Tag Archives: Content Marketing

5 ways to generate more business with guest blogging

Why do people guest blog and invite guest bloggers?

Why do you want to guest blog on other blogs and why do people want to guest blog on your blog? You can achieve the following by guest blogging:

Get more direct traffic by publishing your blog post on another, high-traffic blog and getting your byline included.
Expose your ideas to a different, wider audience.
As a person or as a brand become known to more people.
Get fresh content for your own blog by letting others write for it.
Get yourself some respite by not having to continuously write yourself and instead, allowing others to generate quality content for your blog.
Increase search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, it is the last, 6th reason for which people mostly guest blog and this is how you can become a victim of spamming if you are not careful about for whom you write and from whom you accept content. If you can take care of both these aspects guest blogging is one of the greatest ways of getting access to a wider audience as well as continuously getting new content for your own blog.

How do you generate more business with guest blogging?

Yes, ultimately you want to generate more business. How does guest blogging contribute? Here is how…

You get exposure: If yours is a relatively new business or if you are looking for a bigger audience you can either wait for your search engine rankings to improve and your social media and social networking audience to increase or you can guest blog for more famous blogs. A good thing about guest blogging is, provided you use the right sort of blogs, you can gain massive amount of traffic in no time. How does this help you grow your business? When you are guest blogging you are mostly targeting highly focused, niche blogs, read and viewed by people who are already interested in what you have to offer. Suppose you are in the business of producing biodegradable building materials. Which blogs would you choose? Maybe architecture? Alternative lifestyle? Green living? Regular visitors to these blogs will be more eager to check out your website and become your customers.
You expand your influence as an expert:
Suppose you make a living off advising people how to do a particular thing. For that you need to establish yourself as an expert. You want to be known as an expert in your field. More and more people should know about your expertise so that when they need the expertise that you can provide, they remember that you can provide it. The more you are known as an expert, the better are your prospects.
You get more targeted traffic to your website:
Generating more business from your website and blog is all about getting targeted traffic. Most of the websites face this problem that although they get lots of traffic, they are not attracting the sort of traffic that turns into business. When you are guest blogging you carefully choose the blogs. As I have mentioned in the first bullet, if you are producing biodegradable building materials you will naturally be guest blogging for blogs that attract an audience interested in nature-friendly architecture, green living and pursuing alternative lifestyles. This will send your way lots of targeted traffic and this in turn will improve your conversion rate and hence, generate more business for you.
You get quality content for your own blog: Just as you are providing quality content to other blogs as guest blogger, when you invite other guest bloggers to write for your blog, you are engaging more and more people to generate content for you. As a small business it might be difficult to produce lots of quality content on an ongoing basis over a sustained period of time. But once your blog has crossed a certain threshold level of popularity and traffic, greater number of people will be interested in writing for you. Just imagine, a single person writing one blog post every day and a slew of writers writing multiple blog posts every day. Wouldn’t that be marvellous for your content quantity and quality? The more content you have, the more content is indexed by the search engines, the more content of yours is exposed on social networking websites and the more targeted traffic you have to your blog and website, getting more business to you.
You strike up new business partnerships: It is not just about traffic and exposure when you use guest blogging to generate more business. You can strike up direct business partnerships with people who get involved with you and with people you get involved with. Many of the guest bloggers may turn out to be your customers and clients later on. Similarly you may end up doing business with people you are right now writing for.

Guest blogging is a great networking opportunity because when someone allows you to write blog posts for his or her blog he or she is allowing you to enter his or her space. This is a great opportunity for you to get close to that person in terms of establishing a mutually beneficial business relationship. The same is applied to people who want to guest blog for you.

10 ways to make your content marketing super effective

According to the link mentioned above, these are the 10 ways you can make your content marketing super effective.

Promote your content:
Millions of pieces of content is being produced on the Internet every day. This content doesn’t just exist in the form of blog posts and articles. It can be videos, slideshows, animations, infographics, PDFs, social media and social networking updates, online forum threads and comments left by people on various websites and blogs. Any piece of information, any piece of thought, any piece of idea, is content. When so much content is being published how can your content be noticed by people? How do they find your content? Each time you publish something new it is not going to be ranked well by the search engines and it is not going to be promoted by your fans and followers on social media. You will have to do it on your own. You will need to develop a mechanism to constantly promote your new as well as existing content.
Clearly define your content marketing mission statement: What exactly do you want to achieve when you publish and market content? Obviously you want to target an audience, a particular audience. For example, if you are marketing some gadget you will be targeting an audience that is interested in the benefits of that particular gadget if not that particular gadget itself. You also need to know what sort of content your audience prefers and what channels it uses to access its favorite content.
Create valuable content: Your content is of no use if people don’t find it valuable. They are not going to access and appreciate your content simply because you are creating it and publishing it. Only your mom is going to do that. Make your content irresistible. Make it worth-reading.
Repurpose your existing content for many formats: It is not easy to create unique content for all the formats you are trying to achieve. For example, if you have just created a blog post, you can also create a podcast out of it. Pick up the main points of the blog post and create a slideshow. You can also create a small video that goes through all the main points.
Document your content marketing strategy: How are you implementing it? What steps are you taking to streamline your content according to the needs of your audience? What are the stories that you intend to tell? Are you sticking to your targets? If you are not, what corrective measures are you taking?
Don’t go full-throttle at the beginning of your content marketing campaign: In order to make your content marketing super effective, testing is extremely crucial. Publish some content, distribute it and observe people’s reaction. Study the sort of traffic your content attracts. If it is attracting the right kind of traffic then you’re moving in the right direction but if the sort of traffic that your content is generating isn’t going to turn into business, then it’s time to rethink. This is why, if you have a lean approach in the beginning it’s easier to change.
Keep measuring: Evaluate your content marketing constantly. As mentioned above, study what sort of traffic and engagement your content encourages. Use Google analytics to study the traffic pattern.
Have a clear idea of what sort of buyer you’re targeting: The better you know about your buyer, the more effective is going to be your content marketing strategy. Don’t try to target everybody under the sun.
Automate some of the content marketing tasks: Promoting and broadcasting your content can turn out to be a litany of repetitive tasks. There is nothing wrong in automating some of those tasks. There are many services available on the Internet that can help you automate some of these tasks.
Develop a sense of discipline: Accept that content marketing is hard work. Very effective, but hard work. It requires discipline, perseverance, resolve and lots of confidence. At many stages you will feel nothing is happening but still you will need to stick to your ground. You will need to constantly come up with new content writing, content publishing and content marketing ideas to beat your competition.

As mentioned above, in order to make your content marketing super effective you constantly need to be one step ahead of your competition because just like you even your competitors recognise the importance of content marketing. Your competitors are constantly publishing and distributing new content to remain visible so accordingly you have to strategize each and every step. Besides, on the Internet, it isn’t just your competition that constantly challenges you, there is also lots of noise on the Internet that is constantly competing with your content.

5 beginners’ mistakes in content marketing

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I have mentioned in one of my previous blog posts that 94% B2B small businesses on the Internet are using content marketing in one form or another. So naturally, if so many people are using content marketing more people want to use it. But the problem is, there are some beginners’ mistakes that people commit when they don’t understand the true meaning of content marketing and simply try to ape people who might, to be frank, be aping someone else. Listed below are the 5 major beginners’ mistakes in content marketing.

When you are publishing blog posts and articles, you’re doing content marketing. Publishing blog posts and articles means you are creating content, which is good, which is a first step in the direction of content marketing. If you don’t have content, what do you market? And marketing here doesn’t mean that you are trying to sell content, it means through your content you’re drawing people to your website. You publish high-quality content so that people come to your website to make use of it. But by merely publishing that content doesn’t turn you into a marketer. For that you need to use various channels to distribute your content and make sure it gets found on social networking websites as well as search engines.
Just focusing on SEO content. Don’t publish content just because you want to improve your search engine rankings. There is nothing wrong in trying to improve your SEO, but if that is the only motive behind publishing content, you are not going to experience much success. So what do you do if you don’t publish content for your SEO? Publish content for the sake of its quality, for the sake of the value it provides to your audience, for the sake of helping your prospective customers and clients. Once you can create useful content, it automatically becomes SEO content. After that, what remains is, making sure that there is no excessive code on your website that stops the search engine crawlers from accessing the actual content.
Not being consistent with content publishing and distribution. Content marketing is an ongoing activity. It is not a “campaign”. It is a strategy. Strategy is always long-term. You may have a one-week goal, but you normally have a one-year or a five-year strategy. The search engines are constantly looking for new content to crawl and index and relegate the existing content to lower rankings. Millions of updates are posted on various social networking websites on a daily basis. This is the reality of our times. With so much content constantly being pumped into the Internet, if you are not producing content on an ongoing basis, you’re going to be run over by the content being published and promoted by your competitors.
Neglecting search engine and social media optimization. Fully focusing on the quality of your content without overtly worrying about search engine optimization doesn’t mean that you totally neglect it. Remember that most of your traffic will come from search engines and social networking websites. Better make them an integral part of your content marketing. Pay attention to the sort of keywords you use within your blog posts and articles. Use the language used by your prospective customers and clients. Create compelling titles that can attract people on social media and social networking websites. Wherever possible, use attractive images or videos. Create your social media updates in such a manner that it is easier to share them.
Neglecting your existing content. If you have had a website for a few years then you already have some content on it. You have the homepage. You have the company page. You have the products and services page. There might be an about us page. There might be big and small articles that you may have gotten yourself written a couple of years ago that still hang around. Whether they are performing well or not, they are your existing assets and you shouldn’t ignore them. Carry out an audit of your existing content and see what all improvements you can incorporate. Can you optimize your titles? Can you make your content crisp? Can you incorporate more keywords without indulging in keyword-spamming? Can you put a couple of more photographs? Can you improve the language? Can you add more content – maybe a couple of more paragraphs – to existing pages and blog posts? There is no sense in carrying out new content marketing activities if you haven’t gone through your existing content and worked on it.

There is an exhaustive list of content marketing mistakes that one can commit but these are basically beginners’ mistakes. If you can take care of these mistakes in the beginning, you are not going to encounter the crushing problems that many people encounter later on.