Category Archives: Content Marketing

Content marketing doesn’t stop with n number of webpages or blog posts

1 Reply

Whenever I tell this to my clients they think I’m trying to get more business from them, which is true, in a sense, because if I’m telling you to get more content from me, and that too on an ongoing basis, I cannot afford to provide it for free. It’s like, getting solar panels installed on your roof is a good step because once you have covered the cost of installation the power you get is practically free (and you save your environment from getting more polluted).

So, it doesn’t make sense to grow cynical if a solar energy company asks you to buy solar panels from it simply because it would mean it is trying to do business. Anyway, the point of this post is not that. I think generating content on an ongoing basis must be a conscious choice and being a savvy business person you should be able to decide for yourself.

Having said that, if you’re getting 20 articles or blog posts written and after that you think that your content marketing campaign is over you need to rethink. Millions web pages are being generated on a daily basis. At least 500-1000 among them are lapped up by search engines, bloggers, website publishers and social media/networking users to promote and spread. These are the top ones that attract the majority of the traffic of that particular day.

For how long can you sit on the laurels of those 20 articles or blog posts? The reality of the current state of the Internet is that you constantly need to publish new content in order to stay in the game.

You want people to keep coming back to your blog or website. You also want social media/networking users to continuously promote your content. You want the search engines to keep on crawling your website/blog so that whenever you are making new offers or updating your content it is indexed and reflected in search results very fast. You want to cover as many keywords as possible in order to increase your targeted search engine traffic. You also want to build a community around your product or service so that people not only buy from you they also promote your business through word-of-mouth marketing.

This requires ongoing content publishing.

Both people and search engines are constantly looking for fresh, topical content to learn from and to promote. They are not going to highlight or promote the same content again and again.

You need to provide them fresh content.

Publishing new content on an ongoing basis doesn’t mean that you do it every day (although this is preferred because you accumulate more content faster). There are many clients who prefer just one blog post every week. Some go for three blog posts. It depends on their budget and the requirement. There are many types of audience and some audience do not appreciate receiving fresh content everyday.

So quantity is not an issue here. The issue is continuity. Publish less content, but keep it going. It is like business marketing. Do you stop after a single campaign? No you don’t. Companies keep coming up with new campaigns in order to draw new customers and clients. Content marketing is also a part of that process.

Your content helps you attract the right people to your website

Leave a reply

The greatest challenge people face while doing business online is getting the right people to their websites. But what do we mean by “right people”? They are the people who would like to do business with you. What sort of people would I like to get to my website? People who would like to hire me to avail my content writing services.

Once you get to it it isn’t as easy as it seems especially when billions of people are constantly going through millions of web pages processing millions of terabytes of information. For instance, how do I make sure that people who are looking for a content writer can easily find me when they need me? Since there might be thousands of content writers doing business on the Internet how do I make sure I get ample amount of exposure and consequently, attention.

And even if I get the sufficient amount of attention how do I make sure that the right people are getting attracted? I can do it by creating a noticeable presence on the Internet. My content helps me do that.

You can publish your content on your own website/blog, on other websites/blogs, online forums and social media and networking websites. It gives you the needed visibility. Of course your content has to be about the product or service you offer. It is no use writing about scooters if you’re selling cars. And even if you’re selling cars it is no use talking about Mercedes-Benz if you’re selling Ferraris.

What sort of content you want on your website/blog in order to attract your prospective customers and clients? It depends on what sort of traffic you are trying to attract. Search engines, for instance, are looking for lots of informative content and consequently they rank higher content that teaches rather than the one that sells, especially Google. But it doesn’t mean it indexes and ranks only content that teaches: it just prefers it.

In order to attract right people from search engines you have to focus on keywords and search terms that help people find you for the exact service or product they are looking for. I would like to be found for “content writing services”, “freelance writer”, “website content writer” and such terms. Since I am continuously writing content on how to write content better or how to improve your business through content marketing and content strategy it may seem like I’m trying to attract an audience that is more interested in “learning” and less interested in doing business with me. This happened when I was offering web design services back in 2002: instead of attracting clients looking for a web designer my website was majorly attracting people who wanted to learn web designing and web related programming. When I started my content writing business and again started generating content for this website I made sure that I didn’t repeat the mistake. Although even now a majority of my traffic constitutes of people trying to figure out things and exploring career options I get sufficient number of business queries due to the content I continuously publish here.

The basic idea behind generating content to attract the right people to your website is getting lots of people for the right keywords. I may be getting lots of traffic for “website content writer” and 60% of that traffic may be those people who are simply trying to explore the field (want to try out this “content writing thing”) or researching for their own articles, 40% still are looking for someone to write content for them. In my specific case I have concluded that it is difficult to change this ratio and the only thing for me to do is increase the numbers so that this 40% becomes a bigger number.

While generating content for your website/blog (on your own or by hiring content writer) try to cover as many keywords as possible. Generate your business pages using those keywords first of all. If you’re providing content writing services then generate sufficient number of pages explaining that you actually provide this service. Once you run out of such pages don’t keep repeating them. From then onwards you can start creating instructional content. You may attract people who are trying to “learn things” but the brighter side is you will be covering all your major keywords and their various short and long combinations. Keep your focus on the relevant keywords and keep publishing all sort of content around them. Just make sure that your primary/business pages are visible from every possible page on your website/blog.

The importance of content writing for small business

1 Reply

Normally small businesses, understandably, have small budgets and that means having less money to spend on marketing and promotion. When you’re working on the Internet it is practically impossible to survive without promoting your business. This is because there is lots of competition on the Internet and this is because anybody with a decent Internet connection and a little bit of dedication can run a marginally successful business and just imagine what sort of competition you may have to face if there are, let us say, 15,000 businesses offering the same kind of service that you are offering.

Doing business on the Internet is all about visibility and credibility. People should be able to find you, they need to be familiar with you and after all this they should be able to trust you. Creating this kind of atmosphere is an ongoing exercise because again, everybody is continuously performing this exercise – at least those who are really serious about their business. Everybody is trying to stay ahead of the game whether it is search engine optimization, online marketing, or social media and networking websites. There are scores of channels you need to compete for.

This is where content writing can come to your rescue. Whatever is there on the Internet it is in the form of content: you have text, videos, images and interactive presentations everywhere and they are being generated and promoted in billions in number. The easiest among them is text, of course.

Content writing can be performed on your own or you can easily hire a content writer, and through content writing you can publish new content almost on a daily basis. This advantage is not there if you want to publishing video or graphic content unless you have the needed hardware, software and expertise.

Content writing benefits for small business

Search engines primarily focus on written content

The current search technology doesn’t enable search engines to look for keywords and such expressions among videos and images. You can use tags but they work only to a certain extent. Through content writing, on the other hand, you can create, keyword-rich content all day if you want to. You just need to know what you want to write about.

Even if you are unable to write yourself you can easily hire a content writer who is adept at writing for humans as well as search engines. It won’t cost you much. The more content you have on your website the more keywords and their different combinations and permutations you can cover. Of course it doesn’t mean you always create content according to search engines because eventually what matters the most is how your human visitors react to your content.

It is easier and cheaper to create written content

I know, I have already mentioned this above. But since this is also one of the factors that may affect your content decision it deserves a separate heading. Even if you have videos and images as your primary content you will need to resort to generating some search engine optimized textual content in order to enable the search engine crawlers to find and index (and then accordingly, rank) your content. Again, as I have already mentioned, you can either write content on your own or you can hire a content writer. I wouldn’t advise you to go for an extremely cheap content writer because then you will be compromising on the quality. I always suggest to my clients that go for less, if you have to, but don’t compromise on quality.

Your written content helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field

You can continuously interact with your visitors through your written content. Share your knowledge, your wisdom and your experience with your visitors so that they feel enriched when they visit your website. The more they read and accept your writing the more they trust you and the more they trust you the more eager they are to do business with you. Again, it is an ongoing process because you constantly need to attract new visitors to your website/blog and you cannot achieve this by having a fixed number of pages or blog posts.

You seed new thoughts on your social media and networking profiles

Whenever you publish new written content on your website/blog you can post your links to your social media and networking profiles and invite comments from your friends and followers. This will give rise to lively interactions whether they agree with you or not and this will help generate buzz around your product or service. Although you can keep your social media and networking streams live by finding interesting and compelling content from other sources and posting it, sometimes you also need to post your own, unique content in order to become an authority in your subject.

You get lots of back links from other websites

Just as you find interesting and useful content on other websites and post it to your social media and networking streams or link to it from your own website/blog, so do other Internet users. People are constantly looking for new and interesting content to share with their friends and followers through their social media and networking accounts and blogs. They may also like to use your content to add value to their own content: if you already have a good explanation of “SEO content” they may as well directly link to it instead of writing it from scratch.

As you can see, there are lots of benefits of content writing for small businesses.

Are you setting goals for your content marketing campaigns?

Leave a reply

Without goals we have no direction and this can be applied to content marketing too. When you set up goals — whether big or small — you have a direction and when you have a direction you know exactly what you have to do and what you should avoid doing.

How does setting goals make your content marketing more effective? Let us suppose in the next four months you want to increase your search engine traffic and you don’t just want any traffic you want traffic that converts, that generates business, revenue for you. Once you have decided that, you figure out what sort of traffic from search engines would have a better conversion rate? Obviously the sort of traffic that is looking for what you have to offer. So write down somewhere what exactly you offer.

In my case I offer online copywriting and content writing services. Very good! Incidentally there are thousands of online copywriters and content writers on the Internet and there might be 10-20 content writers and online copywriters whose links appear before my link on the search engine result pages for appropriate keywords and search terms. In such a case scenario I can do three things (through by content publishing efforts)

  1. Beat my competitors in the search optimization game and make my rankings better than theirs
  2. Target those keywords that are less competitive but that can get me a fair amount of business
  3. Generate content that significantly improves my conversion rate

The first option is obviously good but it may take a very long time and I don’t want to spend lots of money. The second option on the other hand is quite achievable. It won’t take much time and it will give me enough breathing space: I can get business and along with that I can also keep improving my website content for more competitive keywords and search terms.

Having a good conversion rate would also be very important for me because as much traffic as I get I would like to generate enough business from it. Since right now I won’t be able to attract thousands of visitors everyday to my website I would prefer that my content has a higher conversion rate. For me this would be my goal and I would generate all my content keeping this fact in my mind.

You may have another goal. Your goal may be getting lots of exposure on social media and networking websites and you may generate content accordingly. For this you will need to know what sort of content creates buzz and goes viral on social media and networking circles. This way you have a direction.

Simply dumping content on your website or blog doesn’t help you much. You must set clearly-defined goals for your content marketing strategy.

Incorporating content marketing in the earlier stage helps

Leave a reply

One of my clients recently asked, “Would it have been better if I had incorporated my content marketing strategy while I was planning my business website?”

Of course, was my reply. And this is not just about content marketing or content writing; every good strategy has an advantage if it is implemented or incorporated from the beginning. There can be some pitfalls if a particular methodology or strategy hasn’t been tested well and in such a case it is better to wait rather than take a big risk.

But everybody knows what an important role your content plays towards promoting your website and generating targeted search engine traffic. This has been known for more than 15 years (at the time of writing this it is 2010). When you implement content marketing strategy earlier you get an edge; you save lots of time and effort when you decide to aggressively promote your website through your content.

Although most of my clients come to me when they have already had their websites for a long time there are some clients who come while they are launching their new websites. They are lucky as they already comprehend the overwhelming importance of targeted content and related marketing from search engines and social media and networking websites. Publishing content regularly on your new website immediately gets attention from the search engines. This is one of the greatest advantages of publishing clearly defined content either on the main website or on the blog. If you create a blog under your main website and start publishing at least two posts everyday your links can start appearing on search engine result pages within two weeks and this has been proven with multiple websites and blogs.

Early adoption to content marketing is more beneficial these days when you can attract lots of traffic from social media and networking websites since people love to post interesting links they come across while browsing the Web. Your targeted content can get you much needed attention at a very low cost.

But it doesn’t mean it is a hopeless case for older websites. You just need to be more aggressive. One pain points can be the quantity of your content. If you already have hundreds of pages indexed for wrongly targeted content you might have a problem refocusing the search engine results. This can be achieved, though, by streamlining the existing content and at the same time adding fresh content.