Category Archives: Business Development

25 reasons your business needs content marketing

Content marketing is one of the biggest advantages the Internet has brought to small and medium-sized businesses, but it also has a drawback – very few people understand it, and it takes time, effort and strategy to actually experience its true power. Another problem with content marketing is that it is mostly related to writing and there are very few who take writing seriously.

On the other hand, people take SEO very seriously because they think getting higher search engine rankings is a big deal. Sure, it is a big deal, but getting higher rankings doesn’t guarantee success in terms of increasing your sales or getting more leads.

I often say that the need to implement a well-defined content marketing strategy is same as actually recognising the impact of global warming and taking corrective measures. Very few individuals in this world take global warming as seriously as it should be because they think it is some distant problem. Since content marketing takes time to show some real results and a great amount of consistency, one, people are unable to understand it and two, even those who can understand it, find it quite overwhelming, despite the fact that there isn’t more effective way of marketing your business than content marketing.

Why your business needs content marketing

Here are 25 reasons:

It is cheaper compared to traditional advertising and marketing (sometimes even free if you don’t count time as money)
It is much more effective than traditional advertising and marketing
It helps you consolidate your online presence
It makes your brand relatable and recognisable
It encourages people to do business with you rather than convincing them to do business with you
It organically improves your search engine rankings
It gets you more qualified traffic from social networking websites
It helps you engage your prospective customers and clients meaningfully
You get repeat traffic to your website
Your online presence becomes more authoritative if you continuously write about a particular subject and people can use your writing to improve their life or their business
Content marketing is self-sustaining – a web page or blog post that crosses a particular threshold level brings you business for months and even years without you having to spend any money
As your content marketing succeeds, its cost moves towards zero
It increases your sales as, the more people read your content the more they are eager to do business with you
Content marketing generates more leads for you
As more and more people link to your content you generate multiple traffic sources and consequently, you have to depend less on search engine whims
With content marketing, as a small business you can compete with big business by making your content more approachable and personal
It helps you build long-term relationships with your existing and future customers and clients
It helps you create a helpful resource on your website or blog continuously drawing people to your business
Content marketing gives you an edge because most of your competitors don’t have the needed patience to succeed at it
It encourages your customers to reach out to you and share your content on their own social networking timelines
When you encourage your employees to create content for your business website it improves their confidence and makes them more productive
As an independent consultant or service provider, as your authority increases due to content marketing, you can charge more for your services
As your audience feels more educated, they will be more inclined towards doing business with you rather than another website that doesn’t publish helpful content
Every piece of content you create and distribute is an invaluable business asset
Sustained content marketing builds you a broadcasting channel with your own dedicated audience through which you can carry out PR campaigns and product promotion campaigns without having to depend on third-party broadcasting channels

For medium-sized and big businesses, I personally believe that the 25th point is the most important. Content marketing helps you build a broadcasting channel which very few businesses have.

Been trying to make optimal settings for credible-content.com in Google’s Webmasters tools

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Recently I installed SSL on my website so I was trying to submit the new, changed URL to Google Webmasters tools: from http to https. There I noticed that I hadn’t instructed the Webmasters tools settings to consider just a single version of my URL without www. Until yesterday the domain was pointing to both the www and without www versions of the URL credible-content.com. Although I had made the needed changes in the .htaccess file and had also chosen the version without www as my main URL in my domain hosting Control Panel I wasn’t sure whether it needs to be exclusively entered in Google’s Webmasters tools or not. Then, when I was trying to do that, it repeatedly asked me to verify that I actually own the domain name www.credible-content.com. I didn’t know that I separately had to add this particular domain name and then verify it. Anyway, I was able to achieve that.

2 things come to my mind. First, all my URLs should go to the version that is without www and now since I have installed the SSL, http has become https. In the ensuing confusion, I have added all the 3 versions of my website to Google’s Webmasters tools, the one with www, without www (that is http) and https. I’m still figuring out eventually which single domain I should keep in the dashboard. A bit confusing for someone who doesn’t manage Google analytics and Google’s Webmasters tools as a profession. I mean, I have been using these services for quite some time, but not very deeply, which I intend to do from now on.

Why am I writing this? With all these settings you may experience some 404 errors while Google decides which URLs to crawl, index and rank. But I’m sure eventually things will settle to a single, https URL.

It’s not Google’s fault that your business entirely depends on the search engine

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When people feel bad about their rankings suddenly changing due to erratic algorithmic changes at Google it is understandable because businesses incur losses. Something that might be inane and simple organizational restructuring for the search giant might be a matter of life and death for a particular business. I have personally experienced total disappearance of my website from the search engine listings around three years ago (April-end 2011 to be precise) and I can totally relate to what must people feel when their links suddenly disappear from the first page or the second page for no fault of theirs.

First, Google never advises people to base their businesses solely on the search engine. The search engine is a good way of getting qualified traffic but it is a search engine after all run by a private company that is only going to worry about its own bottom line. People at Google will never make changes that bring them losses. In fact search engineers and information architects at Google must be working round-the-clock trying to figure out how to maximize the company’s profits. If in the pursuit of this maximization someone’s business is ruined, well, too bad.

But you know what? Google is not a natural phenomenon. It’s not that your business was hit by an earthquake or a flash flood or a lightning and you couldn’t do anything about it. Yes, if it is a major source of traffic you might be hit initially but if you have already been trying to build other resources for qualified traffic then there is no reason to worry. The problem is, sometimes we focus just on a single thing, like put all the eggs in a single basket and if you’re doing that, then even if your business does not depend on Internet traffic, it is operating on shaky ground because you never know when circumstances change.

Take for instance guest blogging. In a recent blog post I explained how to pitch for a guest blogging assignment and I also mentioned how guest blogging is being frowned upon by the search experts at Google for obvious reasons. There is a thriving community called MyBlogGuest for guest bloggers and suddenly Google has decided to penalize not just the website but also all the participants. And this is exactly the sort of response from Ann Smarty, the founder of MyBlogGuest, that should instil confidence among those who don’t want to allow Google to arm twist them into following its every single guideline. The people who are complaining are mostly the ones who had completely left it up to Google to decide how much traffic they should get.

Why is Google penalizing every method of getting back links from other websites? Guest blogging after all is a perfectly legitimate way of getting qualified links to your website or blog. You write for another blog and as a gesture of appreciation, they include a small bio of yours that contains your link; what’s wrong in that? There is nothing wrong in that. You need to remember that Google’s revenue comes from AdWords – it’s a PPC (pay per click) program. If you’re not good at improving your search engine rankings and if you have money to spend on marketing, this is a good way of getting immediate traffic. So naturally, if you don’t have other sources of traffic, you need to depend on Google, and if Google doesn’t allow you to naturally get those links from other websites, the only option left for you is to invest in its AdWords program. Obviously it is going to penalize those businesses that try to get traffic from other links.

Attaching the search engine rankings to the way you get links is just a ruse. Google cannot directly tell you that don’t get links from other websites because the only way to get links is through AdWords. It does that through downgrading your natural search engine rankings, something every business aspires for. So either improve your natural search engine rankings by strictly following Google’s recommendations and guidelines, or invest in the AdWords program if the only thing that matters to you is traffic from Google.

What can be other options? Of course I don’t advise you to go against Google’s guidelines because you can generate massive traffic once you have cracked the ranking problem and gotten your website to the first page or even the second page on Google. This is something that works for me:

When it comes to creating content, make your own website or blog the priority. Create as much high-quality content for your own website or blog as possible. The more high-quality content you have, the better are your prospects at improving your search engine rankings naturally.
When you get links from other websites (and you don’t want those links to adversely affect your Google search engine rankings) request the owners of that website to use the rel=”nofollow” tag (this tells Google that you are not using the link to improve your search engine rankings). Google does not penalize you for incoming links if these links have this tag. It also doesn’t penalize your ranking if these links are coming from well-reputed websites like New York Times, Washington Post or the Huffington Post whether the use the “nofollow” tag or not.
Focus on networking, equally. As a small business word of mouth matters. Getting random traffic from search engines may give you a psychological boost, but it isn’t necessary that it will translate into good business. On the other hand if you establish personal contacts with different people it will fetch you more business. Establish a good presence over LinkedIn, Twitter and if possible, also Facebook. In the past year 20% of my business has come from LinkedIn and Facebook (strangely, there have been queries from Twitter, but so far, no project).
Spend some money on marketing. A great number of things on the Internet are available for free, and this has given rise to a negative mentality that you can do well without spending much money. Invest money getting a good website and hiring a good content writer – regarding hiring a good content writer, I’m not just saying this because I’m a professional content writer, the way you express yourself on your website really makes a big difference. Even PPC programs like AdWords can give you the much-needed initial push. I’m not saying start spending money senselessly, I’m just saying get out of that mentality that on the Internet you don’t need to spend money and everything can be achieved pretty much free of cost. It’s an illusion. Even people promoting open source software applications make money by providing support for those applications.
Develop your own mailing list. Email still rules the roost when it comes to promoting your services although spammers throughout the world have totally tarnished its image. But it really works. These days, aside from providing professional content, I have also started writing for a few news publications and for that I started a new mailing list for people who would like to get notified whenever I publish a new article. The click rate is 16-20%. This is very impressive. It means if I have 100 subscribers, 16 people are reading my articles from that mailing list and if I have 1000 subscribers – on the Internet this is not a stretch – then 160 are reading my articles straight out of that mailing list. 16-20% is not easily achievable, but even if you can achieve 4-5% you no longer have to depend on Google traffic.

I may have not covered everything above, but what I’m trying to say is, don’t just solely depend on Google because this strategy is dangerous in any environment. Work on building multiple streams even if you feel that you are diluting your effort.

How to boost your B2B business with content writing

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First, some statistics: (these represent North America but the analogy is applicable to anywhere in the world) according to this research by Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and Brightcove combined, 93% B2B marketers use content marketing one way or another. 42% of them say they are quite effective at it, this means they have a clue of what they are doing and they are getting positive results. $ 16.6 billion are being invested annually by B2B companies creating and publishing content. That’s a lot of money.

Content is needed everywhere, whether you get it written, videod, drawn or photographed. This is what people see, acknowledge, grasp and then base their decisions upon. It is the experience that they have on your website or blog. They wouldn’t bother checking out your online presence unless something draws them to it and what draws them to your website? Right, your content. You may think that it’s your product or service that is drawing them, but exactly what represents your product or service. If you’re selling mobile phones, you can’t put mobile phones on your website, can you? You need to put photographs. You need to publish their descriptions. If possible you also need to submit reviews. Then there are specifications, model details, et cetera. Whatever you put on your website, it’s content.

Why do B2B customers look for content, especially written content?

Take the mobile phones example. If you’re just a normal customer (and not a B2B customer) not much is at stake. At the most you may buy one or two mobile phones.

But what about the bulk buyer? He or she is your B2B customer. Maybe he or she is buying in bulk in order to sell the phones on his or her e-commerce website or even a normal retail store. Not only is he or she spending lots of money buying from you, he or she is also making a critical business decision. Wouldn’t he or she like to know more about your mobile phones? Wooden he or she like to know more about you as a reliable supplier of the product that he or she intends to sell? What are the prospects of selling these mobile phones? Primarily for what features would people buy these mobile phones? How many people are already buying these phones? If more people are buying these phones, why? What do the existing users have to say about these phones? Your B2B customer would like to know as much as possible about the product before investing so much money.

B2B customers do lots of research, and study. Otherwise they may end up losing lots of money. This is why they consume as much content as possible before making a decision in your favor.

Boosting your B2B business with content writing

So how does content writing help your B2B business (actually it sounds strange, “B2B business” means “business to business business)?

You need to convince your B2B customers that you are giving them a profitable deal. Profitable deal doesn’t just entail selling your product or service as cheap as possible, the more important thing is, you are reliable, trustworthy and above all, you have full knowledge of your field. If you are selling mobile phones of a particular brand at a particular time, you know the inside out of that mobile phone. You not only know the technical specifications, you also know exactly why people are buying that particular model and why your B2B customers should buy this phone in order to do further business. How can you achieve that? How can you instil such confidence among your B2B customers?

By constantly engaging them with your content. You need to satiate their desire to know more and more. Remember that when they come to your website they already have a plethora of apprehensions, and naturally. After all they are going to make a business investment. They’re going to spend lots of money on you. So they need to know more about your business, about you, and the product that they are about to purchase, in bulk, by paying you lots of money. They need to feel confident. They need to feel at ease. The best way to instil confidence in them is to make them familiar to you, your presence and your product as much as possible. This can be done by writing content regularly. Useful content. Content that helps them make a decision.

Now, the decision doesn’t necessarily have to be in your favor – your primary motive for publishing content is helping people make a better decision for themselves (even if they don’t buy from you, the others will). Of course you have to draw a line. It’s no use publishing “helpful content” if all you are achieving is sending customers to your competitors.

Often the problem is not with outsourcing

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I was just going through a rant in an email newsletter about why businesses, especially small businesses, shouldn’t outsource and why it makes sense hiring people in-house.

On the surface there is nothing wrong in the argument because how you get your work done depends on your personal choice whether you want to hire someone full-time, part-time or outsource.

The problem is, when people have bad experience outsourcing their work, they start talking about how outsourcing sucks and why people shouldn’t indulge in it. They rarely try to observe the situation from the opposite angle, that is the person who is outsourcing the work rather than the one to whom the work is being outsourced.

There are innumerable, hard-working, sincere and efficient people on the Internet. Here I’m not going to talk about myself, but almost 3 years ago my client Steve decided to hire a programmer from the Philippines using an outsourcing company and we have had a great experience. He does such a great job that recently when Steve was contemplating terminating the contract (because he felt the job for which the programmer was hired is almost done) I convinced him into not letting the programmer go just because it is so difficult to get such people. You may say I’m contradicting myself (that it is very difficult to get good people to whom you can outsource your work and hence, they are an exception rather than a norm) but I will just come to another point.

The problem is people are either too lazy to look for good talent, or they are simply cheap. I have been writing content for the past 12 years and 70% of the queries seek “world-class content” at “cheap rates”. They actually expect me to create 1000-word “high-quality” blog posts for as little as $5. By offering $5, how much time do you expect me to spend on your blog post?

More than that, how much value do you attach to building your own business assets?

As a content writer living in a Third World country, I (I as any other person) may have my own compulsions for accepting such low-paying assignments and eventually screwing up everything because it is not humanly possible to create enough content to make a decent living with such a rate, what is your excuse? If you cannot afford to spend $35-50 on a decent blog post, why in the first place you are in this business? Either create your own content or hire someone who charges decently, and does good work. If you think that your blog post is worth just $5, if you think that your content writer can be so cheap, then feel fine about getting a cheap deal. Don’t crib.