Tag Archives: Content Marketing

How to publish quality content regularly on your website

Publishing quality content regularly

Regularity is as important as quality if you want to get benefit out of your content marketing efforts.

When you regularly publish quality content on your website it gives a message to your visitors that you’re constantly updating your website and hence, they should keep track of it (a motivation to sign up for your email updates).

Search engine crawlers – this is something that I have observed but I don’t know if it actually happens or not – also take note of your publishing schedule, and start crawling your website accordingly.

If you publish content regularly, your website is crawled regularly.

The more you publish, the more reason you give human visitors as well as search engine crawlers to access more content.

The more you publish, the more search terms you cover.

The more you publish, the more content you make available that can be shared on other websites and blogs, and on social media websites.

But it is easier said than done.

There are two obstacles to publishing content regularly:

Great ideas for publishing new blog posts
Making sure that the quality is up to the mark.

B2C content marketing challenges chart

So, regularity and quality are both indispensable. One or the other tend to suffer when you try to maintain a balance.

The quality aspect can be easily taken care of.

Be genuine.

Try to provide something valuable, something meaningful, something you think can really help people.

This will ensure that you publish quality content.

Quality means meaningfulness.

Meaningful means something that really helps people.

What helps people?

Take the example of my business: content writing. How can I help you? There are two ways I can help you:

Help you write better content yourself
Help you decide whether you should hire me as your content writer or not

But, why should I help you write better content because this means you won’t hire me?

You may or may not.

If you want to write on your own, you will do it anyway.

If you don’t find the information on my website, you will find it somewhere else.

You’re not looking for a content writer, at least not right now.

Right now, you want to write on your own, and you’re just looking for some good start, or some insight that can help you write better.

Right now you don’t want to hire someone, and if I don’t offer you help, you will get that help from somewhere else.

So why should I provide you that help?

If nothing else, it generates goodwill for me.

In the future, if content is needed by you or by someone you know and if that content cannot be written without the help of a content writer, you would rather hire me than someone else.

Then comes the second point: helping you decide whether you want to hire me as your content writer or not.

How do you decide that?

You want to know how I write. You want to know how I express ideas. To help you with this

I publish dedicated pages on every possible question or doubt you may have regarding my content writing services.
I regularly share my knowledge with you through my content writing and content marketing blog.
I provide you samples of my work.
I improve my search engine rankings so that you can find me for relevant keywords and search terms.

This gives me plenty to write about.

This brings us to the question of how you can publish quality content in your website or blog regularly, for your particular business. You can do the following…

Maintain a list of topics

There are many tools you can use these days to maintain a list of topics. You will be creating topics according to the topics, and consequently, the keywords that you want to cover.

Remember that topics must be consistent with the central theme of your website or blog. If you are a mobile app development company them most of your topics must be about mobile app development and related fields.

You can use a simple note book to jot down content writing ideas. You can use something like Google Keep. You can use Evernote. You can use an Excel sheet. Or Trello cards. Whatever you find convenient. But, definitely have a system of maintaining topics.

Use something you can immediately use. As you write more and more and get into the habit of thinking proactively about your content, ideas will suddenly come and if you don’t record them immediately, you may lose them.

Always be on the lookout for topic ideas

Don’t start thinking about what to write when you start writing. One option is keep your ideas repository nearby. Another option is to constantly be at the lookout. Check you Twitter timeline to see what the others in your stream are publishing. Subscribe to feeds and use something like Feedly. Subscribe to email updates that send you new blog posts and articles about your industry right in the inbox. Use Google Alerts. Interact in the forums, or at least follow the discussion threads.

If you have had an informative conversation with your client, even that can be a source of a great topic (you don’t have to reveal the name of your client).

Respond to articles and blog posts published somewhere else

Agree with something published in another website or blog? Disagree? Got something if your own? Why not respond through your own blog post or article?

In fact, this is how initially blogging spread…long time ago when it wasn’t yet associated with content marketing and SEO. Someone wrote something on his or her blog and then the others responded through their own blog post, linking to the original post. It doesn’t just make blogging interesting, it also gives you new ideas on an ongoing basis.

Repurpose your existing content

Content grows on content. Your existing content is teeming with new content writing ideas. Take for example this subtopic “Repurpose your existing content” – I have previously written a complete blog post just on this topic – How to repurpose would content.

Creating your blog posts out of existing blog posts and articles is just one way of repurposing your existing content. You can also create

Infographics
Random images to post on Instagram
Slides
Small e-books by combining multiple blog posts
YouTube videos
Social media posts

Read books and magazines in your field

Developing and expertise, in-depth knowledge in your field is very essential to creating quality content. Books, at least it is assumed, are often written by experts are people who have done lots of research and have come up with new insights into your profession. They give you lots of food for thought. You can find lots of topics in these niche books an marketing d magazines.

Hire an experienced content writer

“Experienced” is the key word here. Everyone can write occasionally. But if you need to publish high quality content on your website on an ongoing basis, it is better to collaborate with an experienced content writer rather than trying to do it on your own. You may be an expert in your field. You may also be able to articulate your thoughts through writing. But can you do it consistently? Do you have enough time to follow a schedule?

Remember that regularity is very important for successful content marketing. If you publish content haphazardly, although over a long period of time it will definitely benefit you, it will depend on chance. But if you regularly publish high-quality content following a strict pattern, the benefit will be more consistent, more predictable. This is something a content writer can provide you.

Maintain a content publishing calendar

Content publishing calendar

A content publishing calendar is basically a topics and ideas list, but with dates and timeframe attached to every stages. A calendar tells you what you will be publishing on a particular date. This instills a sense of organization into your publishing process.

You also spend some time with your content writer deciding on various topics, deciding on when certain topics should be drafted and scheduled. The more you get into the habit of organising and scheduling, the better will be the inflow of ideas.

Curate content

Content Curation

Curation is also a good way of publishing content regularly without running out of it. Curation means finding well-written blog posts and articles on other websites and then linking to them from your own website with small input from you. It takes just a few minutes and before you know it, a repository of quality content begins to build up under your domain.

Concluding remarks

Just like in any form of marketing, successful content marketing, requires consistency. A pattern needs to exist. If you decide to publish something every Wednesday, then it should be published every Wednesday. If every 15 days you want to publish a long blog post, then you need to stick to this schedule. As mentioned above, if you cannot come up with original topics regularly, you can link to content published elsewhere. Make sure the content that you publish – whether you publish original content, or you curate it, make sure that it helps your visitors.

This is a very good example of storytelling for content marketing

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Content marketing through storytelling

In the morning I received this ZDNet email newsletter, and there was a story titled How Apple Watch saved my life.

The author tells how previously he wasn’t enthusiastic about Apple products, and in fact, he was very critical of them. He constantly switched between Apple and Android devices. He owned most of the mainstream Apple products, but he wasn’t a regular user.

Being in technology, it is his work to use gadgets from all the brands objectively without getting personally involved.

One day he decided to purchase a refurbished Apple Watch because his many friends had it and he was just a little curious about the gadget. This is why he didn’t purchase a brand-new watch because he thought that after a few days he would just put the watch in a drawer and forget about it.

After a few days he received an email from Apple asking him whether he would be willing to participate in the Apple Heart Study, a large data-gathering exercise the company was partnering with Stanford University. Always interested in big data studies, the writer joined the program.

Apple heart study screenshot

Through the Apple Watch, heartbeat patterns are constantly recorded and then sent to Apple or Stanford University servers, necessary analysis is done and further action is advised.

A few days later, the writer received a message on his iPhone saying “Irregular heart rhythm observed”. The message also advised him to contact a Heart Study Doctor as soon as possible.

This led to a series of tests and discoveries and ultimately it was found that his heart had a condition that could have turned serious if left neglected.

In the article he has also described his heart condition and his previous problem of high blood pressure, a bit of obesity and high blood pressure.

Although any gadget could have helped him with a similar study being done with a similar gadget from another company, he just happened to be wearing an Apple Watch and the Stanford University study is being exclusively carried out using this gadget, the author has now totally fallen in love with all Apple products.

It is not a feature-based love and dedication because the features remain the same, it’s just that the watch played an important role in detecting the anomaly in his heartbeat and this led to his early diagnosis and treatment, emotionally he wants to repay and the only way to repay a company is to buy its products.

What can be more powerful testimonial than someone telling you that a product or service saved his or her life? And not metaphorically, but actually.

This is a good example of content marketing through storytelling.

The author uses a title you cannot resist: How Apple Watch saved my life – everyone would like to know exactly what happened. For example, I’m not crazy about Apple products and even advise people against buying an iPhone but still, I was persuaded enough to click the link and read the story.

He builds up a narrative. Initially he tells you that although he abundantly uses gadgets, he wasn’t very gung-ho about using Apple products, and in fact, he even disliked using Apple products. This could be anyone, even a person like me. Many readers would relate.

Then he very cautiously brings up Apple Watch. He even tells you that he didn’t go for a new watch and instead, he purchased a refurbished app because he wasn’t sure if he would use it regularly.

Then he signs up for this Stanford University project that exclusively uses the watch from Apple.

Two things happen here: the mention of Stanford University immediately injects a sense of credibility and, it is study on the heart conditions.

The mention of Stanford University itself invokes respect in many. Then, you read that this university trusts Apple Watch to gather “big data” on heartbeat of many people. A very big influencer.

Then, a sequence of events reveals that his own life is saved or at least, he is saved from a big health-related disaster because of the early warning provided by Apple Watch.

Now, Apple Watch didn’t directly save his life. It wasn’t a feature in the watch itself that saved his life, but it was instrumental in discovering his heart condition and him taking remedial measures. Any watch with similar features and with similar research team affiliation could have done that.

But, a positive story gets associated with Apple Watch.

In the end, the author tells readers that not just Apple Watch, now he’s going to buy everything Apple offers including iPhones, iPads, and whatnot.

Maybe it’s a paid article, or maybe it’s a real incident, but that’s not the issue. This is a good example of doing content marketing with storytelling.

How to grow your small business with content marketing

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Grow your business with content marketing

How do you plan to promote your small business (I’m assuming you have a website and you need to promote it)?

Google AdWords?

Pay an SEO company to improve your search engine rankings?

Spend hours on social media posting random messages and replying to people?

All these activities are important and I’m not going to discourage you from using a judicious mix of them to promote your small business.

The problem (here we go!) with these activities is that they’re becoming less and less effective.

Conventional advertising has become boring

If you can use AdWords, so can your competitors. If you outbid them, they can outbid you.

And anyway, people on search engines pay less attention to paid links when they’re searching for useful information. The nature of paid links is that people don’t expect these links to contain helpful information.

Even if people do click your paid links, you can easily imagine how much you will end up spending on just a single campaign – businesses run multiple campaigns to cover multiple search terms.

Advertising has been exploited so much that people no longer trust it. In fact, they are constantly looking for ways to skip advertising. Many users have add-ons in their browsers to block advertisements. This is because most of the advertising is always about selling, selling, and selling. People get put off.

Read: Want to know how content marketing is better than advertising?

More than 650 million devices use some form of ad blocking.

Increasing number of people are using ad blockers

The problem with SEO is multi-faceted. Much of SEO these days has to do with good quality content and if you don’t recognize this and want to improve your SEO without investing in high-quality content, you will just spend money and effort without any results. There is no SEO these days without content marketing. You can acknowledge this today, or after a few months, after spending a ton of money and effort.

Moreover, without quality content, SEO is very easy. You can create “optimized” content in great quantity and go on publishing it. Since, low quality content is very cheap, you can use brute force to improve your SEO and sometimes, it actually works (it depends on how much effort your competition is putting).

Read: How content marketing actually improves your SEO

Since it is very easy, and also egotistically gratifying, many people do it. If you can get cheap content, so can your competitors.

Social media is full of noise. Timelines move very fast. There, unless you are paying to highlight your updates, most of your followers are going to miss your messages. You will be constantly catching up.

Since you will be spending most of your effort (and even money) maintaining a presence on social media, you won’t have any intellectual wealth to show for yourself.

Content marketing is the answer.

Here is a nice infographic of how you can use content marketing for making every part of your sales funnel effective.

Using content marketing to make every part of your sales funnel effective

Source

Why content marketing is the answer to all your small business growth troubles as far as promotion goes?

First, let us understand what content marketing actually means.

I won’t go into esoteric definitions of content marketing as many blogs have it. I will use very simple language to explain what content marketing to you is, and how you can use content marketing to grow your business.

Isn’t this the ultimate goal, growing your business?

So, what is content marketing? Especially in the context of a small business like yours?

Everything that you publish online is content.

All your web pages on your small business website, are content.

The images accompanying those web pages are content.

The publicly accessible PDFs that you have, are content.

If you are publishing blog posts, they are content.

If you constantly publish FAQs and answers to questions from your customers and clients, they are content.

When you send out an email campaign, that’s content.

When you post updates on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you are publishing content.

So, whatever you publish online for the consumption of people, you are publishing content and in a crude manner, you are also indulging in content marketing. You just don’t know it.

Content marketing means using a strategy to regularly publish content in such a manner that people not only want to get more of your content, they go out of their way to make sure that they don’t miss your content.

Remember that the ultimate aim of content marketing (your content marketing) should be the growth of your small business.

So, when you publish content, when you attract people to your content, they should be your prospective customers and clients, and not all-and-sundry.

If you try to attract all-and-sundry, you will simply waste money and time, which you don’t want.

In the context of your small business, content marketing means publishing useful content using your preferred channel, on an ongoing basis, so that your business name or your brand becomes familiar to people, and since you are publishing useful content, your target audience is not annoyed.

Not being familiar with you is one of the biggest reasons why people on the Internet don’t want to do business with you.

In bulleted form, your small business content marketing would include:

Publishing high-quality content regularly.
Providing answers to people’s problems and questions.
Highlighting the benefits of your product or service from different angles, in different ways.
Promoting your content using multiple channels like your blog and social media platforms.
Using analytics to note down what sort of traffic your content is attracting.
Tweaking and adjusting your new as well as existing content according to the feedback that you got from your analytics tools.

Things you need to know in advance if you want to grow your small business with content marketing

Content marketing is way more effective than the other promotional methods listed and not listed above, but don’t opt for content marketing as a tool for your small business growth thinking that it is cheap.

The key is “content marketing is more effective”.

Sure, you can go for cheap content and then like a hamster you can go on running inside a spinning wheel thinking that you’re doing something very important.

Hamster-like conditions with cheap content

Image credit

Your choice.

I’m not saying that you’re not going to succeed with content marketing unless you go bankrupt. I just mean to say that just like any other advertising and marketing cost, or any other business-related cost, content marketing is going to cost you.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that content marketing doesn’t stop at a few blog posts and articles. It is an ongoing process. You can take it as an operational cost.

This is because just like you are using content marketing, so are many more businesses.

You may say that the same thing happens with conventional advertising and SEO, again, I want you to pay attention to “content marketing is more effective”.

Just like SEO, you are constantly going to face competition for your small business in content marketing.

Just like advertising, you may have to spend money getting quality content for your website or blog or social media updates.

Yes, it comes with all the existing attributes like costing money, needing effort, and having to compete with the others.

What makes it different from other forms of marketing is, it is more effective, and if implemented properly, it will certainly help you grow your small business.

So, what makes content marketing so effective for growing your small business?

Don’t roll your eyes, but to benefit from content marketing, you must understand that you are providing something unique.

Unless you yourself recognize the potential of your business – your product or service – how are you going to convince the others? If you are half-hearted about your proposition, so will be the reaction to your proposition.

Once you become a big fan of your business, you have a lot to say.

Compare this with an interesting topic. How easy it is to have a conversation on a topic you find interesting.

Anyway, the biggest benefit of content marketing is that it gives you a unique identity.

A big problem with the Internet is – despite the fact that its potential for your small business is almost infinite – that there is too much noise. The noise doesn’t just come from your competitors. There are millions of distractions on the Internet.

How do you distinguish yourself?

How do people recognize you in the crowd?

Why should they do business with you if scores of other people are prompting them to do business with them?

You give them something to like about you. Something to respect you. Something to hold you in awe.

When they like you, when they respect you, when they hold you in awe, naturally they want to buy from you.

But how do you do that?

One way is to provide them exceptional service once they have bought something from you. But, this can only be done when they have become your customers or clients. What do you do when they haven’t yet become your customer or client?

You can offer them something free.

If it is something digital, although the cost might not be a problem, zillions of digital products on the Internet are free, so, again, people won’t be able to distinguish your small business from others. Heck, even Google provides free Gmail and a stack of other services free of cost. You will be just another service doing the same.

Giving physical products for free will be very expensive. Even giving services for free will be very expensive for a small business.

Providing helpful, good quality content, on the other hand, isn’t very expensive, and people don’t take good quality content for granted because there is so much lousy content available.

What do I mean by good content?

The definition of “goodness” changes from context to context. Some people may find amusing content good – for example creating and distributing funny GIFs. Some people may find fashion tips good. Some people may find recipes good. Some people may find web design and SEO tips good. Some people may find Internet marketing tips good.

Visited boredpanda.com? As the name suggests, it’s a website for people who are bored. So the content over there that unbores them is good content for them.

“Good” here means something that is useful, something that entertains, something that is relevant, and something that is topical, and last but not the least, something that is written well that shows that you respect your readers.

We live in a screwed-up world but fortunately, people still appreciate help, and are grateful for it.

Suppose, you sell scented candles from your website. If you search for the phrase “buy scented candles online” on Google you will see that most of the listings are from famous online retailers. It will be very difficult to get your link featured with these mega-million retail stores. I’m not saying it is impossible, but it is difficult.

What do you do?

You first create a very unique line of scented candles, and then build a community around your business through content marketing.

You have to offer people something that is not available on all these retail shops.

Fine, even if you come up with something very unique, how do you promote your small business with very limited budget?

Through content marketing.

Start posting high-quality pictures of your scented candles on Facebook and Instagram. Invite people to share their experiences of using scented candles from various sources.

Create a video of how you typically create scented candles.

Write blog posts on the process of making scented candles.

Find references of scented candles in classical books and create a blog post on this theme.

Send regular email updates to people on how they can use scented candles for different occasions.

Educate people about the therapeutic benefits of scented candles.

Once you start using content marketing to promote your small business of scented candles, you will keep on coming up with different ideas.

But, no matter how appreciative and grateful we are, we easily forget. We need to be reminded regularly. So, good quality content needs to be published regularly.

For that, create a content publishing and content marketing calendar for your small business.

Remember that there is a reason why it is not called “content publishing” but “content marketing”.

It takes strategy to use content to market your small business.

Once you have released your content into the World Wide Web, you need to make sure that the right people get access to that content. No matter how great your content is, unless your target audience is able to find it, it is not going to achieve the desired results.

Use all the available channels to promote your content. Promote your blog on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Build a mailing list and broadcast your links whenever you publish them. Encourage people to subscribe to your mailing list.

Here are some nice statistics published in an infographic on Demand Metric:

70% people prefer to learn about a company or a product through articles and blog posts rather than an advertisement.
82% customers and clients have a positive outlook about a company after reading content from the company.
On an average, marketers are spending over 25% of their marketing budget on content marketing.
91% B2B marketers use content marketing.
86% B2C marketers use content marketing.
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing.
Per dollar spent, content marketing generates approximately three times as many leads as traditional marketing.
86% people skip TV advertisements when given the means.
90% consumers find custom and informative content useful.

What makes content marketing cheaper and more effective compared to traditional marketing, especially for small business?

Social sharing. Search engine traffic. Direct referrals.

For every non-content marketing promotion, you pay for every benefit that you derive.

When you advertise on Google AdWords, you pay for every click. If you’re paying one dollar per click and if you get 200 clicks in a day, you are spending $ 200 per day for those 200 clicks.

But when you publish high-quality content after adopting content marketing, if your content is good and valuable, people promote that content on their own. You don’t have to pay them to promote your content. It is so valuable that people want to share it with their colleagues, friends and relatives.

The quality of your content, coupled with social sharing, improves your search engine rankings. Whether you get 200 clicks from Google or 2 million clicks, you don’t have to pay even a single cent to Google (or any other search engine). After your initial investment in getting high quality content, the cascading effect is totally free.

The benefits of content marketing for your small business

As you do content marketing for your small business, just in a couple of months you will begin to see the following positive changes:

Improved search engine rankings (of course, better search engine rankings are needed)
More targeted traffic to your website
Increased referral traffic to your small business website, because more websites and blogs will be linking to you and more people will be sharing your links on their social media profiles
People pay more attention to what you have to say
More leads are generated from your website and other sources
Your sales increase

Conclusion

Although, as a small business, you may want to try out many marketing methods, content marketing for small business is not only cost-effective but also result-oriented.

With little creativity, you can gain a competitive edge over businesses that are not using content marketing to promote themselves, or who are using content marketing wrongly.

You can place yourself as an expert or an authority figure if intellectual branding matters in your field. When people respect you for your wisdom, it’s easier for them to do business with you because they trust your intelligence.

You also become familiar to people. When you continuously publish content, people become used to your presence, and not in a negative sense. They associate you with high quality content and timely help.

The overall visibility of your small business increases with consistent and strategic content marketing. More people link to your website. More people share your links. Search engines begin to rank you higher.

Clarity of purpose is very important if you want to promote your small business with content marketing. The entire strength of content marketing lies in strategy and execution. You must know what you want to publish, why you want to publish and what should be the end result. Once you have figured that out, there should be nothing holding you back.

Is content marketing losing its sheen?

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Is content marketing losing its sheen?

One of those phases.

During a particular period of the year, you start coming across articles and blog posts evincing the end, or at least a steep decline, in your profession. It also happens in content marketing.

Yesterday I came across an article on Forbes telling how content marketing has overstretched itself and consequently, is killing itself. It also insinuates that many renowned content marketing companies are borderline scams.

Today I received a newsletter update from someone that conducts writers’ workshops and he says blogging seems to be on the wane.

My personal experience is the opposite.

The number of content writing queries from my website has almost doubled. I’m getting more queries from India, Malaysia, China and The Philippines. I’m even getting more queries from Europe and America.

Yes, the quality of the queries has changed. It has improved. People now understand what they want.

The Indian clients, or rather, the Asian clients, are the same: they cringe at the thought of having to pay to a lowly content writer, and they assume that most of the writing, no matter how well it is done, should be either provided free of cost, or dirt cheap.

But there has been a marked, a welcome change.

Once they have received a few documents, once they have experienced the quality, they are more or less, even if reluctantly, ready to pay what I ask. This didn’t happen before.

Not just my personal experience, this Forbes article says that 89% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing to increase their leads and branding.

One of the biggest companies, Coca-Cola, as totally turned its corporate website into the content publishing platform.

American Express uses its OPEN Forum content publishing platform to use content marketing to drive traffic to its website.

77% of Internet users read blogs in one way or another.

Why do some people think content marketing in general and blogging in particular are dying

It’s all about where you stand. I will tell you a story.

In the early 2000s I used to design websites. For some time I did great. There was a dot com boom and everybody wanted a website.

People weren’t aware of the concept of the phrase “content marketing” but there were some entrepreneurs, including yours truly, who were using articles and tutorials to promote themselves.

Anyway, just as everybody wanted a website, everybody started designing websites after a while.

If you live in India you must have come across poor tailors sitting at the roadsides, under shady trees if lucky, working with their sewing machines.

You could see web designers just like that, those days, there were so many. I mean, they were not sitting under trees by the roadsides like tailors, but you get my point.

Microsoft had launched a tool called Front Page, if I’m not forgetting, that would allow you to make websites using a GUI. It was notorious for generating junk code, but neither the clients cared, nor the designers who would charge Rs. 2500 for a 10-page website.

I used to hand code my websites. When I designed and developed websites, there was not a single line of code extra.

Naturally I couldn’t make websites for Rs. 2500. When I insisted on hand coding my websites, clients thought I was crazy. All the assignments dried up. I switched to promoting web hosting plans.

One day I was sitting in the front room that I used as my office and a person dropped by. It was 10 a.m., early March, if I’m not forgetting. His white shirt was torn at the seams, and was dirty. He was unshaven, sweaty, and with hair that hadn’t been combed or washed for a few days.

I thought he was some construction worker, or a sweeper, or some poor person who had stopped by to get a glass of water.

He wanted to design a website for me. He had come across my ad in the local newspaper. He collected addresses from the classifieds and then did door to door marketing for his web design business. He told me that he visited 30-40 business establishments every month and got 3-4 projects every month. He used Front Page to design websites. He charged Rs. 2500. He didn’t have a computer (laptops were mostly unheard of during those days). He used to design the websites in an Internet café.

I don’t remember now why I hadn’t published my website URL in the ad because I would never go into a business without having a website, being a web designer myself and having had 3-4 websites even by the early 2000’s. Anyway, I turned him away.

With my own experience and after having seen that person, I had the same feeling that web designing as a profession was dead, or at least, it was not a good way of making money.

Still, since then, I have come across, and I’m not exaggerating, hundreds of websites promoting web design services, doing great. They charge thousands of dollars and clients gladly pay them.

In fact, that was a time when most of the businesses didn’t even have websites, and now every business has a website and still, web design and web development companies charge a premium.

The problem was not with web design as a profession, the problem was the way I was promoting my service and the way I was targeting my clients. I wasn’t targeting the right clients. I was targeting clients who were okay with having Front Page websites. I wasn’t targeting clients who appreciated hand-coded websites. There were many, and they were ready to pay for the effort. I just didn’t look for them. Somehow I wasn’t able to reach out to clients who would gladly pay for quality.

Why am I telling this story?

It happens in every business.

Take for example the restaurant business. Does every restaurant owner get to start a franchisee? I’m pretty sure if 100 entrepreneurs start a restaurant business every year, 98 don’t succeed. It doesn’t mean the restaurant business is a dead business. Some people succeed, most don’t, and that’s fine. It happens in every business.

The same holds true for content marketing.

As it was bound to happen, when people started claiming great success with content marketing, everybody wanted a piece of the pie. And as it was bound to happen, there was a no holds barred rush to create and publish content.

So, why do some people believe that content marketing doesn’t work?

Because they don’t know how it works.

People to content marketing all wrong

You see, you have to understand what content is. Most think that content is a way to improve your search engine rankings.

Although there is nothing wrong in wanting to publish content to improve one’s search engine rankings – I get lots of business due to this approach – eventually, it is an improved level of engagement that does the trick. And this is why, some businesses are doing great with content marketing, but most don’t. Maybe the problem is with the “marketing” part. I don’t know.

Publishing content on your website or blog is all about helping people make a decision, and provide them timely help when they need it.

Even if you are able to generate lots of traffic from search engines by publishing “optimized” content, if people don’t feel motivated once they come to your website, they are not going to buy from you.

Do I mean to say you shouldn’t publish content for traffic? I don’t mean that. Every business needs traffic and content marketing is the best way of generating targeted traffic to your website.

In fact, a big reason why people use content marketing is because they don’t want to solely depend on search engine traffic. Search engines can be whimsical. If you are a serious business, you cannot afford to completely depend on search engines for qualified traffic. You need to create your own sources, and content marketing is the best way. You become known for your quality content and authoritative insights.

The problem is not with wanting to generate targeted traffic. The problem is using content marketing just for generating targeted traffic.

This sort of content marketing doesn’t work, it has never worked and it is never going to work.

Sure, you need to publish content to draw targeted traffic to your website. But the primary purpose of your content must be to provide quality information to your visitors so that they can make up their mind regarding doing business with you.

This is exactly why the newspaper industry is failing. There was a time when content – journalism – used to be the primary content. Now it is advertising. Journalism is almost dead. Mostly it is either propaganda or traffic-oriented content to earn advertising revenue.

The primary purpose of content marketing should be to become a valuable part of your customers’ and clients’ lives.

You need to become an information hub, and believe me, even if you are a very small business, you can become an information hub within your niche. Don’t think that only big businesses can become information hubs.

All the businesses who have understood this are doing great with content marketing. The ones who are just greedy for targeted traffic aren’t succeeding.

Why do people get trapped in the traffic trap? Because it’s easier to generate traffic than generate business. Content that gets you search engine traffic is very cheap. It is very easy to create such content. Hire a jobless writer or someone who simply wants to make a few extra bucks and isn’t bothered whether your business benefits or not, and you can get scores of blog posts and articles without even realizing you are spending money.

And when you are able to publish 50 articles or blog posts every month, the quantity reassures you. The traffic DOES begin to manifest and you begin to feel that eventually, this is going to lead to more business.

It doesn’t.

What gives you more business is the quality of your content, the meaningfulness, and the level of engagement it can generate.

Search engine traffic should be a byproduct. When people begin to understand this, content marketing will work wonders for them.

What is the future of content marketing?

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Future of content marketing

Quick note: Of late I have been very busy with work (which is a good thing, right?) and I haven’t been able to publish my regular blog posts. For the time being, I will be publishing smaller, quicker blog posts, that I will be mostly referencing from other content marketing websites and blogs.

So, what is the future of content marketing?

I came across this quandary on this blog post.

In the past, content marketing simply meant publishing lots of articles and blog posts on your website and it would get you good traffic.

Back in 2002 when blogging hadn’t yet been invented (or maybe it was, I’m forgetting) I used to publish .asp web pages on my website and then I would manually update the index file to include the latest web page.

I knew it generated traffic (although, it didn’t help me grow my business much but that’s a different story).

I also published lots of web design related articles on other websites because I knew that would to get me traffic, and it did.

Since then, content marketing has turned into an industry, and, “content marketer” is a profession.

There are two trends that have mostly affected content marketing over all these years:

Advertisements are no longer effective; in fact, people devise ways to avoid them.
Google has been continuously changing its ranking algorithm, increasingly giving prominence to content that is high-quality, relevant and useful.

Social media has also impacted the way people consume content and hence, content marketers are constantly brainstorming on how to format their content and how to steer their content marketing strategy to get more attention from their social media followers.

The continuous effort is to get more eyeballs and, through more eyeballs, more targeted traffic to the website or the blog.

What has changed in the past and what is going to change in the future for content marketing?

In the past content marketing has become, from just a form of increasing your search engine rankings, to a full-fledged form of marketing.

Just as content marketers paid close attention to what the search engines did to their content, the search engines now pay close attention to what the content marketers are doing to their content.

Aside from that, there are different forms of content that are continuously gaining prominence over the written content.

Yes, written content still matters, but you can get traffic to your website through all types of content including images, sound files (audio files like podcasts), GIFs, PDFs, and of course, videos.

According to a Cisco study that came back in 2016, by 2020 75% of mobile traffic will be video (source).

It means video may dominate content marketing – more of your content may exist as video rather than text and images.

But if you are a big fan of content writing – text – focus on content clusters. I have written about content clusters in the blog post titled What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how they improve your SEO?

It means you create very long web pages and blog posts – 3000-400 words – and cover your topic from every possible angle.

Writing individual blog posts and web pages for your keywords and key phrases is frowned upon by Google these days.

Comprehensive blog posts and web pages also help you bring down your bounce rate because people get lots of valuable information on a single page and they don’t have to come back to Google to look for additional information.

Talking about creating topic clusters, one thing that I must point out is that to create very long blog posts and web pages, your writing needs to be very engaging and conversational.

Long streams of boring text are going to send people away.

I’m already observing this trend among my clients – they are coming to me for the need to publish very long pieces of content and they know that I can keep their readers interested.

So, this is a new door of opportunity for writers who can write well.

Anyway, the purpose of this particular blog post is not to publish something very structured and informative. Due to my ongoing workload, I haven’t been able to publish much. I’m trying to figure out how to regularly publish on my blog while writing for my clients.