Category Archives: Content Marketing

10 content marketing myths to avoid

In every field there is herd mentality simply because it is much easier to follow a herd rather than chart your own path. Besides, we think that whatever the herd is doing might be the right way hence why not go that way? The problem is, when one of the sheep of the herd starts jumping over the cliff, sometimes all the sheep follow, including you. The same sort of mentality sometimes manifests in content marketing.

It is surprising that we are ready to put in more effort towards doing what others are doing whether they are doing it right or wrong rather than making an effort to understand exactly what our business requires. Every business has a unique content marketing requirement. So does your business. But are you losing the game simply because you are following the myths created or established by others? If this is the case, you might be wasting lots of money, time and worse, business.

This Business2Community blog post lists 10 content marketing myths that you can avoid and stay on the proper path. In brief, these myths are:

The more content you have the better it is: Well, sometimes it is true and sometimes it is not. Provided you can produce lots of targeted high-quality content and provided you have the budget, more content can certainly give you an edge, but if you are publishing content just for the sake of quantity, it does more harm than good.
Anybody can write content: Again, it depends on your ability to write, your experience as a professional writer and the time you have at hand. Content marketing is a full-time job better left to professionals. Simply because people can write a few sentences or a few paragraphs and sometimes a few blog posts, they get trapped in this notion that they can carry out the entire job of content writing and content marketing on their own.
Content marketing and content writing is the same thing: Just because you publish a blog doesn’t mean you’re doing content marketing. As the world goes, you need to market the content and just as you need to do multiple things in order to market something, the same is applicable to content marketing.
Content should be cheap: Why? It’s a business asset, just like your website. In fact your content is the most precious thing you have because people do business with you after they are exposed to your content. Getting cheap content means considering your business a cheap proposition.
It’s just about creating great content: Although having great content on your website is the topmost requirement if you want to execute an effective content marketing strategy, marketing per se, as already mentioned in bullet 3, is a lot more than that.
Content marketing is just a fad: Well, you think that? All the best with your business, really.
Content marketing isn’t for every business: It is a very potent tool and it depends on individuals and businesses how they use it. It isn’t about whether content marketing is for your business or not, it’s about whether you can use content marketing for your business or not.
You can use automated tools to carry out content marketing: I’m not totally against using automation tools like scheduling when your message is broadcast or scheduling when your email marketing campaign is triggered, but if you’re using automated tools to generate content for your content marketing, this is a sure shot way to fail. Content is all about human beings because it is produced for human beings.
Content marketing is a separate, unrelated business operation: It is not. Everybody needs to get involved otherwise it becomes difficult to create valuable content.
Content marketing needs to generate sales otherwise it’s a flop: The purpose of content marketing is of course to enhance your business presence but it rarely happens that it contributes towards an increase in sales directly. It solidifies your presence and it helps people engage with you. It increases your brand presence. It helps you get more leads.

How to make your content marketing more effective in 2015

Leave a reply

By specifically saying 2015 I don’t mean there is something cosmically special about the year, what I mean is which currently available opportunities you can use to make your content marketing more effective than it was the previous year, that is, in 2014.

We are constantly evolving and when we are continuously striving at something, we hope to evolve, naturally. So if we have been doing something average the better the previous year, we try to make it better this year and then hope to improve more the next year. Of course there can be ups and downs and this is a civilizational reality, but our constant effort is to keep moving upwards.

So how can you make content marketing more effective this year? Here are a few things you can do – some of the actions you carry out today are as effective today as they were yesterday and as they are going to be tomorrow or day after tomorrow, and some are the outcome of the technologies and trends available this year.

Focus on your audience rather than search engines

Quality and readability of your content matter the most and then the rest follow. Effective content marketing means drawing the right people to your website and then making sure that they do business with you or at least are open to frequent communication (that is, you are able to generate leads). This is possible only when your content serves well. It delivers what it promises. People come to your website with an expectation (if they aren’t just stumbling upon it by mistake) and if that expectation is not met they feel disappointed and soon forget about you. On the other hand if they find what they had expected, they will be thrilled, they will remember you, they will do business with you and they will also recommend you. Don’t worry too much about stuffing keywords and creating expressions simply to incorporate your keywords. Use natural language and provide value.

Create valuable content on an ongoing basis

There is no dearth of valuable content on the Internet despite all the noise constantly being created. Some people are pretty good out there and you need to compete with them whether you like it or not. Quality is given and you aren’t even in the game if you cannot publish quality content. The challenge creating quality content on an ongoing basis. Here is why you constantly need to create valuable and quality content:

Someone out there is constantly creating more content than you
Newly created pages and blog posts are ranked higher than older blog posts and articles
People and search engines are constantly looking for fresh content
Constantly publishing quality content increases your knowledge base
The more fresh content you have the more content you get indexed by search engines
Fresh content focused on a niche topic brings people to your website on an ongoing basis (repeat traffic is more important than unique traffic)
You get to cover your primary keywords, secondary keywords and long-term keywords and every other possible combination without spamming existing pages
You engage people when they come to your website
You provide people opportunity to share your links on social media and social networking websites
People trust businesses that regularly share their knowledge and wisdom

Broadcast your content using appropriate channels

Every publisher on the Internet is a potential broadcaster – you don’t have to be a newspaper or TV channel or a magazine to broadcast your content. When you post your links on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn you are broadcasting your content. When you are (or someone else) pins your images on Pinterest, your content is being broadcast.

Content marketing doesn’t just involve publishing articles and blog posts on your own website or blog. You need to broadcast your content. You need to spread it around. How do you do that?

You can use the latest social media and social networking websites (I’m not saying just Facebook and Twitter because well, every year you have something new). People will follow you for the sort of content you post so you can easily build an audience. If I’m interested in content marketers and if you constantly post links on content marketing, and if those links are valuable, I will certainly follow you. You can use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer app to broadcast and schedule your content in various social networking websites. There is so much content on the Internet that it doesn’t make sense to simply publish it and leave it like that. You need to make sure that the right audience can access your content.

Don’t ignore SEO

The good old SEO isn’t going anywhere as long as there are search engines. The way they index and rank your content may differ from year to year, and sometimes even month-to-month, it matters how the gauge your content and then rank it accordingly. The basic tenets of SEO remain the same:

Create content for readers rather than search engines
Create lots of focused content so that your website is known as a specialty area
Create as much quality content as possible
Encourage people to share your content on social networking websites because the more your content is shared, the better it is for your SEO
Become an authority figure. Known personalities on the Internet somehow enjoy better search engine rankings
Organize your content in a search engine-friendly manner. Appropriately use headlines, hyperlinks and bulleted lists

Maintain a mailing list

This maintaining mailing seems like an advice from the early 2000’s but email still rules the roost contrary to all the negative predictions. No matter how widespread social media and social networking become, when it comes to actually doing some serious work, it’s still the email people depend on. It’s the best way to reach your target audience on an ongoing basis without annoying them. Use double opt in – let people confirm that they have actually allowed you to send them email messages.

Just as in any other case, it’s on the basis of the quality of your content that your mailing list is going to succeed. Remember that the benefits of building a maintaining list cannot be reaped in a short span of time – in fact, content marketing itself takes its own good time to give you some good results and prove its effectiveness. Nonetheless, it is one of the most effective ways of marketing your products and services on the Internet and also, the cheapest.

Be awesome at your work

Now, what can beat this? Don’t let them walk all over you, but make your customers and clients as happy as possible. Provide them the best product and the best service and the best after sales support and they will not only become your customers and clients for life, they will also get you new customers and clients. Be awesome and write about your awesomeness on a daily basis. Share it with the world. Boast about it.

Using Pinterest as your content marketing tool

Leave a reply

Pinterest can be a good content marketing tool for your business. Although I write content for my clients I often advise them to not to stick to just one form of content and explore all the arenas available. If you haven’t used Pinterest much it’s a social media platform that allows people to post images, importantly, from the webpages or blog posts they are currently visiting. Suppose you are on this page (on my blog) and there is an image on this page. If you hover your cursor over the image you will see a Pinterest icon. This allows you to pin this image to your Pinterest dashboard. Most of the dashboards are concentrated collection of images and they are highly focused. What’s the big deal?

When you pin the image to your dashboard the image is automatically hyperlinked to my blog post. If someone clicks the image on your dashboard, that person will be brought to this blog post. This is how traffic is generated from Pinterest. This is why it is very important to have at least one image on your webpage or blog post that someone would like to pin.

Everybody on the Internet likes to share interesting stuff. Sharing videos using YouTube is a complicated process and contrary to that, sharing images with people using Pinterest is quite easy. It just takes a couple of seconds. You can either upload images existing on your computer or you can simply share them from the website where they have been originally published.

This slightly old blog post claims that by 2012 some websites were getting more traffic from Pinterest than Google +, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. By that year it had also become the second highest referrer of traffic just after Facebook.

What sort of websites can benefit from Pinterest content marketing?

On the surface, mostly websites that draw an audience interested in visual content and that too, mostly images and photographs. The first such websites that come to my mind are, fashion websites, entertainment, travel, interior decorators, accessories, cooking and food related items, beauty products, hobbies and crafts, education and such – websites that can convey ideas and messages visually. But then these days any industry can use graphics and images to drive in a point, for example infographics.

In order to use Pinterest, as I just mentioned above, use interesting images and visuals along with written content. Focus on images people would like to share. Just make sure that people can easily pin your images on the dashboards without much effort.

How does targeting work in content marketing

Leave a reply

Your content marketing needs to target a particular audience if you want to experience success. I think this is a fundamental fact and everybody knows that. The problem is, how does this targeting work? How do you know whom to target and then target them with content marketing?

Even the “whom” part is quite easy. I sell my content writing services to people who are looking for high-quality content in order to improve their conversion rate and if possible, also to improve their search engine rankings. In my particular case, the problem is my niche is not clearly defined. Everybody who has a business on the Internet needs compelling content. So whom do I target? Again, people who are looking for high-quality content to improve their conversion rate and these people may have any sort of business (as long as that business is legitimate and truly serves people).

Targeting is very important and the more narrowly you can target, the better are your prospects and the greater is your expertise. I’m good at writing content for IT companies, web design companies and personal development agencies. Of late I have also been writing content for realtors, companies that deal with employee background checks and accounting firms and my clients have been pretty happy with the work. This gives me confidence in targeting these particular niches. If I target these, I can be pretty sure that even if not many businesses give me work, people working in these areas will definitely appreciate what I have to offer.

How do I target these people with content marketing?

Once you have figured out whom to target, you start creating and disseminating content about these niches. If I want to attract realtors I will write about how my content writing services are helping realtors get more customers. To create multiple blog posts and articles I may cite examples of various realtors who are doing great business because of my content writing services (with their permission of course). I can also talk about the various problems I come across while creating content for creating services and then how I deal with these problems. It can be as creative as it gets.

Targeting with content marketing means relating your service with your target audience and creating lots of content around that. This will also help you improve your search engine rankings. For example, make a list of keywords that involve your target audience and then also create a list of keywords that involve your own business and then combine these keywords to create blog topics, webpages and articles.

Of course content marketing doesn’t just mean writing blog posts, articles and webpages on your website. You need to make sure that the content that you create and publish reaches the right audience and for that you have to use the right platforms. For some, LinkedIn works. For some, it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or a combination of these. Some prefer to target search engines instead. It depends on where your target audience is. You create content that caters to these audiences and then promote that content using the channels used by these audiences.

How do you measure the ROI of content marketing?

Leave a reply

According to this Marketing Land article, nearly $ 16.6 billion was spent in 2011 on content marketing. If you’re wondering why I’m referring to such an old link it’s because finding such a link wasn’t my intention, I just came across it. Anyway, a relatively new infographic gives a roundabout budget of $ 135 billion for 2014. But the point is, big money is being spent on content marketing. If so much money is being spent, then you must be interested in the ROI – how much money you earn back by investing money in content marketing?

Content marketing is obviously different from conventional advertising. It is not a campaign whereas conventional advertising is. In conventional advertising you run your ad in a newspaper or on TV and then you get a response. Suppose you spend $500 on an ad in a local newspaper which generates, let us say, 300 queries and you’re able to do a business of $15,000. You can easily calculate the ROI here.

Content marketing is an ongoing process so ROI is indirect

It is difficult to find the ROI of a single blog post although websites with lots of traffic can do that. I often tell my clients that it may take them around 6 months to make sense of the ROI on content marketing or at least on the content I am writing for them. The reason is that when you are routinely publishing content on your website, on your blog, and elsewhere, every new blog post, every new article, every new eBook or white paper and every new social update, is a brick and you’re using multiple bricks to build the platform from which you promote your business. Yes, some bricks are more effective than other bricks (some of your blog posts and social updates may go viral beyond your imagination) but mostly it is the sum total of all the content you have published on your own website or blog and elsewhere, that eventually begins to give you an ROI.

In order to get a sense of your return on investment you need to be very clear about your KPI’s – key performance indicators. Not every content marketing strategy aims to increase your sales (fine, by the end of the day, what matters is how much you have sold). Every business has different key performance indicators. Some simply want to raise awareness. Some want to increase their email and blog subscribers. Some want to improve their search engine rankings. You may want to enhance your personal brand that in return will get you more business or opportunities. You may want to generate more leads. And so on.

One way of calculating the ROI of content marketing

If you want to use content marketing to improve your search engine rankings then make a list of keywords for which you aren’t ranking well but would like to rank well. Then initiate your content marketing strategy. Provided you are making the right moves you should see an improvement within a couple of months. You can compare the expense you have incurred getting your content written or produced and your search engine rankings to calculate your ROI.

Another method would be to note down your current sales and your current content marketing expense. Then start observing your sales performance while keeping the content marketing expense the same. As I have already mentioned above, you may not notice a difference for a few months, but eventually (provided you do everything right – that is VERY important) you will. Surely the ROI will be negative initially but soon it will improve with every month.

Is it important to know the ROI of content marketing?

Obviously. This is the only way to know whether your content marketing is working or not. There may not be a direct method of knowing the ROI specifically due to the nature of your business, but there has to be a point A and then a point B and you should be able to know that how much content marketing has helped you reach from point A to point B and preferably, more effectively compared to other means of marketing.