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How to make your content marketing better in 2015 than it was in 2014

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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:

  1. Improve your search engine rankings and get traffic from search engines
  2. 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
  3. Build your mailing list if you haven’t already built one. Having your own mailing list is a great way to broadcast your content.
  4. 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.

How to make your content marketing more effective in 2015

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Content Marketing in 2015

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:

  1. Someone out there is constantly creating more content than you
  2. Newly created pages and blog posts are ranked higher than older blog posts and articles
  3. People and search engines are constantly looking for fresh content
  4. Constantly publishing quality content increases your knowledge base
  5. The more fresh content you have the more content you get indexed by search engines
  6. Fresh content focused on a niche topic brings people to your website on an ongoing basis (repeat traffic is more important than unique traffic)
  7. You get to cover your primary keywords, secondary keywords and long-term keywords and every other possible combination without spamming existing pages
  8. You engage people when they come to your website
  9. You provide people opportunity to share your links on social media and social networking websites
  10. 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:

  1. Create content for readers rather than search engines
  2. Create lots of focused content so that your website is known as a specialty area
  3. Create as much quality content as possible
  4. Encourage people to share your content on social networking websites because the more your content is shared, the better it is for your SEO
  5. Become an authority figure. Known personalities on the Internet somehow enjoy better search engine rankings
  6. 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.