A few days ago I had written about how to make your content marketing more effective in 2015. As I had mentioned, the basic fundamentals remain the same, it’s just that every year comes with its own latest trends, techniques and opportunities that were not available in the previous year. A trait of a successful marketer is that he or she is able to leverage the available resources.
Nonetheless, sometimes we don’t even follow the fundamentals, whether they are pertaining to content marketing, or other aspects of business and personal life. Just as we make resolutions for the New Year, even for our content marketing goals, we can make some resolutions, some decisions that were not maybe followed the previous years but we want to make sure that they are followed in the New Year.
The most neglected activity is auditing the existing content. While writing this I assume that you already have lots of content on your website but you were creating it in a phase when you didn’t mind much whether your content was optimised or not, whether it was useful or not, whether it was relevant or not. You were simply creating it to improve your search engine rankings. You could have hired very cheap content writers from poorer countries. You paid least regard to its quality.
If this is something that you have been following until 2014, and perhaps in 2015 you can decide to audit your existing content.
If you have got lots of webpages and blog posts, running into hundreds, then it will be better to dump all the URLs in a spreadsheet. Then start going through each and every URL and see what improvements you can make.
Last year I did the same with my own website (I hadn’t written cheap content, but it needed some improvements). If you are managing your website with WordPress, there is a plug-in that lists all the blog posts and webpages that you have created so far in a simple HTML page. You can copy/paste this list into a spreadsheet. Even if you are not maintaining your website using WordPress, on the Internet you can easily find perl or PHP scripts that will go through your directories and give you a list of all the URLs that you have created so far.
From 2015 onwards, when it comes to creating or updating content for content marketing, focus on relevancy rather than search engine rankings
Search engine optimization is important – everybody needs better search engine rankings – but it shouldn’t be done at the cost of quality and conversion. When you needlessly use keywords to attract traffic from search engines you end up creating lousy, nonsensical content. If such is the content you have been publishing up till now, this is a good time to make amends and audit your existing content.
What all should you take care of while auditing your existing content to make it more in sync with 2015?
- Make your page titles and headlines more compelling and meaningful
- Introduce focus – focus on one topic or one subject per webpage or blog post
- Correct spelling and grammatical mistakes wherever you find them
- Remove superfluous language and replace it with conversational language
- In every blog post or webpage try to solve people’s problems rather than promoting your product or service
- Introduce call-to-action phrases and links without being intrusive
- If you have used images without alt tags now it would be good time to insert them
- Create shorter sentences out of longer sentences
- Create shorter paragraphs out of longer paragraphs
- Organize content under headlines, sub-headlines and bullets
- Use keywords and key phrases contextually rather than force-writing
Of course content marketing doesn’t mean just editing existing content and adding new content. A major part of it involves marketing that content, distributing it, making sure that it reaches the right audience. If you have been neglecting this aspect of your content marketing, then focus on this. There is no use creating new content if you haven’t established a mechanism to distribute it.
There are 4 ways you can distribute your content in 2015:
- Improve your search engine rankings and get traffic from search engines
- Create a vibrant presence on social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn (just to name a few) and broadcast your content using these channels
- Build your mailing list if you haven’t already built one. Having your own mailing list is a great way to broadcast your content.
- Focus on different formats of content apart from textual content, such as videos, images, Slideshare, ebooks and downloadable reports
If the thought of making your content marketing better in 2015 than what it was in 2014 a bit overwhelming, just focus on one aspect. Sometimes the beginning is difficult and once you start doing something, things start falling at their places on their own.
And of course, working with a professional content writing and content marketing service can always help.