Tag Archives: Content Publishing

The value of your content in the context of social media

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There was a time when in order to promote your content you had to focus on search engines and external links. Even today both these entities matter a lot but there is a third force that could prove to be far more penetrating when it comes to distributing your content: social media.

Some prominent examples of social media are blogging, Twitter.com, FaceBook.com, Ning.com, Youtube.com, Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. Some of these are interactive tools and some are social bookmarking and recommendation websites but their basic function is helping people promote and generate content.

The compelling reason for having great content, and lots of it

These days it is an aberration if an organization or a professional individual providing services on the Internet does not publish a blog. A blog helps you communicate with your audience unhindered by geographical and technological barriers. Blogging has almost become a “traditional” content publishing platform as many people are quickly switching over to micro-blogging. Nevertheless, blogging still rules when it comes to publishing and promoting content; in fact most of the links being promoted on the social media and bookmarking websites belong to blogs.

So what is the value of your content in the context of social media and what all should you consider while creating and publishing content? It is very similar to creating a viral marketing campaign.

Your content on social media websites thrives upon the users’ tendency to recommend interesting and relevant links to their followers and friends. In fact some users produce no original content; they simply forward and promote other links with their own comments sprinkled here and there.

There are two interesting features of users active on social media websites:

  • They promote content
  • They discuss content

In order to leverage the power of social media, first of all you have to create content on a regular basis and the content must be interesting and valuable enough so that they feel compelled to share it with their friends and followers. On websites like Twitter.com people tweet your link and then their followers retweet it if they feel like it and that is how your content spreads. The same thing happens on FaceBook. On Digg.com the users “digg” your link if they like it and the more “diggs” your link can garner the more prominent spot it gets on the website. In the case of StumbleUpon the more thumbs-ups you can get, with greater frequency your link is put in front of its users.

In the case of bloggers if they like your content they link to it and write about it. From there, further, other bloggers and social media users can write about your content, link to it or promote it.

Does your content always have to be likeable and acceptable? Not always. Sometimes people will write about your content, link to it and promote it to show disagreement or express a totally different point of view. Just make sure that whenever you are publishing highly controversial and contradictory content you are sure of what you are doing. This is more important amidst social media websites where it takes a long time to build reputation and very little time to dismantle it.

The moot point is if you want to generate and publish content for the purpose of spreading your ideas and getting more business you have to work on it keeping social media in mind. The power of social media is so great that some Internet marketers have already started claiming that you no longer need the whimsical search engines to get quality traffic. In fact the traffic that you get from social media websites and blogs is more targeted because it is promoted by real people rather than ranking algorithms.

There was a time when the search engines like Google asked for more and more content so that that content could be indexed and ranked. There was a lot of talk, there still is, about creating content that is search engine friendly as well as human friendly. Sometimes if you didn’t face much competition you didn’t even have to generate lots of content. But this is not the case when you want to promote your website through social media websites. You constantly have to publish content that creates buzz among social media circles.

This trend spells trouble for organizations and individuals that have always been downplaying the value of quality content. On social media you cannot create a credible presence unless you have credible content.

Of course, by simply creating and publishing great content you cannot become a social media darling; you need to have a following. It is very hard to make people listen to you if they haven’t listened to you in the past, and that too, repetitively. People on Twitter and FaceBook sometimes have thousands of followers and they themselves are following thousands of people. This means a continuous stream of messages in front of them. How to develop a following that eagerly listens to you? This topic is beyond the scope of this blog post but yes it is an important part of leveraging social media. You cannot hack into that. Either you have to be a celebrity or a well-known person in your niche, or you have to build your followers from scratch and this may take many months. Collaborating with people who are already highly active on various social media websites may help.

Is email marketing content different from web marketing content?

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Of late I’ve been getting plenty of assignments that involve writing content for email marketing campaigns. Intermittently a few clients want to know what is the difference between writing content for marketing on the web and through e-mail. I’m sure they want to know whether I know the difference or not and I am writing this blog post to share my thoughts on the subject of writing content for email marketing as well as web marketing.

Fundamental difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing

Let me tell this at the outset that I am not writing this as a marketing person; I am a content writer who knows a thing or two about Internet marketing. Most of the things that I know have been learned by constantly working and interacting on the Internet with other professionals and also with clients hailing from different fields.

Marketing, as we will all agree, is an exercise to promote a product or service in order to increase business. It may involve running advertising campaigns, organizing events and distributing content that makes the recipients aware of the product or the service and its features. Of course I will be talking from the perspective of a content writer.

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign cannot be easily reused

An e-mail marketing campaign is most of the time a one-time affair, or there have to be long intervals before you send the same e-mail to the same recipients. Do it with regularity and it becomes spam. E-mail marketing is kind of push marketing even if you are using an opt-in e-mail list. It normally survives on numbers unless the targeting is phenomenal. The content for an e-mail marketing campaign, most of the times, is not reusable – you cannot send the same e-mail again and again. Every time you send an e-mail, there must be something new in it.

E-mail marketing content must always be to the point

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign must be concise, to the point, and use as direct a language as possible. Say your thing and get done with it. Remember that the person opening your e-mail would be having scores of unread messages in his or her inbox and it just takes one click to open another message.

This makes it more important to highlight the greatest benefits of your product or service at the top of the message. There should be minimal scope for confusion and misunderstanding.

It is debatable what should be the length of an e-mail marketing campaign. It depends upon what you want to convey and who is your target market. For instance if you are a real estate company selling real estate property then your customers will naturally prefer to read more and more before deciding to call you. On the other hand a less important product (for instance, an MP3 player) may not demand that much attention to detail. So write your content according to your market and the product or service you are offering.

E-mail marketing content should be personal

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign also needs to be personal because an e-mail is a personnel message. It is like knocking at somebody’s door in order to convey something. So the least you can do is address that person by his or her name. Even if the e-mail is going to a business e-mail address it will be opened by a person. Create a sense of familiarity.

Content for a web marketing campaign

A web marketing campaign stays where it is as long as you keep it. The content written for a web marketing campaign performs for a longer time. I am not implying that you don’t need to update your web content; I just mean to say it can stay up there for a longer period of time.

You don’t need to be as personnel as in the case of an e-mail marketing campaign because when it comes to your website it is not you who are knocking at people’s door but the other way round. People coming to your website are already inclined towards reading what you have published on your website. They have either found you on a search engine or have clicked a link on another website.

According to me the greatest difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing is that web marketing content is re-usable and it performs for a longer period of time whereas e-mail marketing content is usually created for a one-time affair so you have to make the maximum impact in the very first attempt otherwise it all goes waste. Web marketing content can be altered and tweaked according to the response you are getting; you cannot do this with e-mail marketing content, it’s like the bullet that has been fired and now you can do nothing about it.

More on content and branding

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A month ago I had written about how to control your branding by writing or generating customized content. As it is rightly mentioned in this blog post aptly titled how to improve your branding with your content, on the Internet, you are what you write.  Your words are your greatest representatives on the Internet because they communicate with your visitors in your absence.

You can strengthen your brand by carefully creating your content strategy. You have to create content that highlights your main strengths and leverages them to get you more clients and customers ultimately. I have seen many websites and blogs in a great hurry to generate content so that they can quickly get traffic from the search engines and sometimes such flukes really work but sooner or later they end-up causing damage to their brand because the right message conveyed through right content is more important than getting random traffic from search engines through haphazardly generate and published content.

Similarly, if there is no substance in your content you cannot instill confidence among your readers and prospective customers and clients. It’s like the real world: no matter in what environment you move, you have to establish respect and authority in order to make people listen to you, pay attention to you, and take the action you want them to take.

How do you instill that confidence? Share with them as much information as possible. Instead of selling a product or a service through your content, try to help them make an educated decision. I know in the end we all want to earn more business, but don’t turn this aspiration into a desperate and grotesque exercise. Write to inform, write to put your point across, and definitely write to convince, but don’t use verbal tricks to entice your customers and clients. Once they trust you, once they trust your brand, they will definitely want to do business with you.

Every word matters, and so does every sentence. This is especially important with the advent of social media because when you are interacting through social media you are leaving your inherent footprints all over the Internet. The more you interact, the more content you generate, the more people become aware of you.

What type of content actually moves your visitors?

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You publish content on your website or blog with a purpose. In fact whenever you publish something on your website or blog (from now onwards I’ll only say website and you can assume it for your blog too), you want it to do something. You don’t publish content without purpose. This is why in order to come up with effective and compelling content you must be clear about its purpose. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Do you want people to purchase something from your website, or subscribe to your service or RSS feeds, or hire you, after reading your content?
  • Do you want them to click the advertisements that you have published on your website?
  • Do you want them to engage in conversation in order to build your brand?
  • Do you want them to promote your content on their own websites and blogs and on various social media and social networking websites?
  • Do you want to increase your search engine traffic?
  • Do you want to improve your conversion rate?

There can be many more questions but these are the fundamental questions you should ask yourself while creating your content strategy. Once you know what you want to actually achieve by publishing content on your website you can generate better content.

We all want to publish content that moves our visitors into taking some desired action. Your visitors will be moved if your content gives them what they seek. So after figuring out what you want your content to achieve for you, you have to figure out what it achieves for your visitors. Does it provide something that they desperately need?

When a visitor comes to your website he or she is normally:

  • Trying to purchase something in order to satisfy a need or an urge
  • Looking for a solution to a nagging problem
  • Looking for information that he or she may not find easily somewhere else
  • Searching for entertainment or amusement
  • Seeking advice or encouragement, or love
  • Looking for an outlet
  • Looking for a service provider

Again they can be hundreds of more reasons for people to come to your website, you had to figure that out.

So in order to come up with content that moves your visitors:

  1. You must know why people should come to your website
  2. How your content is going to convey that you really have what they seek, and do it convincingly