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Forget about content marketing without quality content writing

Content marketing success is impossible without quality content

As a content writer almost all the time I’m writing content to improve people’s search engine rankings.

Yes, people want good content.

They want content that is well-written, content that is crisp and content that is error-free in terms of spelling, grammar and originality.

Then what’s the problem?

Very few people “truly” understand the importance of quality content.

Why do I say so?

Because they are not ready to pay for it.

How do you gauge that something is important for you?

By the amount of money you are ready to spend.

I’m not saying that you pay through your nose just for the heck of it.

If you’re doing that, then obviously, you don’t understand what you really need.

Yesterday, while working on another web page titled “blog writing services”, I quickly created this graphic to illustrate a point:

Content writing-striking balance between quality time and cost

The graphic illustrates that it is very difficult to strike a balance between good content, fast turnaround time and low-cost.

You can see in the graphic within various shaded areas that if you need quality content fast, it is going to be very costly.

If you don’t want to spend much but still you want quality content (writing your own content, as and when you can), the process might be very slow.

There is nothing wrong in that – the slow content writing process.

Fast turnaround time and low-cost leads to low quality and low-quality content helps no one.

An average client wants quality content fast, at a low cost, which, since content is not, at least not yet, produced by machines, is impossible.

This is where everybody gets trapped in a warp: they understand the importance of good content, but they don’t want to pay for it, which basically means, they don’t understand the importance of good content, because, if something is important to you, if you know that it can have a big impact on your business, then you obviously don’t mind spending money on it.

I know, big sentence, but I’m sure you can understand it.

Here is a nice blog post published in Search Engine Journal, titled, “Don’t invest in content unless you can be #1 – Here’s why”.

The moot point of the blog post is, there is no escaping from giving your best when it comes to using content to market your business online.

Otherwise, it is the same old “rich getting richer and poor getting poorer” situation.

People who enjoy higher search engine rankings due to the quality of their content keep getting ranked higher and people who don’t enjoy higher search engine rankings due to the poor quality of their content keep getting ranked lower.

Why shrugging away from good content is both waste of time and money?

Why do you want to post content on your website or blog?

The most obvious reason is that you want to improve your search engine rankings.

Yes, people actually believe that if they can get more clicks from search engines, their business will naturally grow.

They want to get more traffic.

Yes, you can manipulate your content to generate traffic from search engines.

The problem is, although you can manipulate your content the first time, after Google (it can be any search engine) starts tracking the sort of traffic your content is generating, it begins to evaluate many factors, and one of the most important factors is, searcher’s intent.

What is the intent for searching?

Searcher’s intent is, exactly why someone is looking for that bit of information?

This is one thing.

The other thing is, does the searcher find what he or she is looking for on your link for which you are ranking well, or have just begun to rank well?

Google uses a very simple way of finding if you’re truly representing a keyword: if a person uses a query on Google, comes across your link, clicks the link and when he or she does not repeat the query, Google assumes that he or she found the information he or she was looking for and there is no need for him or her to carry on with the same query.

I have explained this in the graphic below:

Impact of searcher intent on search engine rankings

Quite logical.

The more people your link satisfies, the higher it moves in rankings.

The opposite also works.

If a person uses a query on Google, comes across your link, clicks the link and when he or she repeats the query, Google assumes that he or she did not find the information he or she was looking for, for that particular search term.

The more people repeat the query after visiting your link, the lower it moves in rankings.

After searcher’s intent, another thing Google looks for is the time people spend on your blog or website after having found your link in the search results.

Yes, whether you like it or not, Google has a way of finding how much time people spend on your website.

So, if they leave your website very fast, maybe a few seconds, Google assumes that your website does not have relevant information.

On the other hand, if people spend more time on your website after coming across your link in the search results, Google sees it as a positive sign and consequently, improves your search engine rankings.

What do we conclude here?

We conclude that yes, initially, you need to make an effort to appear in the search results so that people come across your link.

But after that, your rankings mainly depend on the experience people have on your website.

The above Search Engine Journal link says that 90% of the clicks in the search results are lapped up by the top 5 search results.

The first five positions still get pretty much all of the action – as much as 90 percent according to some studies. That leaves a paltry 5% percent or less for everyone else outside the top five.

But once they begin to come across your link and start clicking it, your rankings depend on their subsequent behaviour:

Do they carry out the same query?
Do they spend very little time on your website?
Are they satisfied with the information and hence, don’t carry out the same query?
Do they spend more time on your website?

This behavior you can control only with quality, relevant content.

This, is where people begin to falter.

Not valuing quality content

Image source

They want to pay the bare minimum.

They get the bare minimum.

I mostly provide content writing services and I think the problem is with the attitude, especially related to writing.

Most people have this impression that writing is, well, just writing.

The purpose of this blog post is not to explain whether writing to generate business is hard or easy (because on that we can debate till the proverbial cows come home), the purpose is, explaining why settling with mediocre content gets you trapped in the loop of non-performance and the more mediocre content you publish, the deeper you sink.

Now, how do you differentiate between good content and mediocre content?

The above Search Engine Journal link gives an example of a study that they did: they gave the same topic to multiple content writing agencies and then they compared the quality against factors such as originality, plagiarism, linking to internal and external links, the overall quality of writing and the use of images.

The average rate paid to every content writing agency was $100.

After getting the article written they approached around a dozen industry experts and asked them if they would like to publish one of the copies of those articles.

Just one industry expert agreed to publish one of the articles and that too, after some changes.

Why did this happen?

I personally believe that most of the content writing agencies Search Engine Journal contacted provide decent content (have never worked with them, being myself a content writer).

Content writers and content rating agencies are forced to charge less and consequently, forced to compromise on quality because most of the clients are not looking for quality content.

They are looking for “good enough” content for which they can pay a minimum amount.

So, when you’re constantly looking for “good enough” content and wanting to pay the minimum possible amount, it is a race towards the bottom because then, everybody begins to compete on how less one can charge.

A good blog post of 2000-3000 words, with research, takes around 4 to 5 hours.

Sure, if you are just focusing on the number of words, one can write 2000-3000 words even in two hours or even in one and ½ hours.

But a good blog post is not about the number of words (yes, these days number of words matter), it is about the information that you are providing, and the way you are providing that information.

Most of the clients are ignorant of how much money a writer has to make per hour

Most of the clients blissfully ignore the amount of money a writer needs to make per hour.

Although there are many content factories/content agencies on the web, when a writer is working on your assignment, he or she is working on just your assignment.

A writer cannot be working on 3-4 articles or blog posts simultaneously.

So, if he or she is being paid, let’s say, $50 for a 3000-word blog post, how many hours do you think he or she is going to spend writing those 3000 words?

His or her best interest lies in spending least amount of time to make more money.

He or she will be less interested in the quality of your blog post and more interested in finishing it as soon as possible.

Even if he or she doesn’t want to compromise with quality, economically it won’t be feasible for him or her to spend more time on your content writing.

This is an all-pervasive dilemma.

This problem is going to persist as long as clients are more interested in how much they want to pay rather than how the quality is going to be.

They need to remember that content is not something that is mass produced and hence, it doesn’t mean that the more one writes, the less one can charge.

So, what is the solution if you have limited budget?

It is understandable that one may have a limited budget.

It is strange that the attitude that people have for tangible goods and services doesn’t reflect the same attributes when it comes to paying for services.

For example, people know that a better car is going to be expensive than a not-so-better car.

This is applicable practically to every product. A better TV is expensive. A better cell phone is expensive. A better room in a hotel is expensive.

And people don’t mind paying more for better things.

But they mind paying for better content or at least, they think that they should be able to get better content even after paying less.

In general life, if you can’t afford a good thing, you reconcile to the fact and make do with the less expensive thing, but somehow, when it comes to content writing, this reconciliation is missing.

Mostly this is because they think that when someone is writing content one is simply using a skill and nothing much.

There is no official course in writing.

To be a lawyer you need to study law. To be an engineer, you need to study engineering. To be a doctor, you need to study medicine. To be a professor, well, you need to be a professor.

So, people don’t mind paying a premium for services related to these fields.

But writing? Oh yes, even the nephew can write it, it’s just that, he is not available yet.

Anyway, this is not about attitude I’m talking about, but the monetary constraint.

Assuming that you know that good content is costly, so, how do you create a wealth of content on your website?

Go for less content.

With Google and other search engines shifting their primary focus on quality and relevance rather than quantity, it doesn’t make sense to publish lots of low-quality or mediocre content.

The above-linked Search Engine Journal blog post rightly quotes someone saying:

“What is not obvious until you’ve been doing it for a little while is that effort is linear, but results are exponential. So working twice as hard on something sounds crazy. But, actually, if you get four times the results by working twice as hard, it is efficient. You know, working ten times as hard on something? Why would I do that? Because marketers that put in 10x effort get like 100x the results.”

The outcome that you get with the time and money that you spend getting one high-quality blog post written outweighs the outcome that you get with the same amount of time and money you spend getting 10 mediocre blog posts written.

So, when you’re getting your content written, your primary focus should be on the quality, on the relevance and on whether it satisfies the searcher’s intent or not, rather than how many keywords you can cover.

Does it cost more? Sure.

A better writer is always going to cost you more than a non-better (yes, yes, no such word) writer.

You have a choice.

How to write original content for content marketing

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Getting original content writing ideas

One of the biggest problems faced by people wanting to use content marketing as their main marketing tool, is writing and producing original content.

Original content in itself doesn’t help you much unless it really resonates with your audience – audience that will eventually do business with you.

So, for successful content marketing, you need original content, and also relevant content.

For the sake of brevity, in this blog post when I talk about writing original content, I also mean writing relevant content (this goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway).

Writing and publishing original content shouldn’t seem like a big challenge. You just need to have a strong desire to communicate to your visitors.

For this, you really need to know what you want to talk about.

Have a clearly-defined objective for your content marketing

This is one of the best ways of writing original content. If you have a clearly-defined objective for your content marketing, every piece of content has a meaning.

What do you want to achieve with your content marketing?

You want to grow your business with content marketing

Of course, you’re going to say that you want to grow your business. You want to attract more customers and clients.

That is the end result.

Customers and clients don’t come to you just because you are open for business.

Rains don’t come because they have to water your farms. They come when the clouds reach a region where the temperature is lower and clouds can turn into water.

Many factors collectively work to bring people to your business, make them trust you and then make them become your paying customers and clients.

Content marketing is for these factors. People becoming your customers and clients is just a by-product of these factors coming together to act together.

For companies like Amazon and Apple, it is loyalty and brand presence. People want to buy an iPhone because they want to associate with the brand (aside from the fact that iPhones are awesome).

Recently I purchased a OnePlus mobile phone because one, my sister-in-law is a travel blogger and she has been quite happy with the pictures that she clicks with her OnePlus. And two, the company has built a community around its brand, just the way Apple has been able to.

I needed a mobile phone with a good camera, and many people vouch for its camera on YouTube and various blogs.

I haven’t bought their phone just because they have a phone or even because they have a quality phone (many mobile phone companies have quality phones); I have bought because directly or indirectly, so many people have told me that buying their mobile phone is a good deal. I’ve discovered, it actually is, but that’s another story.

Through their content marketing, OnePlus has attracted people who are looking for a mobile phone with more than average-quality camera. Of course, they’re not lying, the camera is actually good, but then again, as I said, there are many mobile phones with equally good cameras.

The difference is, the company has seeded lots of content that primarily focuses on its good quality camera. This is the audience they have been drawing to their brand.

Interestingly, when I went to buy the phone from a local electronics showroom, the sales man very forcibly tried to sell me an LG mobile phone which, he claimed, has a better camera and in fact, at that moment, it did look to be better than the OnePlus model that I had gone to purchase, but I had read nothing about the LG model. In fact, I rarely come across blog posts and YouTube videos on LG Mobile phones, so, I had no information. At one point, I got so exasperated that I told the salesman that I was going to go back without buying any phone, only then he backed down.

You can find numerous blog posts and YouTube videos where people compare the OnePlus camera with the camera of Google Pixel, iPhone, and many other phones, and then conclude that the OnePlus camera is the best.

So, maybe that was their objective.

For writing original content, it is very important to have a well-defined objective for your content marketing. The moment you have an objective, you can have a long list of topics you want to cover whether you want to write blog posts or create videos.

Provide solutions to problems people actually face, for original content writing

Whenever people access your content, make sure that they learn something that they cannot learn somewhere else.

Of course, the Internet brims with quality content but when you try to solve the problem according to your point of view, you introduce a unique perspective. Your unique perspective will be hard to find on other websites and platforms.

Write content with your unique perspective

Developing your own style also helps. Even if the topics that you are covering have been covered by pretty much everyone, you can always write about topics in your own unique style.

Maybe you are humorous. Cynical. Sarcastic. Scholarly.

Never think that a particular writing style is unacceptable (I’m not suggesting you hurt people’s feelings). But definitely develop your own style.

Focus on quality and not quantity

Publishing a well-written, original piece of content in a week is much better than publishing five pieces of mediocre content in a week.

Focus on quality content writing

When you focus on quantity, when you are in a hurry to cover as many keywords as possible, you lose your focus.

Remember that your objective is not to cover every possible keyword combination.

Your purpose is to provide valuable, engaging content that helps people. It should solve a purpose. People should go back after having taken something.

Solving a purpose is also important for improving your search engine rankings. If people don’t find your content useful, they will immediately leave your website or blog, and this in turn increases your bounce rate, signaling to Google that your website doesn’t have useful content and hence, your rankings should be reduced.

Research other blogs and websites and see what’s missing

I’m not suggesting that you nit-pick. Remember that your audience is unique and hence, its needs too are unique that are perhaps, being ignored by other publishers.

Find something that is missing in other blog posts and videos

Try to find out something useful that is not being covered by your competitors, and then write about it.

Put your energies into doing research for original content writing

Research is something not many are good at. For some, it’s very hard work. For some, even if hard work is fine, it is difficult to find the right data and insight.

Do research for original content writing

Research takes time. This is why, don’t be in a hurry to publish a blog post or an article.

Sure, on many content marketing blogs you read that you must have a publishing calendar and once your have it, you must make sure you stick to it.

Sticking to a content publishing calendar makes sense if you have a big content marketing team and different team members can contribute to different aspects of your content.

But if you are a small business, even if it takes an extra week or two to finish a research-packed blog post or an ebook, don’t rush.

Yes, I repeatedly recommend that you should publish content regularly, but what I mean is, keep publishing content, one topic after another, but don’t insist that if you have decided that you are going to post a blog post on Monday then no matter, what you are going to post it on Monday (unless it is time-critical).

If you want to use good research data, it’s ok if Monday becomes Tuesday and Tuesday becomes Wednesday, really.

Rewrite already written content in your own language

Yes, there is nothing wrong in that. As long as you’re not plagiarizing, there is nothing wrong in rewriting existing content and then adding your own take to it. Remember that everything should be original. Not even a single sentence or paragraph should match that of the original blog post or article.

You can rewrite existing content

Why is it fine to rewrite already published content?

I don’t recommend that you do it all the time because then, you will never be able to come up with your own content. This is just to keep the muscles of your content marketing moving. Publishing something is always better than publishing nothing.

When you are rewriting great blog posts, suddenly ideas begin to hit you and you will be surprised to know that you yourself are getting some ideas to write about.

Maintain an ideas repository for original content writing

Ideas come at odd times and when they come, you should be able to save them, preserve them.

Save and organize when new content writing ideas come

These days I’m using OneNote from Microsoft. Surprisingly, it is better than Evernote. But you can also use Google Keep.

The basic idea is, you must have a place where you can quickly jot down writing ideas. Make sure that it is easier to retrieve the ideas when you need them and this is why I recommend something like OneNote.

In OneNote you can create a notebook (something like, content marketing), and then within the notebook you can create sections (something like, the medium you would like to cover – blog, guest blogging, social media) and then within a section, you can create pages (blog topics and research material).

But ultimately it depends on what you are comfortable in. You can also use a conventional notepad. You can also use a recording app on your mobile phone.

Just make sure whenever an idea comes to you, you are able to save it.

Use content aggregators to get original content writing ideas

For example, I use Google Alerts to get alerts in my inbox when content on content marketing appears on the web.

I also use Medium, Twitter and Flipboard to get content writing ideas. The LinkedIn newsletter is also very useful. Although I’m not as regular as I would like to be, these are very good sources and even spending 10 minutes can give you lots of original content writing ideas.

When you talk of originality, I’m not much concerned about search engine rankings because rankings are very unpredictable. Lots of lousy content still comes up in search results even after many algorithm updates.

Here is another link on A guide to creating amazing content: 5 tips to crafting useful content, from Search Engine Journal.

Contrary to what I have written above, this blog post from Search Journal recommends that you put your energies into focusing on SEO cornerstone content – writing blog posts and articles that give you ranking #1 in SERPs for your chosen keywords.

What is cornerstone content? Something like the “ultimate guide”. It is very comprehensive. It covers the topic represented by your main keyword. It is long lasting. It is going to get you targeted traffic for a very long time.

For my own, this blog post, I haven’t focused much on the SEO aspect of writing original content because improving your search engine rankings should be a long-term strategy, and not something that is to be achieved by writing lots of poor quality articles and blog posts.

The value of the original content is its ability to help you build your readership and consequently, loyalty. When people like your content, they want to do business with you. Even if they don’t want to do business with you, if you want them to promote your content, they readily do it because they have been benefiting from it, and in that process, they help you build your brand presence, which gets you business.

11 things that make your content marketing successful

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11 things to make your content marketing successful

In this blog post you’re going to learn about 11 things that can make your content marketing successful.

Content marketing success is not a random phenomenon.

The approach to success is very scientific and methodical.

Just like in any business or any strategy, you have to be persistent and you need to have a clear idea of what you’re doing and through what you’re doing, what you intend to achieve.

If you are clear about that plus, if you are persistent, success can never be random. You are bound to plunge into it.

Why use content marketing to promote your business?

I have written a lot about the benefits of content marketing and why you should use it to promote your business. Some of the links I could quickly find are

Some of the reasons why you should use content marketing to promote your business include:

It provides useful information to your customers and clients (and shoppers) that they can then use to decide whether they will need to do business with you or not.
It definitely improves your SEO, especially organic search engine optimization.
Helps people use your products and services in a better manner once they have purchased from you.
Gets you more leads and attracts prospects and customers to your website or blog.
Builds your brand.
Establishes your reputation.
Keeps your prospective customers and clients engaged.
Helps you maintain a positive buzz on social media.

Why content marketing sometimes doesn’t work?

There are many reasons content marketing doesn’t work. In this blog post I have listed the mistakes that you should avoid in 2019.

But this blog post is not about why content marketing doesn’t work. It is about the 11 things you can do to make your content marketing successful, and here they are:

1. Create/write useful content

Create useful content for content marketing success

Useless, aimless content is neither useful to you nor to someone else. And if your content is not useful, why should someone appreciate it?

The entire purpose of having an operational content marketing strategy is that you promote your business on the strength of your content.

Your content derives strength from people.

When you are writing content (or when you are getting it written by a content writer) make sure you publish only useful content. It must help your visitors in one way or another. It must solve problems. It must provide solutions.

Why is it important that you publish useful, high-quality content?

Your content marketing success solely depends on how people react to your content. Even your search engine rankings these days depend on how people react to your content.

Drab, uninspiring, useless content is not going to get any attention.

Useful content, on the other hand, grabs people’s attention. People react to it. They share it on their timelines. They link to it. They spend more time on your website, bringing down your bounce rate that in turn, improves your SEO.

2. Publish original content

Publish original content

If you are publishing what everyone else is publishing, there is no motivation to come to your website or blog. People will come to your website or blog only when they find something that they cannot find somewhere else.

Constantly coming up with unique topics can be a problem.

But your opinion is always unique.

For example, I am constantly writing about content writing and content marketing and there must be thousands of other individuals doing the same.

Still, what I am saying here is unique because I’m using my own “voice” and my own writing style to express my own opinion.

Even when you are curating content – linking to external content – give your own take, the way I do sometimes.

These days when I don’t have time to write a completely original blog post, I link to an external article or blog post and then write some words on my own. I present my only unique view on the topic, even if couple of sentences.

3. Be consistent and persevere

Persevere and be consistent for successful content marketing

I don’t know about other people, but this is a big drawback that I have experienced in my own clients. They initiate their content marketing with great enthusiasm, even have the clarity about what sort of content they need to get written and publish, but then, within a couple of months, and sometimes even within a month, they lose track and no longer want to publish new content.

Now, you may say that being their content writer I should be able to convince them that content marketing success cannot be attained without consistently publishing high-quality content, but the problem is not with clients who hire me as their consultant (and hence, would heed to my suggestion), the problem is with people who hire me just for my content writing services.

Though, I give them my unsolicited advice, and then it’s up to them.

Anyway, the point is, they pursue content marketing for a couple of months, don’t see results, and then abandon content marketing midway.

Content marketing is an ongoing process. New content is constantly being pumped into the World Wide Web.

Unless you publish new content, your old content is going to be pushed into oblivion by your competitors and even by those who are not directly competing with you but are constantly publishing new content that can be remotely related to your content category.

People mostly abandon content marketing because they think it is an extra expense whereas, it is a necessary expense, running expense, just as you continuously have to spend money on running your infrastructure.

4. Make your content accessible for content marketing success

Create mobile accessible content

People these days are not just using PCs and laptops to access your content. They’re using all sorts of mobile devices.

They may access your content on their mobile phones, on their tablets and even through smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Your content should also be easier to read. Avoid creating long sentences and thick paragraphs.

5. Maintain a content publishing calendar

Maintain a content publishing calendar

The lack of a content publishing calendar can also derail your content marketing. Constantly coming up with new content writing and content publishing ideas can be a difficult task after a while.

Whether you are writing and publishing content on your own or your content writer is doing it, you definitely need to maintain a content publishing calendar so that you have things in the pipeline for the foreseeable future.

You can use an Excel sheet. You can use Trello. You can also use a mind mapping tool (which I use).

6. Learn to repurpose your existing content

Repurpose existing content

Backbone of a successful content marketing strategy is publishing content on an ongoing basis and sometimes, it becomes difficult to publish totally unique, original content even from the perspective of your own website or blog.

What do you do?

You repurpose your existing content.

Here is an older blog post you would like to read: How to repurpose old content.

Repurposing your existing content means creating new content out of your old content.

You can do this in the form of a weekly or monthly recap – creating summaries of all the blog posts you have written in the month of January, for example.

If you have been researching and gathering data to write and publish multiple blog posts, perhaps you can use this data to create infographics.

You can create podcasts from your existing blog posts, web pages and articles.

Similarly, you can create slides, animations and YouTube videos.

7. Try to improve your search engine rankings to ensure success of your content marketing

I always write on my blog that your search engine rankings should be a natural outcome of your quality content and you shouldn’t focus much on it aside from taking care that the search engines can easily crawl your website, it loads fast and you provide meta information to make it easier for the search engines to understand the nature of your content.

Having said that, it helps to have your main keyword in the title of your web page or blog post.

Strategically placing your main keywords also helps.

Again, don’t make extra effort. Focus on good writing but make sure that you use your keywords and search terms when you are creating content.

For example, since I want to attract clients who are looking for content writing and content marketing services, these are the phrases that I often use.

Just as content marketing is very important for better SEO, search engine optimization also fuels your content marketing.

If people are able to find your content on search results, more people can access it and there are more opportunities for inbound traffic.

8. Create an active presence on social media and social networking websites

Remain active on social media for content marketing success

Social media and social networking websites can be great content distribution platforms.

For example, everybody is on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram these days.

Most of the content consumption happens through these platforms.

Your social media and social networking platforms (your accounts, your profiles) can be a great source of targeted traffic to your website or blog.

Share content from your website or blog on social media. Publish original content. Build an audience.

It takes time. Ongoing engagement will be needed. So, there is no need to hurry. But, consistently make an effort to build an audience.

9. Use email marketing to disseminate your content and keep the people in your mailing list engaged

Email marketing is an integral part of content marketing

Billions of emails are sent to and fro every day. More people use email than Facebook, Twitter and Instagram combined. Email marketing can be the backbone of your content marketing success.

How do you use email marketing to implement a successful content marketing strategy?

If you continuously publish high-quality content, your visitors wouldn’t like to miss it. But, they cannot visit your website or blog every day. Give them an opportunity to subscribe to your updates.

When they subscribe to your updates, send them an email whenever you publish a new blog post or a new web page.

Send them useful information that they can use to better utilize your product or service.

Keep in touch with them. Ask them how you can help them.

But basically, you can use your mailing list for successful content marketing.

10. Use analytics data to steer your content marketing in the right direction

Use analytics for successful content marketing

Without analytics data it is just guesswork.

Analytics tell you what content your audience wants and then you can write and publish your content accordingly.

Even when you are trying to cover keywords and search terms for your SEO, analytics will tell you whether your SEO-content is working or not.

You can track individual links. You can track a group of web pages and blog posts. You can track your social media updates.

Your email marketing service (I use MailChimp) will have its own analytics features that will let you know how well your individual email campaigns are performing.

11. Have well-defined KPIs

Clearly define your content marketing KPIs

Key performance indicators are very important.

Although, as I often write on my blog, by the end of the day what matters is how many sales you have made, content marketing is more targeted and segmented.

Content marketing doesn’t directly increase your sales, it creates positive circumstances that in turn, increase your sales.

So, your KPI might be getting more subscribers for your email updates.

It can be increasing the number of unique visits.

If you want to target a particular geTorres of theographic area, you track whether your visitors from that particular geographic area are increasing or not due to your content marketing efforts.

You may also aim for bringing your bounce rate down.

Before and after data is very important for tracking your KPIs.

KPIs tell you how successful your content marketing strategy is at the grassroots level. This is how the sum total of your content marketing brings you success.

Concluding remarks on making your content marketing successful

To implement a successful content marketing strategy first most you have to understand and accept that it is not a one-off activity.

The second thing is, before it can bear fruit for you, you have to keep the momentum going even when you feel there is no return. This is because in the beginning, there is actually no return.

For the initial months, you will simply need to focus on creating and publishing lots of high-quality content, distributing that content using all available channels to you, and building a platform and a presence.

Then, it is this platform and presence that begins to generate business for you, more leads and more sales.

Content marketing in the beginning is like laying bricks and building other structures of a house or a building. You cannot use that house or building before you have built it.

Hence, unmitigated quality, distribution and engagement and perseverance definitely ensures content marketing success and through that, business success.

Avoid these 10 content writing and content marketing mistakes

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Content marketing mistakes to avoid

Content writing and content marketing seem very easy, don’t they?

It seems as if it is just about writing and publishing blog posts and web pages on different topics (of course, on your business or topics that are relevant to your business), and you’re good to go.

Guess what. Thousands of entrepreneurs think on the same lines.

Some publish good content, and some publish mediocre content, and some even publish horrible content, but the more content there is on the web, harder it is to find your content.

In the contemporary times, content marketing is the strongest marketing tool. Never before has a marketing and promotional tool been available on such a democratic scale.

89 percent B2B small businesses use content marketing

Source

Why content marketing is so powerful no matter what size your business is?

It is due to its scalability.

If IBM can use content marketing so can a local computer repair shop.

All one needs to know is, choose an audience and then publish and disseminate appropriate content.

People love to do business with you if you

Offer them something valuable on an ongoing basis.
Provide useful information that they can use immediately for their benefit.
Solve problems for them.
Regularly engage them in meaningful conversations.
Become a pleasant part of their lives.

Benefits of Content Marketing

This is easily achievable, isn’t it?

Provided that you know who your audience is, you can write and publish highly targeted content, and you will get a better response.

Why content marketing fails despite being almost failsafe?

Why does content marketing fail?

No clarity. Impatience. Erroneous targeting. Haphazard content publishing.

Just like everything else in the world, content marketing can either be strategic and consequently, result-oriented, or it can be random, giving you random results, and you all know what happens when you depend on random results.

For your content marketing to succeed, two attributes are very important, most critical:

Clearly knowing what you want to achieve.
Publishing/writing content that helps you achieve that.

Take for example my content writing and content marketing business.

It’s a given that I want more leads, more queries, and eventually, more clients who pay me.

But, in a world replete with “content writers” who are ready to write $ 5-articles and blog posts, and in a world replete with clients who actually believe that they can ride the wave of content marketing with such articles, how do I convince them into investing in quality content?

Therefore, through my regular content writing, content publishing and content marketing, I need to not only reach out to clients who understand how important content writing is for the growth of their business, I also need to convince them that I’m the content writer they need.

Read 5 Reasons Why Content Writing Is Important for SEO

What do I do?

Well, this blog post is not about this topic, it is about the content writing and content marketing mistakes that we commit that make even a failsafe marketing opportunity, fail. Are you committing these mistakes?

1. Not having a long-term plan for your content marketing strategy

Have a long-term content marketing plan

Content marketing is never a rush job. Although you can say that in 2 weeks you want to launch your website and before that you want to implement a content marketing strategy, it is not going to help you much. Better rely on conventional advertising for that.

For your content marketing to succeed, you need to have a long-term vision.

Content marketing is like a fruit tree. If you want to have your own fruit tree, you need to grow it. You need to get a sapling or you need to sow a seed. You water it. You take care of it. Eventually when it grows into a tree, it begins to bear fruits.

In the same manner, your content marketing bears results when it has blossomed into a considerable presence. When people begin to recognize you for the quality of your content. When you have enough good quality content.

Takes time. Takes patience. Takes perseverance.

2. Not having a content writing and a content marketing strategy

Build a content marketing strategy

I mention content writing because I provide content writing services. Writing content is a big part of providing content marketing services for my business.

Anyway, most of the content marketing strategies fail because there is no strategy.

Every successful content marketing campaign is backed by solid strategy

Strategy vis-à-vis content marketing means

Knowing what your core audience is looking for.
Knowing exactly what you want to achieve through your content writing and content marketing.
Strictly defining your KPIs.
Writing content strictly within the framework of 1., 2. and 3. above.
Distributing your content through the most appropriate channels.
Analyzing data and drawing intelligence.
Making changes in your content marketing according to data.
Creating a sustainable cycle of 1.-7. steps.

Why is it important to have a content writing and content marketing strategy?

Strategy gives you a direction. It tells you what you need to do and what you need to avoid.

Read How your typical content marketing evolves

You may have the following goals and KPIs for your content marketing:

Brand awareness
Lead generation
SEO
Customer acquisition
Customer retention and customer loyalty
Thought leadership
More website traffic
Better engagement

For example, if this year you want to increase your newsletter subscribers from 1000 to 10,000, you will need to observe what sort of content gets you more subscribers, and then publish that content more often.

If there is some type of content that does not get you lots of newsletter subscribers, then maybe you shouldn’t spend too much time on that content.

This is, assuming that your sole purpose is to increase your number of subscribers from 1000 to 10,000. Of course, you may have different key performance indicators.

In the absence of a content writing and content marketing strategy, you go on publishing content, without ever finding out whether the content is helping you OR not and then, mistakenly, you are disenchanted with your content marketing.

3. Not promoting your content aggressively

Promote your content

Even when you are publishing high-quality content unless you promote your content it is going to be difficult for your core audience to find it simply because there is too much content on the Internet.

People may never come to your website directly unless they need to purchase something from you or do business with you or get something that is only available on your website and nowhere else.

With so many channels available these days (sometimes I get clients directly from LinkedIn and they never even visit my website), even when doing business with you they may never visit your website.

This is why, it is important that you make your content available through the channels they use.

If most of your audience is on Instagram, then you need to promote your content on Instagram.

If your audience is on Facebook, then you need to promote your content on Facebook.

Build your audience, and promote your content.

4. Not focusing on SEO

Content marketing to boost your SEO

Searching on search engines is a big part of trying to find something. If you want to find some information before you make a purchase, you go to Google and not to Facebook.

If my clients want to find a competent and professional content writer, they are going to use Google and not Facebook although, they may find my content on Facebook.

This is why it is very important that they are able to find my content on Google and other search engines.

Now, ideally, we all want better search engine rankings for our target keywords and search terms.

Some people overdo it and hence, get penalized.

Some people completely ignore it, living in denial that they don’t need it.

Some get it and reap the benefits.

It is very important for you to get found on search engines because one, it is a never-ending free supply of leads and sales, and two, it brings you exposure that further improves your SEO.

If your product or service is of such type that people need to do some research, they need to acquaint themselves with the nitty-gritty of your product or service, when they need to read reviews and opinions, they’re going to use Google or Bing.

Optimizing your content writing for search engines isn’t as difficult as it seems. It becomes difficult when people are in a rush and want to push their way into the top 10 results. This doesn’t work if you face competition.

Provide value. Write in a language people use.

Check out Professional SEO content writing services.

5. Ignoring mobile audience for your content writing and content marketing strategy

Write and publish content for mobile audience

Mobile-friendly content writing means writing very short sentences and organizing the sentences in short paragraphs.

Usually, you must have noticed these days, people write a single sentence in one paragraph.

It may seem odd, but it looks good on mobile phones.

Using simple words.

If you go on and on and on, writing a very big sentence and then you have multiple sentences in a single paragraph, your readers are going to end up distracted.

On mobile phones, they want to be able to read quickly. Write accordingly.

Read How to do content writing for the mobile-first experience

6. Not working with an experienced content writer

Work with an experienced content writer

Now, you may think that I’m writing this because I provide content writing services, and in a way, I won’t blame you if you think that way.

Content marketing, and consequently, writing content, is an ongoing job.

You need someone who can write good content regularly, without compromising on quality.

Quality is of paramount importance.

Without quality there is no engagement. There is no value addition. Very bad search engine rankings.

Can write well yourself? Good.

Can write well, regularly? Marvelous.

No? Then you need a content writer. Don’t waste time.

7. Not building a dedicated content writing and content marketing team

Build a dedicated content marketing team

The need to build a content writing and content marketing team may differ from business to business. Some businesses need lots of content and lots of marketing, some don’t.

But if you think that lack of manpower is stopping you from moving on to the next level, then you need to build a dedicated content writing and content marketing team. Without it, your entire strategy crumbles.

As your content marketing scales and matures, you will need people with diverse talents including

Content writing & copywriting
Graphic design
Video and animation skills
Social media marketing
Data analytics
Strategy
SEO
Web design

Putting off the decision to build a dedicated content writing and content marketing team, especially when your business is on the path of growing, is going to cost you dearly.

8. Ignoring email marketing

Email marketing is an integral part of content marketing

86% business professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes, according to Hubspopt.

According to a Radicati report, by 2020, 3 billion people will be using emails (just in case, this is December-end, 2018, when I’m writing this). The report also says that 205 billion emails are sent every day these days, and by the end of 2019, the count will be 246 billion.

Anyway, these are big numbers, but the point is, people still use emails.

It is the best way of making it possible for them to discover your new content and re-appreciate your existing content.

How does your email marketing help boost your content marketing effort? It’s a self-serving relationship.

Email marketing is only effective if you build your own mailing list.
You build your own mailing list only when people subscribe to your updates on their own.
They will subscribe to your updates only when they think that they are going to receive something valuable.
They think that they will receive something valuable only when they find valuable content on your website and hence, are driven to subscribe to your email updates.
You will need to publish valuable content on your website.
You will need to make it possible for them to discover your valuable content.
You will need to publish content they don’t want to miss.
Hence, you will be continuously publishing high-quality content.
This will boost your content marketing.

Frankly, there is no meaning to content marketing without email marketing.

Read Importance of segmentation in email marketing

9. Thinking that publishing blog posts is content marketing

Simply blogging doesn’t mean content marketing

Although blogging is my favorite form of content marketing, it isn’t the only way you disseminate your content.

Content marketing also means publishing

White papers
FAQs
Press releases
Case studies
Infographics
Social media posts
Long and short videos
Memes
GIFs
Podcasts
Graphics and images
Animations
PDFs
Slides

and a horde of other things.

I’m not suggesting that you put your energies and budget into all forms of content listed above. You will have to find what interests your audience the most.

White papers are preferred by those who want to access substantive content that educates and informs. This is a good way of showing how deep you have gone in your profession.

Case studies tell how your product or service solves problems and benefits businesses and individuals.

Memes allow you to participate in ongoing trends.

You will have to know how your audience reacts to different formats and then once you have found that out, you need to focus there.

10. Thinking that content marketing is a one-time affair or it is a single campaign

Content marketing is an ongoing commitment

Content writing and content marketing is an ongoing affair.

The simple reason is, if you are publishing blog posts and articles and then disseminating them using various channels, so is your competition. So are numerous other businesses that may not be directly your competitors, but have content that can compete with your content.

Take the example of traditional advertising. Do you see Johnson & Johnson’s ads on TV? Do you see Intel ads? McDonald’s? Pepsi? The iPhone?

If these are renowned brands, why do they still need to advertise constantly?

Because there are scores of, if not hundreds of, alternatives on the market. It just takes a couple of seconds for the customer to get distracted and end up purchasing another product and then switching to that product for ever.

Similarly, in content marketing, thousands of blog posts, web pages, articles, press releases and social media updates are being crawled and indexed by the search engines on a daily basis.

You need to maintain a presence. You have to convey to the search engines and your prospective customers and clients that you are still in the game.

Of course, you’re not a publishing company and like my business, you are also not into content writing and content marketing. So, you don’t have to publish every day.

Still, you need to have a schedule. And this schedule should continue and then scale according to the growth of your business.

Conclusion – what makes content writing and content marketing work for your business?

Persistence. Clarity. Persistence.

Over the years I have seen many content marketing efforts fail because they’re not persistent.

They had the clarity. They had the vision. They also had the needed enthusiasm in the beginning.

Then they lost steam.

As I have written above, the benefits of content marketing manifest like the benefits of growing a fruit tree.

In the beginning you need to invest before you can see results.

It’s like, to be able to use your office to do business, you first need to build the office, or purchase the office and then set up the paraphernalia. Until these basic steps are done, you cannot start doing your business.

Similarly, content marketing means creating a presence through high-quality content. You cannot build a presence with 5-10 blog posts and web pages and then spreading them across your social media profiles.

Strategy doesn’t happen in a week or a couple of months. And there’s a reason why it is called content marketing strategy.

Sentiment analysis: Happy customers, better content marketing, better SEO

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Sentiment analysis, content marketing and SEO

Content marketing and SEO are not just intertwined, they are also constantly evolving as companies like Google constantly try to figure out how to churn out the best possible results.

Algorithms today can analyze billions of messages in the form of text, images and videos on the Internet and tell you the exact sentiment people have about your business, about you, about your political party, and pretty much anything people feel sentimental about.

This is advanced technology and not everyone can have it. But, as a business, you can develop a content marketing strategy that can help you create content that depicts positive sentiment.

This blog post on Skyword explains in detail what sentiment analysis means and how it is changing SEO, and improving user experience. The post says that MIT has developed an algorithm that can even interpret sarcasm through the emojis people have used in their social media updates while talking about brands.

According to this Search Engine Journal report, Bing has already started using Sentiment Analysis to influence search results, and Google is contemplating it.

In fact, Google, to an extent, has already been using this technology, or something similar, to show you Featured Snippets.

Example of Google featured snippet

Here are two blog posts that I wrote about Google’s featured snippets:

To show Featured Snippets, the Google algorithm tries to find the intent of the search and then goes through the links it has crawled and finds out the portions that exactly answer the question being asked in the query. It interprets the sentiment.

The problem with the current version of such snippets is that they tend to provide just one perspective.

For example, in the above Search Engine Journal blog post, the author takes the example of “are reptiles good pets?”

Same intent but different Google query results

It was noted that Google showed a different snippet for “are reptiles bad pets?” whereas, search engine experts like Danny Sullivan feel that the answer should be the same because the question is more or less the same – you want to know whether reptiles are good pets or bad pets.

Microsoft Bing, instead of shuffling between different snippets, has started showing two perspectives side-by-side. Here is a screenshot from their blog post on the same topic:

Sentiment analysis used by Microsoft Bing

What exactly is sentiment analysis, especially in terms of content marketing and SEO?

It means using online tools to analyze various pieces of writing (not necessarily on your blog or website) to gauge what sort of sentiments people have about your business.

A special thing about sentiment analysis is that it is not just the black and white of “you are good” and “you are bad”. Though, “good” and “bad” are also very strong sentiments, there are many subtle emotional tones that people use to talk about your business and the subtle differences can make a big difference on whether people decide to do business with you or not. Take for example:

“Yes, a great piece of writing, indeed!”

“Do you really think it is a great piece of writing?”

“This piece of writing could have been better.”

“I have certainly seen better examples of writing.”

“Your writing is good, but anyway I’m going to go with another content writer.”

Now, as a human, if you go through these lines, you can interpret them as positive, negative, comparative and even cynical (the first one).

Suppose, I have been gathering all the feedback from my content writing clients and storing it somewhere over the years. A good sentiment analysis tool can tell me what the overall experience of my clients with my content writing service has been. Of course, more data there is, better are the results.

The above-mentioned data can be gathered from multiple sources, not necessarily from the emails that you get from your customers or clients. You can get the data from your comments section, from reviews section, and even the chat transcripts that you might have been saving.

If you want to widen the net, you can use hashtags, trends, keyword strings and your brand name to collect data from all over the Internet and then run it through your sentiment analysis software.

Sentiment analysis isn’t just done to know what people think about your business, it can also be done to know what people think about a particular aspect of life or doing work or having a vacation and then accordingly you can make changes to your business.

So, how does sentiment analysis have an impact on content marketing and SEO?

As a business you can use specialized sentiment analysis tools to monitor conversations on the Internet and social media and then tailor your content to serve your customers and clients better.

As mentioned above, Bing is already using sentiment analysis to decide what results to show for your search queries, and Google is in the process of doing so.

For big brands, the search engines may analyze the conversations people have about these brands on various platforms and then rank their content accordingly.

Suppose, there is a greater number of people criticizing the latest version of the iPhone. So, instead of showing a blog post from Apple that lists great things about the latest version, the search engines may decide to rank another blog post highlighting the negative things about the phone better than Apple’s blog post.

Similarly, if people share your blog post on various platforms with “positive sentiment” its search engine rankings may improve, compared to a greater number of people sharing another blog post on similar topic from another blog, but with “negative sentiment”.

So, as a small business, how can you improve your content and your content marketing by observing sentiment analysis, and consequently, improve your SEO?

Age-old wisdom comes into picture: create and publish relevant content. It all boils down to that.

Why?

What is positive sentiment anyway? You get positive sentiment in the form of endorsements from people who read your content, who watch it, use it to better their lives or the way they do their business or make purchasing decisions.

How do they endorse good content? They link to it and surround it with positive expressions (a great example, great insight, well said, what a piece of writing, nice tips, and so on).

When your content is posted on social networking websites people comment on it, like it, share it and carry out other activities that prove that they appreciate your content.

Sentiment analysis and SEO

Although Google hasn’t completely adopted sentiment analysis, the search engine has been using “search intent” to show featured snippets.

There is another technology that is called RankBrain that observes user behavior when people find your content on search results. If search engine users find your content on Google, go to your page or blog post, spend a few seconds over there, come back to Google and carry on the same search, it tells Google that the user didn’t find what he or she was looking for and hence, your content doesn’t solve the purpose of being ranked for the search term it is currently being ranked for. Your content loses its ranking.

How to write content for Google RankBrain

Alternatively, suppose currently a link doesn’t rank well but a user finds it on second or third page, goes there, spends some time and then no longer carries the same search back on Google, Google thinks that your content has solved the purpose of being ranked for the search term. Your content gains its ranking.

This is also a form of sentiment analysis because Google observes how people react to individual search results and then this has an impact on your search engine rankings.

Concluding remarks on sentiment analysis

The success of your content marketing depends a lot on your ability to understand what your audience needs and then providing it.

This very much takes care of positive sentiment about your content in general, and your brand in particular. If people like your content, there is a great chance that they are also going to like your brand, although, if they don’t like your product or service, it doesn’t really matter how great your content is. Ultimately, it is the business experience that matters, especially when you intend to promote a business through content marketing.

People generate and share content everywhere these days. You are not directly in control of the content generated by the others. You are only in control of the content generated and published by your business.

So, how do you control content generated by your prospective and current customers and clients?

By not giving them a reason to write content with negative sentiments. Provide them exceptional quality products and services then follow with great service.

It’s been observed that people leave negative feedback more easily than positive feedback. If someone has a lousy experience with your business there is a greater chance of him or her venting it out than someone having a good experience and going to the extra length of putting in some good words about your business.

Hence, publish high-quality content and then follow it up with a great business proposition. You will maintain a positive sentiment around your business.