Tag Archives: Content Marketing

Should you create content or curate content

The fundamental strength of your online marketing and promotion heavily relies upon the quality of your content, whether it is on your blog, your website or your social media profile. Generating quality content can be a bit difficult if you don’t have sufficient budget and resources. Mindlessly publishing at low cost doesn’t do any good. It may, by hook or by crook, increase your search engine rankings for particular keywords and expressions, beyond that nothing much can be achieved, because eventually it is the quality that converts visitors into paying customers and clients.

Quality content can be generated using two methods

Creating new
Curating existing from other sources

The basic idea is providing quality information to your visitors. When they come to your website they must go back enriched and informed. So before deciding whether you want to create or curate you need to decide

Why you need quality content on your website?

The content on your website solves the following purposes

Informs and educates your visitors
Helps them make better purchasing decisions
Conveys to your visitors that you have authority over your subject
Encourages your visitors to come back to your website for updates and more information
Engages your visitors and creates opportunities for interactive experiences
Increases your search engine rankings
Helps you maintain a vibrant presence over your social media and social networking profiles
Encourages other website and blog publishers to link to your website resulting in more diverse traffic
Helps your present and prospective customers and clients look beyond the corporate wall and experience the human side of your business

All these objectives can be achieved either by creating new or curating existing content.

Why create new content?

For the obvious reason that if everybody started curating we won’t have anything original to link to. Other than this, creating your own content generates more trust and a sense of authority. It gives you an opportunity to share your knowledge. It also makes your website a unique source of valuable information. It increases the intellectual value of your online presence. If you just curate you are simply referring to external sources with your own comments in the and perhaps. You are always sending traffic to other websites and there are very few websites that send traffic to your website.

Why curate existing content?

Content curated from external sources introduces variety and some different perspective. When you need to provide value to your visitors you shouldn’t discriminate against other publishers. Since your primary concern is providing good information, and if that information already exists and it exists in a better manner than what you can produce, then there is no harm in linking to it with your own opinion. Content creation also helps you when you want to present in-depth information from different sources. For instance, on a single page you want to compile the best content writing tutorials from different websites. Along with your own opinion, you can also introduce opinions from other content writers of repute.

Creating the perfect balance between original and curated content

So you can create a good balance between original and curated content. I would prefer a ratio of 60:40 – 60% original and 40% curated.

Of course you can use any ratio and even in the reverse order (40:60) – it depends on your audience, the familiarity that you enjoy with your audience, and your true intentions. If you curate simply to increase your search engine rankings, people can easily see through it. But if you really want to provide valuable, high-quality content without bothering whether that content comes from your own website or from other websites (just make sure you are not plagiarising and simply linking with your own comments), this can be a good strategy.

Why content marketing is important for your business

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Content marketing is a misunderstood terminology. It has got nothing to do with conventional marketing where you keep on pushing your messages and then wait for response.

There is often some confusion regarding why you need content regularly and why it needs to be marketed through proper channels. Unlike your brick and mortar business, the game is totally different on the web. You cannot compete on the Internet on the strength of your money, market reach and off-line reputation. You need to have a presence, and you need to have a convincing presence, and only high-quality content gives you that presence.

On your website or your blog, you cannot directly communicate with your visitors unless you are constantly online and are using a webcam or a chat interface to talk to individual visitors (this is feasible, but only up to a certain point). Your web pages, and what they contain, become your representatives, your voice on your online presence. So your content helps you communicate.

But this is not the only reason you require ongoing content and subsequent content marketing. You also require content to

Strengthen and establish your brand
Generate traffic from social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook
Improve your search engine rankings
Establish yourself as an authority
Keep your visitors/customers/clients informed
Provide answers to the most common questions regarding your business
Keep on communicating with your prospective and present customers and clients so that they remember you when they need the product or the service you provide
Give your visitors a reason to visit your website or blog regularly

Why content marketing

After you start publishing on your website, people need to know about it. Since there are zillions of pages and blog posts on the Internet it is practically impossible to publish 50-60 odd web pages or blog posts and then expect the traffic to pour down from all over the Internet. Some people may have 500-600 web pages or blog posts, and some may even have thousands of them. So in terms of quantity and quality, you are in a constant competition on the Internet, and the good thing is you need to compete constantly. Why I say this is a good thing is because then everybody gets a chance to compete on the strength of his or her ability to produce and market high-quality content. This way, even while working from your basement, in your undergarments, you can compete with as big a company as Forbes by producing better content and marketing it properly.

In order to compete, along with publishing relevant information you also need to market it. You need to highlight it and promote it where people can see it. Here are a few things you can do in the effort of content marketing without spending much money:

Search engine optimize your content: Although this comes under search marketing, basically it is content marketing. With the help of your content you are trying to promote your business on various search engines. If you are able to optimize your content, it is going to rank well on major and minor search engines and this can bring you tons of traffic. Choose the right keywords, pack your articles and blog posts with as much information as possible, and make them as helpful as possible.
Write for other websites and blog posts: You can publish articles on article directories (although they are losing their charm over search engine rankings because there are 100s of such article directories). A better thing to do is write blog posts as guest blogger for reputed blogs. This might not be easy so first you will have to interact on the blogs and let the blog publishers become familiar with you. Many start-up companies use this content marketing tactic with great success by publishing blog posts on tech blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch.
Maintain an active social media presence: This may include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or YouTube. These days your website may get traffic from multiple sources and you need to maintain a vibrant presence over these places. Regularly interact with your friends and followers on social networking websites and generate content for social media websites like YouTube and Tumblr. Lots of content is shared and passed around using these platforms and you never know which of your links might go viral.

These are but a few ways you can carry out your content marketing effort. As mentioned above, content marketing is important for your business because first of all content is important for your business, and second, you need to make as many people aware of the existence of your content as possible.

Difference between content writing and content curation

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There are basically 2 ways you can generate quality content for your website or blog:

Content writing/generating fresh content
Curating quality content from other reliable sources

The benefits of creating new content

By constantly creating new content and publishing it on your website or blog you establish your authority on the subject. You get to share your own knowledge, your own experience and your own expertise. Writing and publishing your own content is a very good way of building online intellectual wealth that not only helps your visitors but also helps you.

It also makes you an independent knowledge resource. When you’re generating your own content you don’t need to depend on external links, and to be frank, external links cannot always be relied upon. I remember when there was a big earthquake in Japan a very prominent website published an info-graphic comprehensively explaining how to survive an earthquake. I had linked to that info-graphic from one of my blog posts. Recently when there was a big earthquake in north-eastern India I wanted to share the same link. But when I visited it, it directed me to another, irrelevant (full of affiliate links) URL. The original info-graphic has been removed. Had I had the same info-graphic on my own website at least it would have been still there.

Obviously, the search engines are constantly looking for original content to index and rank and the more original content you publish the more advantage you get in this arena.

Original content writing is also a showcase of your communication skill. You are not simply providing information to your visitors just to gain traffic; you are actually putting in effort to create quality content.

The benefits of content curation or curating quality content

The biggest benefit of content curation is you can share high-quality content with your visitors without having to create it. Normally what people do is, create a quick synopsis of the original link, publish it as a paragraph and in the end append the original link.

Does it help your search engine rankings? Surely it does, provided you stick to the core theme. Suppose I decide to create a blog post solely having quality links on content writing. If there are 10 links in my blog post it means I’m going to write 10-12 paragraphs on the topic of content writing in order to briefly explain every link. So targeted content plus high-quality outgoing links (and in the form of trackbacks you may also get some juicy incoming links) can do wonders to your search engine rankings.

Content curation is a great way to create link bait opportunities because often it is difficult to get high-value content at a single place. If all the 10 links on content writing I’m linking to have great value people are going to link to my blog post as a valuable resource and they are also going to share it using their social media profiles.

What is good, content writing or content curation?

Both are important, I would say. There can be no content curation without original content so somebody has to write and publish original content and only then it can be curated.

The Internet can be chaotic as well as intimidating with millions of webpages and blog posts vying for your attention at a particular instance. So if you can find a single webpage or a blog post that has lots of links collected from different reliable sources it can help you tremendously.

Does content curation help your business?

Whether content curation helps your business or not depends on your business model. There are lots of blogs that simply publish lists gathered from various other blogs and websites (for instance, a web design blog curating web design links from scores of blogs and websites, just dealing with designing the top navigation bar).

As a personal advise I would recommend a 70-30 ratio. If you publish 10 webpages or blog posts every month and you also want to curate content, you should try posting 7 original posts and 3 collected links.contact

How to know if your content writer is effective for your business

Gauging the effectiveness of your content writer

It is same as evaluating the performance of any other marketing and promotional activity. Before starting working with your content writer study your analytics. Take note of how your particular keywords and key expressions are performing and what is your conversion rate presently. Google Analytics allows you to study individual pages contentwise, hitwise and even conversionwise. Here are a few improvements you should notice if you have an effective and competent content writer working for you:

Your search engine traffic increases after a couple of weeks of regular content posting
Search engine traffic on important keywords and search expressions increases compared to the period prior to hiring the content writer
In case of a blog there is increased engagement: people respond to your blog posts and express themselves
Your content begins to go viral on content sharing websites
In 3-4 months people begin regularly sharing your content through their social media profiles
Your customers and clients are well-informed even before approaching you
More people are doing business with you

These are some good benchmarks to know whether your content writer is effective for your business or not. This exercise may become difficult if you are running multiple promotional activities at the same time, but even then you can define parameters to track individual activities.

Content that is not optimized does not add value to your marketing

Optimizing content for search engines

I know this particular topic has been beaten to pulp by practically every “expert”, but surprisingly the majority of content publishers have no idea how to optimize their content for search engines. Search engine optimization is as important as generating quality content and publishing it regularly, if you want to target search engines for qualified traffic.

Here is how to optimize your content for search engines

Make a list of keywords and key phrases you think your prospective customers and clients are going to use in order to find your product or service on various search engines. It is very important that you leave your own judgement aside and think from the point of view of your customers (or clients). You can ask the help of your existing clients, you can use various keyword analysis tools available on the Internet and you can also hire qualified SEO experts to compile an exhaustive list of keywords and key phrases to focus on while creating your content.
Use the keywords and key phrases prepared in the above-mentioned list within the content you regularly generate. You can focus on three or four keywords at a particular time and keep generating content centered around them unless your search engine traffic has improved. Make sure you use your keywords and search terms contextually instead of simply stuffing them here and there. There is no well-defined density of keywords but use them as naturally as possible.
Use your primary key phrase in the title of your webpage or blog post. Your webpage title or blog post title is very important and that is why it appears highlighted as well as hyperlinked in the search engine results. Normally when people are using search engines they rarely use a single word or a keyword; they always use a phrase or a combination of different keywords. That is why construct a phrase that encompasses the real essence of your webpage or blog post and use that within the title.
Organize your content under various tags. Search engines look for the appropriate keywords within particular tags, such as

These are some fundamental search engine optimization vis-a-vis content steps that you can take in order to make sure that you can drive maximum traffic from search engines to your website or blog.

Optimizing your content for social media

The sharing dynamics of social media are a bit different from search engines. You have to focus more on the viral aspect of your content. So in order to optimize your content for social media it must be easily shareable, it must be highly interesting (not that your user content shouldn’t be highly interesting and informative), and it should be as concise as possible. This is not the case with every social media user but since almost everybody has highly active timelines they rarely get a chance to go through lengthy blog posts and articles. They are more inclined towards sharing videos, images, quick tips, slides and presentations.

Also, make your content easily shareable by using all the tools and add-ons available to you. You should also have a vibrant presence over selected social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, for example and consistently interact with your friends and followers so that whenever you post your content or updates they check it out in as many numbers as possible.

Optimizing your content is not a quick job. It happens over a long period of time. Whether you’re optimizing your content for search engines, for social media websites, or preferably, for both, it takes time and effort and above all consistency. Ideally the effort must begin even before you start implementing your content marketing strategy so that you have a ready platform by the time you start promoting your content.