What the heck is content marketing?

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Aren’t we constantly talking about content marketing? But what the heck is it, recently asked one of my clients.

I could totally relate to his confusion, I mean, does it make sense to go on publishing blog posts and articles hoping that after reading them people will do business with you? Even if that is possible, for how long one has to keep on publishing?

As a content writer who makes a living off providing content writing and content marketing services to my clients, it’s very important that I’m able to explain to them why the heck they should pay me, and that too, on an ongoing basis.

The clients who get what is content marketing and why their business needs high-quality content have no problem. Some of the clients understand that their business requires content marketing but they don’t have much clarity. I’m happy to get their business, but while I’m working for them, it is my constant effort to help them understand exactly what I’m doing and what it is going to lead to.

What the heck is content marketing?

Content marketing basically means creating, publishing and disseminating content, useful and highly relevant content, to a targeted audience in return for their attention. The scarcest commodity on the Internet is attention. There is too much distraction. There are way too many options available on the Internet and it often becomes extremely difficult for people to choose one business in favor of another. For instance, how do you know whether you should hire me as your content writer or another person?

In order to help you decide in my favor, I need to get your attention in a positive manner. I should be able to convince you, that whenever you need a reliable content writer, you should come to me. How do I do that?

One option for me is to constantly advertise my services. But the problem with advertising is one, it is too expensive for me (the last time I checked, Google AdWords charges almost $8 per click for the term “content marketing services”) and two, conventional advertising is interruptive and hence less effective. Even if I advertise on Google, I have enough data to prove that given a choice, people prefer to click links that naturally appears in the search results (due to the strength of their content) rather than those that appear by the side as sponsored links.

Content marketing is all about making connections with people rather than stuffing your messages down their throats. Once you have made connections, people do business with you not because they have seen your advertisement but because they have trust in you and they really believe that you’re going to deliver on your promise. They come to your website or blog on their own – this is called inbound marketing.

Does content marketing simply mean writing and publishing lots of content on your website or blog?

It differs from case to case, but “content marketing” per se doesn’t simply mean writing and publishing content on your own blog or website. Merely publishing your content doesn’t solve any purpose. Your content must reach the right audience or the right audience must reach your content in order to make an impact. This is where content marketing helps you. But yes, you cannot do content marketing meaningfully unless you have lots of valuable and compelling content on your website – if you don’t have anything to market, what do you market?

Here is the basic essence of content marketing:

Publish highly relevant and useful content people are craving to get.
Publish your content in multiple formats because different people prefer different formats – blog posts, articles, white papers, social networking updates, PDF files, videos, infographics and slides.
Use different platforms to distribute your content – as mentioned above, simply publishing content doesn’t do much good to you. The right people must avail your content. For example, if I want to promote my content writing and content marketing services then people who may someday actually need my services must somehow be able to access my content.
Build your mailing list so that you can constantly keep in touch with people who have shown even a little bit of interest in regularly hearing from you (that’s why they submitted their email ID to your mailing list); provide them high-quality content so that when they actually need your product or service, they remember you.
Establish yourself as an authority – it’s easier to trust people whose authority you respect. Once people trust you for who you are they do business with you more eagerly.
Constantly engage people – engaging people means interacting with them and responding to their feedback.

Why content marketing is better compared to conventional marketing or advertising?

For advertising you are paying constantly but this is not the cased with content marketing. Once you have established yourself (at the fraction of the cost of conventional marketing and advertising), once you have built good stock of content, once people have come to know you and what value you offer, your customer acquisition cost begins to move towards zero. Once you have gotten better search engine rankings for the quality of your content, you are not paying for every click the way you do with PPC programs. Just imagine, coming on the first or the second page of search results and getting 100s clicks everyday without having to pay them.

In monetary terms, let us suppose, you pay me $35 for a blog post that ranks well. Assuming you are paying $0.50 per click, for 70 clicks you will be paying $35. But if you’re getting your clicks due to my blog post, after those 70 clicks, you are paying nothing. And you’re not just getting traffic from search engines. Many well-written blog posts and articles go viral on Facebook and Twitter and massive amount of traffic can be generated.

But it’s not about money when it comes to content marketing; it’s about creating a credible presence on the Internet. People need to trust you. You need to be familiar to them. They should be comfortable because they know you have always been there. Through your content marketing they can easily find you on search engines, different blogs and websites, on your own blog and website and, websites like Facebook and Twitter. For them it is very reassuring. Conventional advertising can never accomplish this.

How to write content for the festive season

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When you want to write content the biggest hurdle is often the lack of ideas. What to write about? The content needs to be relevant, topical, useful, informative and if possible, also entertaining. The examples and ideas must come from the things happening around you. For instance, festive season is fast approaching in the Western world. Here in India we had just had Diwali, Dussehra and a litany of other big and small festivals that are lined up between the months of July and December.

Now we’re moving towards Christmas and the New Year. How do you write content for the festive season? Remember that there has to be a relationship between the occasion and your business otherwise the meaning is lost. I’m not saying this always has to happen – not everything needs to be business- related – but if they can be combined, nothing like it.

It’s not just always about why people celebrate a particular festival, how it is celebrated or what various aspects of the festival mean to different people. These are important, but there are many big and small things that are associated with almost every festival that impact people directly and indirectly.

Take for instance overeating. We all end up overeating during festive days. If your blog or website promotes healthy living, why not create multiple articles and blog posts advising people how to celebrate their festive reason without overindulging? What about publishing recipes of foods that can be enjoyed without the added problems of upset stomachs, bloated bellies and inflated calories? What about listing gift ideas that are not just healthy but also enchanting?

What if you are selling woollen garments or winter clothes? How would you suggest people to take care of winter clothes during the chilly Christmas days? What sorts of clothes are best for celebrating a white Christmas?

Suppose your company sells alcoholic beverages. You can create a series of articles and blog posts advising people how to enjoy alcoholic beverages during the festive season without indulging in drunk driving or losing control. How about managing a hangover after raucous evening?

I’m writing content for a real estate client these days. Some people consider investing in real estate property auspicious during festive seasons. Many rich parents and relatives like to gift apartments and houses to their younger kids and relatives during festivals like Christmas and Diwali. Why not give them advice about what would be the best real estate buying options for such gifts?

The whole point of writing content for the festive season is touch upon issues that are normally overlooked but are highly relevant and important.

How to hire the best content writer for your startup

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Although the startup economy is buzzing with lots of excitement and opportunities, it is also fraught with extremely high risks especially when careers and lots of money are involved. Just as every aspect of your startup is important, so is the aspect of hiring the best content writer. Ultimately it is your content that is going to drive the engine of your marketing and communicate your idea to the masses. If the content writer you hire cannot come up with compelling, informative and highly unique content, the going is going to be quite tough for your entire team, and I’m not just saying this because I myself am a content writer – I say this because I know and understand the power of content.

Why hiring a capable content writer takes a backseat especially in the case of startups?

I’m not saying this is the case with most of the startups. There are many startups that take their content seriously because they know that without communicating to their core audience they cannot hope to achieve anything, but most entrepreneurs are too obsessed with their own notion of what people want. What people want might be totally different from what you think they want so no matter how revolutionary your product is, you need to understand what people are looking for, and then offer your product or service accordingly.

Resources are scarce in the beginning. Funding is hard to come and most of the people involved with the startup are spending money out of their own pockets, so they need to be really careful about where they spend that money. Unfortunately, whereas people are ready to spend money on software, website, office space, blog setup and conventional advertising, somehow when it comes to content they think it is merely text and anybody who knows how to write sentences can create content. The effect of a lousy website and buggy software is immediate but not that of content. This is why hiring an experienced and knowledgeable content writer takes a backseat.

Why it pays to have a content writer in your startup team from the beginning?

Every startup needs an involved audience. People among this audience are going to be your pioneers – the first time users, or what they call, the early adopters. These early adopters need to feel passionate about what you are building. Before you can offer your product or service you need to build a platform from where you can broadcast your vital branding messages on an ongoing basis.

Suppose you are building an app that is totally going to change the way people use their browsers. Now, making people use another app or a software tool is always a difficult task because people are so used to using what they are already using. Why would people want to change the way they use their browsers? Even if they’re missing something or they’re not aware of the fact that they’re missing something, and even if they are aware, maybe they don’t want to accept. Whatever is the reason, it is always difficult to make people do things or see them your way. This is where your content writer helps you.

Your content writer is going to become one of your first evangelists who will passionately write about the value you aim to provide to your prospective customers and clients once you have launched your product or service. He or she will make your target audience aware of exactly what you are trying to achieve for the people. This will be achieved through:

Blogging
Highly focused ebooks
Interactive and engaging content on social networking websites
Email marketing campaigns
Publishing blogs and articles on other, high traffic websites and blogs
Case studies and white papers

All these publishing campaigns will not be effective if they are initiated just when a startup is going to launch a product or service. Your content writer requires at least 6 months of constant content generation, publishing and content marketing before you launch your product or service.

How to hire the best content writer for your startup

Here are a few pointers you should keep in mind while looking out for a content writer for your startup:

He or she is as passionate about your branch of technology as you are (even if he or she isn’t aware of exactly what you’re trying to achieve at that particular time)
He or she knows how to communicate compellingly and convincingly
He or she can give you a long-term commitment because often it takes some time to incubate the project and then launch
He or she is totally comfortable with the language used by your target audience
He or she totally understands the way people communicate on the Internet and the way they respond to the various content formats
He or she understands how critical content is for your startup
He or she is comfortable writing for different mediums such as blogs, social networking websites, email marketing campaigns and ebooks
He or she has a solid presence on the web including social networking profiles, a business website and a blog (if you don’t intend to hire the content writer on full-time basis)

Do you edit your content after writing it?

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Since most of the content writing on the web happens for personal websites and blogs people don’t take the editing part of it as seriously as professional publications like newspapers, book publishers and magazine publishers. In professional publications editors are big shots. In newspapers editors are slightly different from your conventional editor who goes through your writing and then improves it, but the broader importance of an editor always remains the same – maintaining the quality and authenticity of the content that is published.

According to this blog post, editing means optimizing a piece of writing for its audience (of the publication). It’s the responsibility of the editor that the writing isn’t just up to the mark it also caters to the audience of the publication.

On the web though, the content writer and the editor, there is a great chance, are going to be the same person. On bigger publications there ARE dedicated editors who go through every piece of content and make sure it adheres to the publishing guidelines of the publication but for most of the small businesses the person who writes the content is the one who also edits it.

It’s very important that you edit your content after writing it

We are normally in a rush to publish whatever we have written not just because of the vanity of displaying our skills, but also because there is little time. We all know that content is crucial to our marketing efforts and it needs to be published on a routine basis and the quality needs to be maintained. This is well and good. But since there is very little time, most of us simply hit the publish button as soon as we have written the last line.

I’m not saying that if you don’t edit your work you end up publishing lousy content – many people are very good writers and they can maintain a standard without having to spend time on going through the writing again and editing. I need to edit. I need to make sure there are no spelling mistakes, no redundancies and no superfluous expressions. Most of my writing is conversational so it’s not about the style that I’m worried; I mostly worried about typos.

How to edit after writing your content

After finishing what you have written, quickly go through it and check for typos and grammatical errors (also something like there and their). If you are not in a great hurry to publish, just close the document and start doing something else to become detached. Remember that it is not important how you feel about what you have written, what’s important is what impact your writing makes on your readers. This is why detachment is very important and it helps you look at your writing in an objective manner. Once you have distanced yourself, come back to your document and go through the following:

Have you over-optimized your content?

This happens when you are trying to optimize your content for higher search engine rankings. I’m not saying it’s bad to write optimized content, but sometimes we overdo it. We end up using our main keywords and expressions more than we should have. This can affect your search engine rankings adversely. So carefully go through your content and if you feel you have used your primary keywords excessively, remove them, and if removing them isn’t possible, use synonyms.

Have you needlessly made your content lengthier?

Google loves lengthier webpages and blog posts, but it doesn’t mean you fill your content with meaningless material. If there is something you can express in 300 words there is no need to use 600 words.

Do you even need that piece of content?

This can be very difficult decision to make especially when initially you were feeling very enthusiastic about the topic and even spent lots of time on it. But you have to make sure whether your website or blog actually need that piece of content or not.

Editing is as important as content writing

You shouldn’t underestimate editing. Spend ample amount of time going through the content you have written because after all you are creating a business asset. Every piece of content that you write and publish has a possibility of generating business opportunities for you.

5 reasons you need to hire a content writing service

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How do you (or your business) know that you need to hire a content writing service? What are the reasons? Of course it depends on what course your content marketing is going to take in the coming weeks, months and years. It also depends on whether you’re more comfortable hiring an in-house content writer or you are fine with the idea of working with an outside content writing service.

When you decide to work with the content writing service it is a serious decision because it might turn out to be a long-term commitment. Although quality and relevant content is the best way to attract targeted traffic to your website or blog, it doesn’t just happen the moment you start publishing content. It takes time. Even if you publish exceptional content from the first blog post or the first article onwards, it takes time for people to know about you, your blog or your website and it also takes search engines and social networking websites some time to take notice of the value you are providing. Content marketing also doesn’t work in terms of a “project”. You can’t say okay let me have 10 blog posts published and then suddenly I will see some improvement in my traffic. It’s an ongoing process.

This is not to say that you cannot hire a content writing service if you want just a couple of webpages (many times I take up such work where the client needs just a few pages for the main website). In fact this is one of the strongest reasons because it doesn’t make sense hiring an employee when you don’t have regular work and you simply need someone to write a few pages.

While writing this I’m assuming that you’re looking for a long-term commitment. Because as I have just written above, it doesn’t make sense to hire an in-house content writer if you just need a few pages even if you need those few pages every month. Hiring a content writing service means

You on-and-off need high-quality content but not regularly
You need high-quality content written regularly but it doesn’t warrant hiring a full-time content writer

Anyway, here are

5 reasons you need to hire a content writing service

You don’t want to depend on a single content writer: The best reason people go for a content writing service is that the quality of content is always assured. Your content does not depend on a particular content writer, it depends on the service that provides you the content. It isn’t your headache who writes the content. What matters to you is the quality is consistent and your deadline is maintained. This becomes very easy if you obtain your content through a content writing service.
You want to optimize your budget: When you hire a content writing service, you pay just for the content and nothing else. This is not the case when you hire someone full time. When you hire an in-house employee you need to accrue all the associated costs. You will be paying the employment agency. You will have to conduct multiple interviews. Along with the monthly pay you’ll also need to pay the benefits that are normally paid to an employee. You will also need to invest in the extra infrastructure needed by the content writer.
You prefer a lean workforce: Maybe you’re working from your basement, or whatever, you don’t want many people in your office and you are fine with people submitting their work from remote locations. Internet these days makes it very easy to collaborate with multiple people no matter where they are (provided they have a decent Internet connection). You don’t want people turning up every morning at your workplace especially when they’re going to work intermittently.
You are looking for scalable service: Ideally, content marketing should be an ongoing affair, but we don’t live in an ideal world. Sometimes you scale down your requirements, and sometimes you scale them up. When you hire someone in-house, you have to incur a fixed expense no matter how much content you are getting written. This is not a problem if you hire a content writing service and in fact this is one of the most attractive reasons to work with such an agency rather than hiring someone full-time. Just need a couple of articles a particular week? No problem. Get those couple of articles and pay for them and you’re done. Suddenly you require 10 articles on a particular week? Again, no problem. Get those 10 articles and pay for them and then go on with your work with no sense of commitment.
Avail professionally written content from day one: When you hire someone in-house you need to give some time to that person – maybe more than a month – to get acquainted with what sort of content your business requires. And all this while you are paying this person. On the other hand, it is expected of a content writing service that the content is going to be top-notch from the word go or you don’t pay. There is no reason to bother about how trained or untrained the content writer on the other side is. A professional content writing service (provided you have done enough research to find the right one for your business) normally has writers with massive experience writing for different industries and niches. They are adept at creating content for search engines as well as human readers and by the time they submit the first article or the first blog post, they have already done decent research of your industry.

Some quick reasons why you should not hire a content writing service

You are more comfortable working with people face-to-face
You seek immediate response
You have enough budget to accommodate new staff
You don’t mind paying people even when they have no work to do
You are fine with getting stuck with a single content writer whether he or she delivers or not
Quality isn’t something you’re crazy about