it on Google, the Google algorithm begins to “think” that the website is being ranked higher for wrong reasons and it doesn’t deserve to be there, and consequently, that particular link begins to lose its place in the search.

There is a reason why sometimes your content writing is directionless – there is no strategy

When you have a clearly drawn out strategy, you know why you should be writing. There is no ambiguity. There is no throwing of darts in the dark.

When you have a strategy, you know why each page, each blog post exists. You want to deliver a definitive message. When you are sure, it shows through your writing.

In the lack of a strategy, you are not only spending more effort on writing content that isn’t benefiting your business, if you are working with a content writer or a content writing agency, you’re also wasting money.

How to quickly create a content writing strategy

Create a content writing strategy

Create a content writing strategy

A strategy can be as complex as you want, and as simple as you want. It depends on your business size and the goals you are aspiring to achieve.

What about creating a quick content writing strategy?

When my clients ask me to help them come up with content writing ideas I ask them first to make a list of issues they would like to cover through publishing content on their website or blog. A list of questions they would like to answer. A list of ways they can help their customers and clients.

What helps them stand apart?

Naturally most of the clients want to improve their search engine rankings so, keywords are very important.

Improving search engine rankings is one of the topmost priorities when businesses approach me so when they are preparing a list of issues that they want to cover, I try to cover as many keywords and search terms as possible.

Every piece of content these days must have a clearly-defined objective, if you want to get good search engine rankings.

When you are covering a topic, cover it from all angles. Give it all you have got. Deliver something that people cannot get from other websites.

Every web page and blog post that you publish must have objectives like

  • Group of keywords to cover
  • Message to deliver
  • People to target
  • What people should do after reading it

Once you have these objectives in front of you when writing content, your writing becomes clear and your bounce rate comes down.

When you have covered everything that currently comes to your mind you will have a good collection of web pages for search engines to crawl and index.

Remember that you want to keep your content relevant to the keywords and search terms you are trying to optimize your website for, because you don’t want people to think that you are misleading them into visiting your website.

As you have more and more web pages and blog posts, you will have more content to link to from within your newer pages.

You also want to focus on quality and purposefulness because you want the others to link to your content.

Focus on creating topic clusters. A topic cluster is a very comprehensive web page or blog post where you have completely, and I mean really completely, covered a topic. A topic cluster web page or blog post easily consists of 3000-4000 words.

Of course, you cannot just fill up bigger web pages and blog posts with random text, it is not going to help you. Only create such clusters when you have enough information to deliver.

Here are some immediate steps you can take to create a content writing strategy:

What is the bigger objective you are aiming for?

I know, the most obvious question, but many people who want to use content to create an online presence, have no clear idea of what their bigger objective is.

Your “bigger” objective is of course a situation where your business does well, and you make lots of money. But this is not an objective for your content writing strategy, it is just a life-related objective.

Clearly define the persona you are going to target

Who are the people who can benefit the most from your content? Why?

Persona is also known as “buyer persona”.

You write content for a defined set of people, who would appreciate what you are doing and who would someday become your customers and clients.

Have you ever done a LinkedIn search? Their interface very nicely allows you to define the personae of people you would like to search. For example, you can target your searches by (or by multiple combinations)

  • By region
  • By language
  • By industry (content marketing, real estate, pharmaceuticals, business consulting, and so on)
  • By designation/title (CEO, project manager, consultant, speaker)
  • By gender

There are many other attributes you can use to find conacts in your search. The more targeted you get, the better and precise are your results.

In the same manner you can define a persona before starting to write content for your business and then whenever you are writing content, keep these personae in front of you.

You may like to read Content marketing is basically P2P.

Audit your existing content

Why is it an important part of your content writing strategy?

If you already have lots of content and when you were writing (or getting it written) that content you were not very aware of the need to create optimized, targeted and high-conversion content. That content is just lying around achieving little or even nothing.

But it may have great potential once you have revised it for better search engine rankings and better conversion. This content is something that you already have. It is always better to audit your existing content before going for new content.

Define KPIs specific to your business needs

The key performance indicators tell you how effective your content writing is. Before beginning to write content for your website or blog, make note of the following:

  • Bounce rate – how much time people currently spend on your website
  • Web page engagement rate – for how long people stay on individual web pages
  • Email subscribers – how many email subscribers you currently have
  • Overall search engine rankings – if you plan to aim for certain keywords and search terms you should note down their current rankings, otherwise, you can note the overall rankings of your website
  • Conversion rate – how many people do business with you among all the people who come to your website

It’s only when you know where you are currently that you know where you’re going to be in future. After a few months of regular, strategic content writing on your website or blog, you can revisit these KPIs and see if there is an improvement.

Remember that different businesses may have different KPI requirements. For example, for some businesses, getting new email subscribers is more important than improving their bounce rate or their search engine rankings (although, everything is interrelated). So, define your KPIs according to your specific long-term business goals.

Focus on creating topic clusters and content pillars

Coming back to topic clusters, Google loves authoritative, comprehensive content. No matter how good and relevant to your content is, if it is just 300-400 words, it is not going to be able to compete with web pages and blog posts 2000-3000 words long.

It doesn’t mean you can fill up 2000-3000-word web pages and blog posts with trash – these bigger web pages and blog posts need to be packed with relevant and useful information. Quality can never be compromised.

Remember that no matter how much content you publish and how well you write, ultimately it all boils down to how people react to your content.

If your visitors don’t find your content useful, they’re not going to spend much time on your website and if they don’t spend much time, Google thinks that you are not publishing relevant content.

It might not be easy to create comprehensive topic clusters and content pillars every week. Maybe you can target one such piece for every month.

Repurposing your existing content

Although this current blog post primarily focuses on writing content, content these days exists in numerous forms. You have textual content, video content, audio content, slides, images, infographics, GIFs – and many more formats.

You don’t need to focus on every existing format because you may not have your audience using that format. But you will need to find out all possible formats consumed by your audience.

For example, maybe your audience prefers infographics. If you have blog posts, web pages and articles that contain lots of information around a theme, you can re-purpose these blog posts, web pages and articles and create infographics out of them.

If you have lots of instructional content, maybe you can create YouTube videos out of this content? What about slides? What about combining 15-20 blog posts into an e-book?

Is creating a content writing strategy worth your time?

A long time back I remember we used to tell a joke: there is this man who is running with his bike. On his way someone asks him why doesn’t he climb up his bike and ride it instead of running with it? This way he will reach his destination faster. He says he doesn’t have enough time to stop and get onto the bike.

The same sort of state of affairs exists with content writing strategy. While you are spending all that money and time on writing content without a strategy, you can take a breather and start working on a strategy. It may take a month to figure things out, but when you eventually start publishing your content, it will be more effective.

Improve SEO of web pages and blog posts with higher engagement levels

Leave a reply
Improved search engine visibility of web pages with higher engagement levels

Improved search engine visibility of web pages with higher engagement levels

On web pages and blog posts with higher engagement level, people stay longer. For example, if someone stays more than 30-40 seconds on a web page or blog post on your website, this web page or blog post has a higher engagement level compared to web pages and blog posts that people leave within five seconds.

A point on this NewsCreed blog post on content marketing KPIs caught my attention (although, all the points are worth reading):

Some articles may receive many pageviews but have low engagement rates, which indicates that you may want to revise those pieces to capture people for longer amounts of time. Other stories may have low pageviews and high engagement, indicating that you should reallocate distribution resources and re-optimize them for SEO to get those pieces in front of more people.

This makes great sense, and although it is a natural thing to do, we often ignore such steps.

You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to know how much time people are spending on individual web pages and blog posts on your website.

Your statistics give you lots of insight. There might be many web pages or blog posts that get lots of traffic, but people don’t stay on these web pages or blog posts for long.

In terms of SEO, these web pages or blog posts might be great, but they are not performing much in terms of eliciting a positive response from your visitors.

I repeatedly mention on my blog that traffic doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t get you business. Without business, more traffic is just ego massage or an illusion.

There might be many web pages or blog posts that don’t get much traffic, but when people land on these web pages or blog posts, they stay there longer. When they are on these web pages or blog posts, they even feel encouraged to explore other parts of your website or blog. This tendency of these web pages or blog posts helps you increase your conversion rate.

So, shouldn’t you try to get more traffic to these web pages or blog posts? You should.

If you have lots of web pages and blog posts on your website, prepare an Excel spreadsheet (or Google spreadsheet) and enter all the URLs you would like to track, over there. If you are using WordPress to manage your website, there is a nice plug-in that allows you to make a list of all the URLs in your WordPress database.

Some study of Google Analytics can tell you how you can find out how much time people are spending on your web pages and blog posts.

Once you have discovered that there are many web pages and blog posts that have a higher engagement level but don’t get much traffic, you can start promoting these web pages and blog posts.

Note down their current rankings, traffic and the amount of time people are spending on them in separate columns of the spreadsheet.

You can start with trying to improve their search engine rankings.

How to improve the SEO of web pages and blog posts with higher engagement levels?

Do you feel that if you tweak the content of web pages and blog posts with higher engagement levels may bring down their engagement levels?

Sure, this can happen, and this is where an experienced content writer can help you.

Anyway, as long as you are clear about why these chosen web pages and blog posts have a higher engagement level, you can optimize the content to increase their search engine rankings without meddling with their current engagement level.

You will need to be patient. My website gets crawled almost daily, and even multiple times a day sometimes. This way, I can find out quickly whether certain changes have had some sort of impact on their search engine rankings or not.

That might not be the case with your website. If it takes a while for Google to crawl and index your new and updated links, then you will need to wait and see how your recent changes are improving SEO of your chosen links and how it is affecting the engagement levels.

Make small changes. You must have clear idea of what keywords and search terms bring targeted traffic to these web pages and blog posts. See if you can incorporate more instances of these keywords and search terms into your existing content.

Maybe you can include a couple of more points with headings having your keywords?

Maybe you can increase the number of words?

But don’t add text just to increase the number of words; have something relevant to say. Make sure that you are adding value rather than creating extra noise to increase the size of your web page or blog post. This will cause more harm than good.

If right now you have got nothing to add, then don’t add. Do some research. Do some more reading. Take more time. This is not some job that you should do in a hurry.

Make a list of changes that you would like to incorporate and then wait for the new data to emerge in the Google Analytics dashboard.

As a content writer my advise would be to make very small changes in the existing text and then if possible, add more text where the original text ends. This way, the material that gives you a higher engagement level won’t be pushed down or diluted.

You can also promote links with higher engagement levels directly without resorting to improving their search engine rankings. You can encourage people to link to these web pages and blog posts. You can link to them from your own LinkedIn, Quora and Medium posts. You can repeatedly share them on social media. You can frequently share these links through your mailing list.

The string of thoughts that made me write this post was triggered by the suggestion that one should try to improve the SEO of web pages and blog posts that enjoy a higher engagement level so that more people can come to these web pages and blog posts, to get you even higher engagement level and consequently, improve your conversion rate.

How your typical content marketing evolves

Leave a reply
How your content marketing evolves

How your content marketing evolves

Content marketing comes with very esoteric expressions these days, but every content marketing strategy begins from the basics.

Why does your business need a content marketing strategy?

Established content marketers tell you that your business needs content marketing so that you can build a platform for yourself that you can someday use for promoting your business.

Michael Hyatt, in his book, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, says “Without a platform – something that enables you to get seen and heard – you don’t have a chance. Having an awesome product, an outstanding service, or a compelling cause it is no longer enough.”

bigger goal of content marketing

The bigger goal of content marketing is to attract, convert and retain customers.

Of course, they are right. Every business needs its own platform, whether micro and macro. You need your audience if you want to do business. People should be eager to listen to you. Not just listen to you, they should pay attention to what you are saying, and the best would be that they also react to what you are saying.

What is the initial goal of your content marketing strategy?

That’s a bigger goal – building a broadcasting platform. Your broadcasting platform takes shape when you have done content marketing for your business for at least a year (assuming you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on promotion and marketing).

What happens in the beginning? When you have just started content marketing?

In the beginning, you work at the basics.

All the basics boil down to one thing: you need targeted traffic.

no traffic no platform no business

No traffic – no platform – no business.

There are rivers of traffic. There are lakes of traffic. There are seas of traffic, oceans of traffic.

You have to dig channels towards your business and these channels will bring traffic to your website either in small streams or flash floods depending on the tectonics of the Internet world.

Although throughout your content marketing you may try to get as much targeted traffic from the search engines as possible, in the beginning you primarily focus on your main keywords.

I’m not suggesting that you focus on your keywords so much that you don’t pay any attention to your quality and relevance, but you have to strike a balance between writing and publishing keyword-rich content and providing value to your visitors.

If you have lots of time and resources at hand, you can focus on multiple sources of traffic like your own blog and website, other blogs and websites and various social media channels, but if you have limited resources and no extra help, I suggest you first focus on your own website and blog.

Make sure that all the necessary pages on your website are there. All the information that a prospective customer or client may need to make a decision in your favour, should be there. All the concepts should be explained. All the doubts should be cleared. All the apprehensions should be laid to rest.

Then focus on your blog. Publish lots of useful content that is keyword-rich. Don’t get carried away. Initially stick to 1-2 blog posts every day and follow this pattern until you have 50+ blog posts.

According to the latest patterns emerging through various SEO and content marketing conversations, longer pieces contents are better than shorter pieces.

By shorter pieces I don’t mean “thin content”, that is totally useless, and even harmful; shorter pieces mean blog posts of 500 to 700 words. These are no longer sufficient.

Publish fewer blog posts, but publish longer blog posts – 1200-1500-2000 words if possible.

Seems daunting?

Look at it this way: publishing in 2000-word comprehensive blog post that covers your central topic from all the angles gives you far better returns than publishing 4 blog posts of 500-700 words. These 500-700-word blog posts – considering you publish quality content – may take more time than the 2000-word blog post, and in many instances, may even cost you more.

Longer blog posts obviously take time and effort, and this is the reason why search engines like Google take longer blog posts more seriously compared to shorter blog posts – anyone with little effort can write shorter blog posts, but it takes lots of effort and dedication to write longer blog post.

So, just starting your content marketing? Don’t go overboard with the number of blog posts. From the beginning itself, start posting bigger, more comprehensive blog posts even if you have to publish fewer blog posts.

Once you feel that you have covered all the topics that you could have possibly covered in these 50+ blog post, start focusing on other publishing platforms also. Occasionally publish on Medium. Publish on LinkedIn. Answer to people’s questions on Quora. Start networking with other publishers so that they publish your content on their websites and blogs.

This is your initial stage of content marketing and it can easily take up 4-5 months.

What is the advanced stage of content marketing for your business?

For continued content marketing success, you will need to maintain the pace.

There are many reasons:

  • Just like you, many businesses, your direct and indirect competitors, are using content marketing to promote themselves.
  • Your current and prospective customers and clients need to be kept engaged constantly otherwise they lose interest in your business and even when need to avail your product or service they may not recall you and do business somewhere else.
  • Search engine rankings are being shuffled every second. Millions of blog posts, webpages, images, videos and social media updates are being indexed by Google every hour and all these pieces of content are competing with your content. You constantly need to feed Google and other search engines with new content.
  • People’s attention span, especially on the Internet, is quite fickle. You constantly need to remind them of your capability. If you are simply promoting others’ content, you don’t make much impact. But if you share your own content, if you engage people through your own content, they remember you better and the respect you for your knowledge and experience.
  • When you publish content continuously some of your content begins to appear on other websites and blogs. Remember that for the effective back linking, people need to link to your content voluntarily. The more content you publish, the better are your chances of being linked to by other Webmasters and bloggers.

From simple SEO, your content marketing evolves into a complete content publishing and promotion routine

This is how your content marketing evolves. In the beginning you simply focus on improving your search engine rankings, but eventually, you begin to build a platform for your business and for your brand.

There is no use hurrying. A few months ago, I created a video titled “Content marketing is like growing a tree”, in which I have explained that just like you cannot hurry when you want to grow a tree and enjoy its fruits, you cannot hurry with content marketing. It evolves at its own pace unless you are ready to pump in lots of money and effort. Here is the video:

Behind every successful content marketing there is unique content and a very remarkable quality of unique content is, it can sustain itself even in the face of competition.

After you have attained a traction with unique and quality content, you can slow down your pace. Instead of publishing 1-2 blog posts every day, maybe you can publish 1-2 blog posts every week, or even a couple of weeks if you want to focus on detailed, longer blog posts.

By the time you have published 50+ blog posts you become known for your content quality and people begin to seek you out when they are looking for quality advice and insight. This is an indication that you have built your platform.

A platform means people converge at a particular point associated with you to achieve something, and in terms of content marketing, they want to be informed, so they pay close attention to what you publish on your website, blog and even on your social media timeline. You have got an audience. People carefully listen to you.

After this, you just need to sustain your platform. At this stage, your content marketing has evolved and unless you do something really disastrous, the only way from here is forward.