Tag Archives: Content Marketing

Is the rise of content marketing good for your business?

There is a sharp rise in the importance of content marketing and more and more business organizations are diverting their funds from conventional marketing to content marketing. Is it good for your business? Does it make things more difficult or easier?

It depends on how you look at it. As a small and as a mid-sized business it is perhaps one of the greatest marketing opportunities you have come across and in such a manner that you can compete with the big boys without spending big money.

Content marketing is all about quality and timeliness. Sure, a business with lots of money can generate tons of content in no time and consequently dominate traffic-generating sources like search engines, blogs and social networking websites, how much of that traffic actually converts is another matter. And this is where you can compete.

Of course realistically you will mostly be competing with businesses that lie within your sphere of influence but even that can be a big deciding factor. Then you can gradually move towards bigger, something like, Fortune 500 companies.

The moot point is, when it comes to content marketing, it’s very easy to initiate a strategy and then sustain it over a long period of time. All it takes is perseverance, a little focus, and an understanding of your market. Once you have decided that you are going to focus on content marketing rather than conventional marketing sources, you have to identify which channels you are going to focus upon. Initially, my personal recommendation would be the following:

Business blogging
Guest blogging
Information articles under your own domain
Information articles and opinion pieces on other publications
Twitter, Google plus and Facebook

These are very easy things to achieve. You can easily set up a blog under your existing domain name and start publishing informative blog posts. You can also approach other blogs who would be interested in posting your opinions and insights.

Aside from regular blog posts, you should also plug content holes within your existing website. Are all the pages your website needs there? Have you described all your services? Have you published testimonials from your customers and clients? Have you listed all the benefits of your products and services? What about your FAQs section? Is it up to date? Carry out a detailed analysis of your existing business content and see where you can update and add.

There are many publications that would be interested in publishing your articles, especially if you can give some expert advice people can use. This is a great way of expanding your brand presence on the Internet.

Twitter, Google plus and Facebook, of course you might already be using. It is a good idea to keep separate accounts for your personal postings and business postings. This way your core message is not diluted. Remember that search engines have started displaying social networking content among normal search results, so you wouldn’t like to appear for unnecessary material.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, the rise of content marketing is definitely good for your business. It helps you reduce advertising and marketing costs. It improves your search engine rankings. It brings you more visibility. It helps you engage your audience. Above all, it significantly improves your conversion rate.

How to keep on creating fresh content for your content marketing strategy

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One of the greatest hurdles faced by content marketing is creating fresh, engaging content regularly. You need more content to cover possibly every topic under your niche and in order to draw attention to that content from people as well as search engines it needs to be highly relevant, useful and well structured.

When you initiate your content marketing strategy as a serious business it is given that you’re going to pursue quality no matter what. It’s regularity you need to worry about. Some businesses publish new content every day, some prefer it twice or thrice a week, some make it a weekly affair and some even do it once or twice a month. The frequency primarily depends on where you are publishing your content. You might be publishing it under your regular business website, on your blog, on other blogs (guest blogging, for instance), news and analysis websites (Washington Post, Huffington Post, Techcrunch, etc.) or social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Listed below are a few ways you can get a ton of quality content on an ongoing basis.

Maintain an editorial calendar

An editorial calendar keeps you focused and it also helps you know which topics you have already covered, which topics you need to improve upon and where you have to publish more.

As already mentioned a well-managed content marketing strategy requires you to publish content on varied platforms. Just focusing on one publishing platform might not be a good approach. For instance, if you are just publishing high-quality content under your own website it may not get the kind of attention it deserves. You need to spread your content so that it also becomes visible at other places. It means you have to generate content for other blogs (it is called guest blogging), niche publications, article directories, wikis and social networking websites.

Without an editorial calendar keeping track of all these platforms can prove to be a gargantuan task and unless you have a team you won’t be able to focus on all of them on a daily basis. On Facebook and Twitter you will need to be pretty regular as visibility matters a lot there. You can allocate certain days to your own blog and others for external publications. Accordingly you can create topics for your own blog as well as other blogs. You can use an Excel sheet to create your editorial calendar. Some also prefer Google calendar.

Use your existing content to create new content

You can get lots of interesting ideas from your existing content. For instance, I can write a completely new blog post (300-500 words or more) on this very topic – How to create new content from your existing content.

Whenever you cover a topic there are many subtopics that you simply touch upon. They may need further elaboration but it might not be within the scope of the current topic. There might be some bullet points that need blog posts and articles exclusively for themselves. This is also an added advantage. Once you have created content around those words, you can hyperlink to this newly created content from existing articles and blog posts and improve your SEO.

Update and improve your existing content

There is always some scope for improving your existing content and once you have updated it, it is as good as new. Suppose you wrote a blog post in the times of MySpace that might not be relevant today. Either you can mention this in the blog post or make necessary changes.

Maintain an ideas file

Ideas are hard to come by especially when you are sitting and thinking about them. They are random dust motes that need to be captured as soon as they manifest. You can maintain an ideas file to do this. As soon as you get an idea for a new blog post or a new update on Twitter and Facebook, quickly jot it down in your ideas file.

My personal favorite for this is Google Docs because you can access them from any device. This way you don’t necessarily have to be in front of your computer or laptop in case a new idea strikes you. You can use your mobile phone or your tablet to save the idea.

If writing seems to be a problem, you can record your ideas using audio, video and photographs.

Make regular content publishing a part of your thinking process

The more you think the more ideas you get. It’s like building a particular muscle in your body. If you keep using your arms, lifting weights with them, they grow stronger and stronger. In the same manner, if you keep on thinking about different writing topics for your content marketing you will keep on getting new ideas.

Track conversations on Facebook and Twitter

Most of the time it is just gibberish on Facebook and Twitter so you might have to use some tools to track relevant conversations. You can use hash tags; for instance if you want to track conversations on content marketing you may try following the hash tag #contentmarketing. Similarly you can join dedicated pages on Facebook. Pay close attention to the sort of questions people ask and out of those questions try to make new articles and blog posts.

Look for questions and issues in various question/answer forums and websites

Have you ever seen the “Answers” tab in LinkedIn? Similarly have you been following questions on Quora? Try to find out what sort of questions people are asking in your particular niche and then create content around those questions.

Engage your audience

You will be able to engage your audience through your blog as well as social networking profiles. Initially it may take some time but if you post relevant content for a sustained period gradually you will build an audience you will be able to engage with. Ask them questions. Request them to let you know what they would like to read on your blog and what sort of issues they would like you to address.

Follow other blogs and websites

This is an oft-repeated advice. You can get lots of content writing and content publishing ideas from other blogs and websites. Just as you can use your own pre-existing content to create new writing ideas, you can also get ideas from others’ writings.

As already mentioned above, quality as well as persistence is required for a successful content marketing strategy and generating new content writing ideas is as important as having a content strategy in place.

What is guest blogging?

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Guest blogging is one of the best ways of making your content available to a wider audience, getting high-value link-backs for your website and blog, and consequently, increase your search engine rankings. Many people make it an integral part of their overall content marketing and SEO strategy.

There are millions of blogs out there on various themes and niches. If you are a web design company you will be focusing on web design blogs or at least blogs publishing content on related topics. If you’re a fashion designer then you will be looking for a blog talking about fashion or clothes, or accessories.

Guest blogging is writing blog posts for one of these blogs. Some of the blogs are very popular. For instance, Digital Photography School is one of the best-known blogs on photography and there are many professional as well as amateur photographers who aspire to write for this blog.

When your posts are published on one of these well-known and high-traffic blogs, via the resource box (that briefly talks about the author; what’s her name, what she does, link to her website or blog and probably her twitter handle) they also publish your profile. Through this profile people can come to your website if they want to. Guest blogging in such way helps you in following ways:

It highlights your content and your abilities in front of a wider audience. Suppose on your own blog you just get 100-300 visitors every day. But on a famous blog your blog post will be read by 10,000-50,000 (even more) readers in a single day.
It boosts your search engine rankings. Search engine algorithms, before ranking your website need to know how many genuine blogs and websites are linking back to you. If they link to you it means your website has valuable content and valuable content is what the search engines are looking for. It’s kind of a validation when people link back to you. Since they won’t just link to you they need a reason. One reason might be finding a valuable blog post or an article on your website and then linking to it from within one of their own blog posts or articles. The other reason is, when they publish your article they link back to you through the resource box.
It sends direct traffic. Since your link is published along with the guest blog post many people will be clicking the link to check out your website.
It sends indirect traffic. If your guest post becomes popular other bloggers and web masters may link to it from their own blog posts and this will send you further traffic.

So this is how guest blogging benefits you. Famous blogger Leo Babauta is known to have garnered 15,000 RSS subscribers for his blog in a single month by publishing his content as a guest blogger on scores of high traffic websites and blogs.

Content marketing is basically P2P

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You always write content for people. The basic strength of your content lies in its ability to engage people and fruitful engagement can only manifest if you create and market your content keeping intended people in mind.

I have lost track of the link, I came across a very relevant thought regarding content marketing: it says that content marketing is neither B2B nor B2C, it’s P2P. This makes perfect sense. After all, you are always writing for people. There might be different writing styles and you might be using different jargon to target different audience, by the end of the day it’s the people who are going to consume and understand your content, and share it among their friends, colleagues, relatives and business partners.

So what makes your content people-centric?

It should be conversational, first of all. By conversational I don’t mean use that notorious SMS or Twitter language. Just use smaller, easy to use language your target audience can understand. I’m not averse to using technical words wherever necessary because this makes people relate to what you are conveying. For example, if I’m talking about a mobile device people would like to know various specs in an appropriate language (although personally I prefer focusing on functionality rather than specifications).

In terms of business content writing, make it useful and relevant. When people read your content they should learn something. If you are creating content for your own business website, use a particular profile while writing your content, and talk to that profile. This is also called a “persona”. Don’t try to please everybody because then you only end up with hodgepodge.

It is possible to create interesting, engaging business content. Write in first person wherever possible, even when you are writing on behalf of an organisation or company. Use some passion. If you are not interested in what you are writing, it is easily conveyed through, no matter what an excellent writer you are. Try to feel what you are writing.

Well, I never intended to write this blog post on the art of content writing, it’s just that I was vocally thinking about creating a P2P content marketing strategy and how every strategy revolves around this concept.

Defining Content Marketing

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Joe Pulizzi on his Junta42 blog has put up some great definitions – gathered from various content marketing experts – of content marketing.

My favourite there is this one:

Traditional marketing and advertising tells the world that you are a rockstar. Content marketing shows the world that you are one. — Robert Rose

Don’t take “rockstar” literally; what he means is, instead of harping on about what great stuff you’re selling and what miraculous product you have got, content marketing helps your prospective customers and clients find that out on their own.

So how do I explain content marketing to my clients?

I don’t have a definition, but I do tell them that their content creates a ripe ground for conversations and engagement. It’s easier to buy from you if I know you, but how do I know you unless you are close to me or I am mad about you, or if you’re a totally trusted and respected public figure? I begin to know you if you have regular conversations with me.

By “conversations” I don’t mean having useless talk – nobody has time for that. People remember you and visit your website multiple times if you offer them something valuable. Since you cannot offer them free services or free products all the time (you offer them once, so they will come to your website once, or maybe a couple of times) the best option for you would be offering them valuable information. This information exists in the form of content.

Content marketing primary constitutes of three activities, or rather four:

Figure out what your target audience is looking for in terms of content
Mostly which medium it uses (prefers to use) to access that content
Produce that content and make it available through their preferred medium
Keep doing that on an ongoing basis

Many people find the fourth point troublesome, but when it comes to marketing your products and services on the Internet, this is the most crucial point. Content abounds on the Internet. Millions of pages and blog posts (containing text, video, images and audio) are being published daily and within seconds your content can be buried under the new content.

So what’s the use of creating new content, you may ask, if it is going to be buried instantly?

This is where quality matters. Since most of the content has no value, valuable content gets highlighted not just on search engines, but also on various other websites and forums.

But then again, publishing one or a couple of valuable pieces of content doesn’t give you sustainable engagement. Engagement happens when you provide valuable content on an ongoing basis. It doesn’t have to be everyday, but it definitely has to be consistently regular, whether you publish new content every day, once a week, or once a month. Quality, coupled with regularity, creates the most effective content marketing platform.