Tag Archives: Content Marketing

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

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A few days ago I had written about how to make your content marketing more effective in 2015. As I had mentioned, the basic fundamentals remain the same, it’s just that every year comes with its own latest trends, techniques and opportunities that were not available in the previous year. A trait of a successful marketer is that he or she is able to leverage the available resources.

Nonetheless, sometimes we don’t even follow the fundamentals, whether they are pertaining to content marketing, or other aspects of business and personal life. Just as we make resolutions for the New Year, even for our content marketing goals, we can make some resolutions, some decisions that were not maybe followed the previous years but we want to make sure that they are followed in the New Year.

The most neglected activity is auditing the existing content. While writing this I assume that you already have lots of content on your website but you were creating it in a phase when you didn’t mind much whether your content was optimised or not, whether it was useful or not, whether it was relevant or not. You were simply creating it to improve your search engine rankings. You could have hired very cheap content writers from poorer countries. You paid least regard to its quality.

If this is something that you have been following until 2014, and perhaps in 2015 you can decide to audit your existing content.

If you have got lots of webpages and blog posts, running into hundreds, then it will be better to dump all the URLs in a spreadsheet. Then start going through each and every URL and see what improvements you can make.

Last year I did the same with my own website (I hadn’t written cheap content, but it needed some improvements). If you are managing your website with WordPress, there is a plug-in that lists all the blog posts and webpages that you have created so far in a simple HTML page. You can copy/paste this list into a spreadsheet. Even if you are not maintaining your website using WordPress, on the Internet you can easily find perl or PHP scripts that will go through your directories and give you a list of all the URLs that you have created so far.

From 2015 onwards, when it comes to creating or updating content for content marketing, focus on relevancy rather than search engine rankings

Search engine optimization is important – everybody needs better search engine rankings – but it shouldn’t be done at the cost of quality and conversion. When you needlessly use keywords to attract traffic from search engines you end up creating lousy, nonsensical content. If such is the content you have been publishing up till now, this is a good time to make amends and audit your existing content.

What all should you take care of while auditing your existing content to make it more in sync with 2015?

  • Make your page titles and headlines more compelling and meaningful
  • Introduce focus – focus on one topic or one subject per webpage or blog post
  • Correct spelling and grammatical mistakes wherever you find them
  • Remove superfluous language and replace it with conversational language
  • In every blog post or webpage try to solve people’s problems rather than promoting your product or service
  • Introduce call-to-action phrases and links without being intrusive
  • If you have used images without alt tags now it would be good time to insert them
  • Create shorter sentences out of longer sentences
  • Create shorter paragraphs out of longer paragraphs
  • Organize content under headlines, sub-headlines and bullets
  • Use keywords and key phrases contextually rather than force-writing

Of course content marketing doesn’t mean just editing existing content and adding new content. A major part of it involves marketing that content, distributing it, making sure that it reaches the right audience. If you have been neglecting this aspect of your content marketing, then focus on this. There is no use creating new content if you haven’t established a mechanism to distribute it.

There are 4 ways you can distribute your content in 2015:

  1. Improve your search engine rankings and get traffic from search engines
  2. Create a vibrant presence on social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn (just to name a few) and broadcast your content using these channels
  3. Build your mailing list if you haven’t already built one. Having your own mailing list is a great way to broadcast your content.
  4. Focus on different formats of content apart from textual content, such as videos, images, Slideshare, ebooks and downloadable reports

If the thought of making your content marketing better in 2015 than what it was in 2014 a bit overwhelming, just focus on one aspect. Sometimes the beginning is difficult and once you start doing something, things start falling at their places on their own.

And of course, working with a professional content writing and content marketing service can always help.

The importance of knowing your content marketing KPI

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Knowing your content marketing KPIs

Content marketing is more effective if you know your KPIs – key performance indicators. What exactly do you want your content marketing to achieve for your business?

  • Engage your visitors
  • Improve your search engine rankings
  • Increase your revenue (this is something broad, actually)
  • Get more visitors from social networking and social media websites
  • Improve your conversion rate

These are the basic KPIs that you need to keep in perspective while working on your content marketing strategy. This way you know exactly what you are trying to achieve. Remember that the narrower your KPIs are, the better you will perform. This will also help you optimize your resources.

Why is it important to know your content marketing KPIs?

The problem with content marketing is most of the people don’t know exactly what they are trying to achieve. They know that it works. They know that it is working for other businesses. But all they know is, people are publishing one blog post after another, one article after another, and taking social media and social networking websites by storm with their “killer” content. Somehow they cannot figure out how to add method in the content marketing madness. Exactly what is happening? What sort of content gets you what? How does it actually get you more business?

As I mentioned in the above bullet, having a KPI like “Increase your revenue” is quite broad because by the end of the day, even if you have performed 1000 activities, you want to increase your revenue. Every for-profit business wants to get more revenue. This is an existential truth nobody can escape. So you can take “Increase your revenue” out of the bulleted list.

When you have figured out the KPIs of content marketing in your case, you don’t worry about other aspects of your business.

Suppose the most important KPI for you is, getting more newsletter subscribers. It doesn’t matter how your search engine rankings are. It doesn’t matter the level of engagement you can manifest on social media and social networking websites. Heck, it doesn’t even matter what sort of conversion rate your website enjoys. What matters is, if you were getting 5 newsletter subscribers per month previously, after you have set your content marketing ball rolling, and after it has been awhile since you set your content marketing ball rolling (for, it needs some time to show results) you should be getting 50 newsletter subscribers or 500 newsletter subscribers every month. If you set this as your KPI – getting more newsletter subscribers – then your content marketing is working for you. Once you have figured out that your content marketing is working for this particular KPI, if you want, you can put in more resources to get even better results. This is why it’s important to know the KPIs of your content marketing.

Some good examples of content marketing KPIs that you can set for your own business

  • People begin spending more time on your pages and blog posts: It means they’re finding what they’re looking for. It also means that they’re not being distracted by other things while they’re visiting your website. The more they stay on your website, the better will be the prospects of them turning into your customers and clients. If this is the KPI you have set for your content marketing, it can be good indicator of its success.
  • You’re getting more unique visitors to your website: Of course repeat visitors are good, but they will become repeat visitors if they come to your website for the first time, right? So the more unique visitors you have, the more repeat visitors you will get and repeat visitors are the ones who normally do business with you, the most. If you’re getting more unique visitors and if this is a KPI that you have set for your content marketing, you’re going in the right direction.
  • More people download your e-book, case study or report: Suppose the growth of your business depends on the number of people downloading your e-book, your case study or the report that you have prepared so that you are known as an expert in your field. If you have set this as your KPI, you will be publishing content accordingly.
  • You are getting more subscribers for your newsletter: Building your mailing list is a timeless piece of wisdom. The more people hear from you (without feeling annoyed) the more eager they will be to do business with you. This is why many businesses solely focus on building their mailing list and getting more subscribers for their newsletters. This sort of content marketing KPI would be perfect for those who are looking for long-term business development goals. They want to establish relationships and communication channels so that eventually these relationships and channels metamorphose into business partnerships.
  • You are getting more inbound links: There was a time when inbound links were extremely important for your search engine rankings. Although this no longer is the case, why solely depend on search engine traffic if you can get traffic from other websites? In fact there are many businesses that completely ignore search engines – something that I don’t advise – and completely focus on getting inbound links from high-traffic websites. Having this as your content marketing KPI will keep you focused on publishing highly useful and high-quality content so that people voluntarily link to it from their own websites and blogs.
  • Your search engine rankings are improving: Which business doesn’t want better search engine rankings? By the way having better search engine rankings as your primary content marketing KPI doesn’t always help because eventually it is the conversion rate on your website that matters. So, yes, aim at improving your search engine rankings but not at the cost of quality, meaningful content.
  • More people are engaging with you on social media and social networking websites: 82% people in the USA are engaging with their preferred brands on websites like Facebook and Twitter. I’m getting decent amount of work from LinkedIn. Some businesses are targeting Google+. No matter what social media or social networking channel you plan to target, eventually it is engagement that matters. If you’re simply posting content to fill your profile with information, it doesn’t help your business. People need to regularly interact with you, and this is a worth pursuing content marketing KPI.

Again, why haven’t I included things like “Increased revenue”, “more leads”, “more sales” and such terms as your KPIs? Because, no matter how important they are – in fact, the most important for any business – they are a by-product of the KPI attributes mentioned above. If your content marketing takes care of those KPI attributes, you naturally begin to get more revenue, more leads and more sales.

The importance of maintaining a content marketing calendar

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Content Marketing Calendar

In my previous blog post titled How to Add Method to The Content Marketing Madness I briefly touched upon the point of maintaining a content marketing calendar so that you always know what you’re doing, how you are doing it and at what time you are doing it. Most people call it “Content Marketing Editorial Calendar” but here I’m not just talking about writing content and hence, organising topics and assigning them to various days; I’m talking about scheduling everything that you need to do in order to implement a result-oriented content marketing strategy.

Content marketing calendar helps you define a vision

The biggest problem with content marketing is when the enthusiasm wears off people are often at a loss, especially when you are a small business. What to do? And even if we do it, is it worth it? Aren’t we wasting time needlessly publishing blog posts that nobody reads? Why post links to various social networking websites?

You don’t come across such doubts when you are just launching your content marketing campaign because then you’re full of enthusiasm and confidence. Then, after maybe a month or so, you don’t experience much improvement. The search engine traffic doesn’t improve. You don’t see many people coming to your website. Your sales haven’t increased. You aren’t getting more leads. Your developing doubts – are you making a big mistake investing so much in content marketing?

But you know content marketing works. It is working for other businesses. Then why isn’t it working for you?

It is working for other businesses because they have already gone through the phase that you are going through right now and passed through it unscathed. They had prepared. They had a calendar and they simply stuck to it.

Once you have developed a content marketing calendar and written down the sort of effort that would be required, the sort of budget that will need to be allocated, and a long list of pros and cons that may come your way after a few weeks or a few months, you are already prepared for the phase of discouragement. Even if you are not experienced enough to anticipate lean periods, at least you know what you’re going to do for the next 2 months – yes, don’t create a content marketing calendar just for a few weeks. At least focus on the next 2 months.

A content marketing calendar will also help you formulate a strategy according to the resources you have or you may have in the coming days so that you don’t stretch yourself or go over budget. For instance, if you know that in order to publish new content for the next 2 months you will be requiring at least $ 3000, you must have that much money with you.

Doesn’t it all sound like a “plan” rather than a “calendar”? Yes, it does sound like a plan, but with dates allocated. I’m calling it a calendar because then you know that if today is January 20, 2015, exactly what blog post you will be publishing on February 15, 2015, what exact steps you will be taking to promote either your latest content or some existing piece of content and how you will handle or incorporate some sudden developments – having to write a blog post on a sudden political development or a natural catastrophe or scientific breakthrough.

Do you need a dedicated calendar application to maintain a content marketing calendar? Besides, how do you create such a calendar?

Rather than a calendar application I would recommend a spreadsheet application. You can use Google Docs (because then the documents can be accessed remotely by everybody) or you can use Microsoft Excel.

Open a new spreadsheet and rename the first worksheet as something like “Publishing Calendar”. You can insert another worksheet and rename it as “Marketing Calendar”. Why have separate worksheets? It is easier to maintain different activities.

Anyway, go back to the “Publishing Calendar” and in the top row, create the following columns:

  • ID: A unique ID can be assigned to every piece of content so that you can enter related information in different worksheets.
  • Date: On which date that particular piece of content will be published?
  • Format: What sort of content are you going to create? Blog post? Webpage? Video? Info graphic? PDF? Slide? Stop Motion Animation?
  • New or Existing: Are you revising/streamlining existing content for creating new content from scratch?
  • Topic or Headline: The topic on which the webpage or the blog post will be created.
  • Where: Whether you’ll be publishing the piece of content on your own website or blog or somewhere else.
  • Author: Who will be creating/writing that particular piece of content?
  • Responsible: If yours is a bigger organisation and you have a dedicated content marketing team, exactly who will be responsible for the timely publication of that particular piece of content?
  • Current Status: What is the current status of that content? Is it being written? Is it being edited and proofread? Is it being reviewed?
  • Visuals: What sort of images or videos will be used with this content?
  • Topic Categories: Under what categories this content will be published?
  • Keywords and meta data: What keywords should be targeted while creating this piece of content?
  • Call to action: Every piece of content must have a call to action. What is going to be for this piece of content?
  • Related URLs: Is related content already existing? Are there some existing URLs you would like to be linked to from this piece of content?

After you have created these columns you can start filling in the details and building your publishing calendar.

Simultaneous you can also move onto the marketing calendar and create the following columns:

  • Content ID: This unique ID was created in the “Content Publishing” worksheet.
  • Date: The date on which this particular marketing activity will be carried out.
  • Channels: What channels you are going to use to promote your content – Facebook, other websites, email broadcast, Twitter, LinkedIn, et cetera.
  • Format Conversion: Can this content be converted to another format? For example, can you create a slideshow or video presentation with the help of this content and then submit it to the appropriate social media website?

Actually, this can go on and on and it depends on how comprehensive your content marketing is going to be. Somewhere you can also include analytics and the changes carried out due to the data derived from those analytic tools.

 

How to add method to the content marketing madness

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Adding method to content writing madness

There is so much talk about content marketing on the Internet that it has become a panacea for all Internet marketing and search engine optimization problems. Interestingly, the hype is not misplaced. Content marketing is actually powerful. Still, it works for a selected few. Why?

People often forget that you need to have a marketing bent of mind in order to be a successful marketer. What makes you a successful marketer?

  1. You understand the inherent strength of the product or service
  2. You understand the inherent desires and problems of your target audience
  3. You create a compelling message (or get it created by someone who can) that can convince people that the product or service you are trying to market can actually solve their problems
  4. Use the most appropriate channels to spread your message
  5. Analyze people’s reactions
  6. Tweak the message and reconsider the broadcasting channels based on the conclusions you draw out of the analysis
  7. Repeat steps 3-6 until you feel that you have optimized your marketing strategy

Sounds simple, right? Businesses are ready to pay millions of dollars to individuals who can carry out these activities. So no, it is not as simple as it sounds.

What I’m getting at?

What does it have to do with adding method to the content marketing madness?

The problem with content marketing is everybody who can write and publish blog posts and social media updates (mostly on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) starts calling himself or herself a “content marketer”. An ability to write content is a different thing and marketing content is a totally different thing. Since many people think that, since they can write, they can also market, they start providing content marketing services, and this is where madness manifests. There are hundreds of thousands of content marketing companies on the Internet adding little value.

I have been providing content writing services for almost a decade now and even till now I don’t market my services as content marketing services although I offer it truncated version of these services because of the experience that I have gained over the years.

Anyway, how do you add method to the content marketing madness, within your organization, and while you’re hiring someone who seems to know his or her job? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

  • Find out what sort of content your target market prefers – text, videos, images, slideshows, ebooks, case studies, PDFs, social media updates or a mix of different formats
  • Carry out an audit of your existing content – You must have some content on your website, right?
    • How does it sound?
    • Is it well-written?
    • Does it address the issues it was meant to address?
    • Does it solve its purpose?
    • Can you remove some pages?
    • Can you alter them?
    • What about the titles? Are they appropriate?
    • Is your content full of distractions?
    • Can lengthy paragraphs be rearranged in bulleted points?
    • Do you have lots of junk content that is harming your search engine rankings?
    • Have you been creating content simply to improve your search engine rankings (nothing wrong in that unless you are preparing nonsensical content)?
    • Do you feel that there are some pages or some topics that are missing on your website?
  • This may take a few weeks or a few months to sort out so don’t hurry and certainly don’t be impatient. Content marketing is not something that you can do like a small project. It’s an ongoing process and no matter how much hurry you are in, if it is going to perform, it is going to take its own good time.
  • Do you send email updates? Have you been building a mailing list? Do you have a subscription form on your website where people can subscribe to your regular updates?
  • If not, start building your mailing list NOW.
  • Do you have a blog? Can people in your organization create content for your blog? Do you have a budget to hire a professional content writer? Setup a blog and then start adding valuable high-quality content to it.
  • Start building your social media presence. You can curate content from other websites and routinely post under your profiles so that people gradually begin to follow you for your particular topic. This will help you when you start promoting your own content.
  • Start diversifying in terms of formatting. I provide content writing services but it doesn’t mean I advise my clients to only have written content. It depends on your audience. As I have already mentioned above, explore different channels and use the ones that give you maximum output and exposure.
  • Use tools like Google Analytics to study what sort of content you create gets maximum attention on the Internet. Create more of that content without losing your core focus.
  • Setup a content marketing calendar so that content writing, publishing, production and dissemination happens on an ongoing basis.

This is how you add method to the content marketing madness. You take care of all the aspects of content marketing and not just routinely publishing a blog or posting “SEO articles” on various websites.

How to make your content marketing more effective in 2015

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Content Marketing in 2015

By specifically saying 2015 I don’t mean there is something cosmically special about the year, what I mean is which currently available opportunities you can use to make your content marketing more effective than it was the previous year, that is, in 2014.

We are constantly evolving and when we are continuously striving at something, we hope to evolve, naturally. So if we have been doing something average the better the previous year, we try to make it better this year and then hope to improve more the next year. Of course there can be ups and downs and this is a civilizational reality, but our constant effort is to keep moving upwards.

So how can you make content marketing more effective this year? Here are a few things you can do – some of the actions you carry out today are as effective today as they were yesterday and as they are going to be tomorrow or day after tomorrow, and some are the outcome of the technologies and trends available this year.

Focus on your audience rather than search engines

Quality and readability of your content matter the most and then the rest follow. Effective content marketing means drawing the right people to your website and then making sure that they do business with you or at least are open to frequent communication (that is, you are able to generate leads). This is possible only when your content serves well. It delivers what it promises. People come to your website with an expectation (if they aren’t just stumbling upon it by mistake) and if that expectation is not met they feel disappointed and soon forget about you. On the other hand if they find what they had expected, they will be thrilled, they will remember you, they will do business with you and they will also recommend you. Don’t worry too much about stuffing keywords and creating expressions simply to incorporate your keywords. Use natural language and provide value.

Create valuable content on an ongoing basis

There is no dearth of valuable content on the Internet despite all the noise constantly being created. Some people are pretty good out there and you need to compete with them whether you like it or not. Quality is given and you aren’t even in the game if you cannot publish quality content. The challenge creating quality content on an ongoing basis. Here is why you constantly need to create valuable and quality content:

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

Broadcast your content using appropriate channels

Every publisher on the Internet is a potential broadcaster – you don’t have to be a newspaper or TV channel or a magazine to broadcast your content. When you post your links on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn you are broadcasting your content. When you are (or someone else) pins your images on Pinterest, your content is being broadcast.

Content marketing doesn’t just involve publishing articles and blog posts on your own website or blog. You need to broadcast your content. You need to spread it around. How do you do that?

You can use the latest social media and social networking websites (I’m not saying just Facebook and Twitter because well, every year you have something new). People will follow you for the sort of content you post so you can easily build an audience. If I’m interested in content marketers and if you constantly post links on content marketing, and if those links are valuable, I will certainly follow you. You can use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer app to broadcast and schedule your content in various social networking websites. There is so much content on the Internet that it doesn’t make sense to simply publish it and leave it like that. You need to make sure that the right audience can access your content.

Don’t ignore SEO

The good old SEO isn’t going anywhere as long as there are search engines. The way they index and rank your content may differ from year to year, and sometimes even month-to-month, it matters how the gauge your content and then rank it accordingly. The basic tenets of SEO remain the same:

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

Maintain a mailing list

This maintaining mailing seems like an advice from the early 2000’s but email still rules the roost contrary to all the negative predictions. No matter how widespread social media and social networking become, when it comes to actually doing some serious work, it’s still the email people depend on. It’s the best way to reach your target audience on an ongoing basis without annoying them. Use double opt in – let people confirm that they have actually allowed you to send them email messages.

Just as in any other case, it’s on the basis of the quality of your content that your mailing list is going to succeed. Remember that the benefits of building a maintaining list cannot be reaped in a short span of time – in fact, content marketing itself takes its own good time to give you some good results and prove its effectiveness. Nonetheless, it is one of the most effective ways of marketing your products and services on the Internet and also, the cheapest.

Be awesome at your work

Now, what can beat this? Don’t let them walk all over you, but make your customers and clients as happy as possible. Provide them the best product and the best service and the best after sales support and they will not only become your customers and clients for life, they will also get you new customers and clients. Be awesome and write about your awesomeness on a daily basis. Share it with the world. Boast about it.