Tag Archives: Content Publishing

Is publishing less content good for your content marketing?

Leave a reply
Is publishing less content better for your content marketing

Is publishing less content better for your content marketing?with the funeral me

This Forbes update says yes. Gary Vaynerchuck, on the other hand, says you should publish as much content as you can possibly publish because ultimately, who decides the quantity?

I am often approached by clients who, although want to benefit from publishing high-quality content on their websites and blogs, don’t have much budget.

Consequently, they want to pay less for my content writing services. I politely refuse their work.

I agree with the Forbes article, and I also agree with Gary.

Mindlessly publishing content isn’t profitable, especially when you have limited budget, but you should publish as much as you can and there is no clear definition of what’s more and what’s less.

If you have a website or a business blog, you may publish 1-3-4 updates every week, or even less. For an average business website or blog, this is a good number.

But if you publish an online news magazine or newspaper, you publish 30-40 updates in a day.

So, how much content you must publish depends on your business and your capacity.

Gary in the above link says that don’t worry about the quality and keep on publishing. His logic is, unless you regularly publish, you are not going to improve your quality. Again, I agree.

But this is applicable when you are not paying. For example, he seems to be creating most of his content on his own and even if he is not creating a big part of content on his own, he must have enough money to pay good content creators.

Even for my own content writing blog, I don’t have to worry about the quality of every post. Sometimes, I just want to publish something random and I do that. This is because I’m not paying anyone. It hardly takes me 10-15 minutes to write a quick blog post, like this one.

If you’re paying for every piece of content, you need to be mindful of its quality.

Therefore, if the client has a smaller budget, I advise him or her not to go for a certain number of updates on the website and the blog. Instead, just focus on very few updates, but very good and very relevant updates.

This is what the Forbes article suggests. Instead of trying to publish every possible content idea and trying to cover every possible publishing platform, pick and choose your battles and then stick to them.

The article rightly says:

Whether you’re a small business owner who is doing the work yourself or a large brand with a dedicated marketing team, this approach on a social network can be overwhelming in resource drain without garnering much of a return.

My suggestion is like this:

  • Have a target for your blog or website: Maybe 20 webpages for your main website and then 150 posts on your blog every year.
  • Once your target is met and if you have more budget, then focus on other publishing platforms.

Initial thrust is definitely needed. It’s no use publishing highly remarkable blog posts on which you spend a couple of weeks on research in the very beginning unless you have a good marketing budget.

In the beginning, you can also publish less than remarkable blog posts that give you some organic exposure on search engines and then you can reduce the quantity and start focusing on quality.

Improve your SEO with content auditing

Leave a reply
Improve your SEO with content auditing

Improve your SEO with content auditing

For the past week I have been auditing my existing webpages.

In a hurry to build every section of the website, we often, quickly, build webpages without giving much care to the SEO aspect of those webpages.

These pages may be complete in themselves vis-à-vis delivering your core business message and conveying to your visitors how you can serve them, but in terms of SEO, you haven’t taken care of all the aspects of your content.

I exported the entire list of my main Credible Content business website webpages into an Excel sheet and now I try to rewrite the content of at least two webpages everyday.

Then, with color coding, I mark them done.

Is it improving my SEO?

For more than 1-1/2 months, I was bedridden.

I could only take care of client assignments and I couldn’t publish new content on my blog.

The content writing field is very competitive because practically, everyone can provide content writing services because most of the clients are unmindful of what is quality content.

Anyway, that’s an altogether a different issue, but one tends to lose search engine rankings very fast if one doesn’t publish new content regularly.

Since I couldn’t publish new blog posts and webpages on my own website, I lost search engine rankings for many of my top ranking keywords.

Even when I resumed my regular routine, I couldn’t focus on publishing your blog posts.

But I started rewriting my existing webpages – making them current and adding more sections and images.

I’m also optimizing these webpages for long tail keywords.

At least I have regained the rankings that I had lost.

What is content auditing?

What is content auditing?

What is content auditing?

Is there a content audit definition?

Is there a content audit tool you can use?

Is there any content audit criteria?

What exactly does webpage content audit consist of?

If you have had a business website you must have lots of webpages and blog posts that you have been adding over the years.

Many of these webpages and blog posts have old, outdated information that is not relevant to the current context.

You may have also lost their rankings because fresh content on the same topics or even on the related topics, have been crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines.

As I have written above, my search engine rankings suffered even when I couldn’t add new content for a couple of months.

Google is constantly looking for fresh content.

Content auditing means going through your individual webpages and blog posts (they already exist I presume) and then updating them.

Content auditing may include:

  • Adding fresh information.
  • Restructuring the content to make it crawler friendly.
  • Writing more content.
  • Incorporating your primary, secondary and longtail keywords.
  • Refining meta titles and descriptions.
  • Adding more images.
  • Updating obsolete information.

Content auditing can be as comprehensive as you want.

It can be an occasional exercise and it can be an ongoing undertaking.

Auditing can be full-fledged it during which you observe the following attributes of your existing content:

  • The number of clicks the link attracts.
  • First published date.
  • Author name (in case you have multiple authors).
  • Call-to-action of the webpage (what was the purpose of the webpage when you created it).
  • Page bounce rate.
  • Image alt tags.
  • URL.

Content auditing may take a few days, a few weeks or even a few months, depending on how much content you have.

Why content auditing improves your SEO?

Why content auditing improves SEO?

Why content auditing improves SEO?

When I say content auditing, I don’t mean just randomly updating your existing webpages and blog posts.

Auditing means having a serious look at them from the point of not just adding useful information, but also from the point of improving their SEO.

When for the first time you were creating those webpages and blog posts, maybe you didn’t have a clear idea of how to search engine optimize them.

Maybe you were not even aware that you should write your content keeping keywords in mind.

Or maybe you were too obsessed with the keywords and you didn’t pay attention to the overall quality and purposefulness of your content.

Or maybe you didn’t have an experienced content writer working for you and as a result, you neither have good quality content nor have optimized content.

Whatever is the reason, you should have a fresh look at your existing content and see what improvements you can make so that it not just reads well, it also improves your SEO.

Content auditing improves your SEO in the following ways

  • You use a tool like Google Analytics to know how much traffic your individual webpages and blog posts generate and which are the best performing and worse performing links.
  • You add more content – Google prefers lengthy pieces of webpages and blog posts.
  • You interlink your blog posts and webpages so that high traffic links can send references to your other blog posts and webpages that don’t get much exposure.
  • You rewrite meta titles and descriptions in terms of improving SEO.
  • You make the content fresh and resubmit the links, which Google likes.
  • You add more relevant images to give your SEO further boost.
  • You can re-share your content through your social media and social networking profiles getting more exposure to your older blog posts and webpages.

What are the benefits of content auditing?

  • Pinpoint main problem areas and rectify them.
  • Identify content for content repurposing (you may like to read How to repurpose old content?)
  • Improve quality of your content.
  • Restructure your content for better readability.
  • Incorporate primary, secondary and longtail keywords strategically and in a logical manner without compromising on the overall quantity of your content.
  • Enhance content usability.
  • Improve credibility by linking to trusted sources.
  • Improve call-to-action.

How to do content auditing?

This is something you yourself will have to figure out, but I can explain how I am doing.

I use WordPress as my CMS.

I use a plug-in that generates an HTML page of all the links that I have posted so far.

Using this plug-in I generated a fresh list and then copy/pasted the list into an Excel worksheet.

There are other tools also that can help you generate a list of all the URLs under your website, including Screaming Frog and URL Profiler.

I also use SEOPressor for WordPress to analyse my text as I write it.

I select a link and copy/paste it in the browser and then go to the WordPress dashboard to edit the link.

SEOPressor immediately tells me whether I have previously optimized the content or not.

I also check (using anonymous browsing) how the link ranks for the selected keywords and search phrases.

If SEOPressor tells me that I didn’t optimize the content the first time, I start working on it until the SEOPressor plug-in okays it.

Once I feel satisfied, I republish and resubmit the link to Google.

In the Excel sheet in the adjacent column, I enter the date on which I audited the link and then I also color code the link to mark it as “audited”.

This is how I do it.

I am an experienced content writer and I can immediately know if a certain webpage or blog post is optimized or not.

You may not have that experience.

You can hire a content writer to audit your website and then update the content.

If you have too many pages and blog posts, don’t worry about the cost.

You can select the most important pages and blog posts and hire a content writer to work on them.

However you decide to audit your content to improve your SEO, sometimes deciding to audit your existing content is better than adding new content.

 

When it comes to writing and publishing content, does quantity ultimately lead to quality?

Leave a reply
When it comes to writing and publishing content does quantity lead to quality

When it comes to writing and publishing content does quantity lead to quality

It is often advised that instead of relentlessly writing and publishing content on your website or blog, you should focus on quality and meaningfulness.

In his latest blog post, Gary Vaynerchuck has raised a valid question, “Who decides the quantity?”

Then the blog post further asks, can quantity lead to quality?

When it comes to filling up your website and blog with quality content, this is a pertinent question to ask.

But, as an experienced content writer who routinely comes across clients who don’t want to spend much on content writing, I know the answer.

Quantity differs from person to person. It also depends on how much effort and time you’re spending on writing and publishing your content.

When a client doesn’t have a big budget, I always suggest him to focus on quality and not on quantity.

For writing for my own Credible Content Blog, I try to maintain a balance between quantity and quality, although, I wouldn’t say that when I am shifting towards quantity I compromise on quality. No, on my blog, it doesn’t happen.

I can totally understand where Gary is coming from. And I totally understand that unless you don’t bother about quantity, you don’t know how to attain quality. As they say, it is difficult to grow your business if you are counting every penny.

Again, clients who are paying for every blog post and web page, would beg to differ.

If money is not a problem, I’m totally fine with going with quantity, as long as you are not publishing trashy content that is going to get you penalized by search engines and social networking websites.

Quantity doesn’t mean writing and publishing inferior content. It just means publishing lots of content that does not require lots of research.

Take for example this blog post. I suddenly come across a post from Gary, link to it, and share a few thoughts from my side. This post doesn’t require lots of research and time. Nonetheless, my blog has new content. I would call it quantity.

Also, when you are continuously writing and publishing content for your blog or for various channels, and if you have enough time and money, you get to play around with different ideas. This is not the case if time and budget are limited.

My personal experience with my personal websites and blogs has been that quality does lead to quantity as long as you stick to the bare minimums. The bare minimum means not going overboard with keyword-centric content and not diluting your core topic.

For example, my core topic is content writing. Then it is content marketing. Digital marketing affects my business, so sometimes, I allow guest bloggers to write on digital marketing. SEO, yes, as long as it is related to content writing.

But, it doesn’t mean that I publish whatever content ideas that come to my mind. That I would call wasteful quantity.

Is content writing and publishing same as content marketing?

Leave a reply

Just writing and publishing content is not content marketing

If you are simply writing and publishing content it is not content marketing. Content is the basis of your content marketing so obviously, without content, there is no marketing, but merely writing and publishing content doesn’t deliver you the needed results.

It is like this: you have a TV channel. You are broadcasting high quality movies and series. You don’t aggressively promote your movies and series. You simply produce them and broadcast them. The only viewers you get are those who are randomly channel surfing and accidentally come across your TV channel.

The same happens when you are writing and publishing content without doing anything else.

Marketing, as is the case with any systematic marketing campaign, is a collection of steps that you need to take or follow to get tangible results.

In content marketing, you create content, and then you draw people to that content. The drawing of people can happen through multiple channels. These channels include:

  • Search engines.
  • Social media and social networking platforms.
  • Mailing lists.
  • Back links from other websites and blogs.
  • PC campaigns.
  • E-books, case studies and white papers.

In simple terms, content marketing means publishing content and then not just promoting that content, but also taking steps to make sure that maximum number of people consume that content.

Aside from using the channels above, content marketing also involves using analytics tools available to you to monitor what sort of traffic your content is generating and then streamlining your content accordingly.

Take for example search engine traffic. The keywords and search terms you are trying to target, may not be getting you the needed traffic and people who find your website on search engine pages may be using totally different keywords and search terms. Through Google Analytics, you can find out which keywords and search terms people are using and then make changes to your content. This is also an ongoing activity.

Content writing and content marketing are ongoing activities

These are not one-time affairs. You cannot publish 10-15 blog posts and articles and then rest on your laurels. It’s because almost all your competitors are using content marketing to draw targeted traffic to their websites.

Since everyone is trying to get ahead of everyone, sooner or later your competitors are going to have more content than you have and consequently, more exposure than you have.

They will be able to create buzz on an ongoing basis and hence lap up all the traffic.

Since everybody has an online presence these days, competition is greater than it used to be a decade ago. Everybody knows about SEO. Everybody knows about social media marketing. Most of the businesses use email marketing.

Millions of instances of content are constantly being produced and published in the form of blog posts, webpages, press releases, PDFs, videos, infographics, images, articles and social media and social networking updates, every hour. Amidst this deluge of content, how do people find your content?

Writing content and publishing it and then marketing it constantly may overwhelm in the beginning, but once you begin to follow a pattern, it is just like any other business activity.

Every established business has a sales and marketing department. This means, marketing is required all the time.

The same is the case with content marketing. It is definitely cheaper than conventional marketing, nonetheless, it is an integral part of doing business.

Is user generated content good for content marketing and SEO?

Leave a reply
The image shows a group of people working in an office

User generated content for content marketing and SE

Until a few years ago, there was lots of buzz about user generated content. I remember lots of websites used to talk about it. Social networking was catching up and lots of content was being generated by users, without getting paid for it, for websites like YouTube and Digg.

Even smaller websites were encouraging people to leave comments in the comments section and online forums hoping that it would improve their SEO due to highly focused content generation.

User generated content can consist of reviews that people leave on your website, videos, photos, questions and answers and comments. With every new question, with every new comment, a new URL is generated, and it gives Google and other search engines something new to crawl and index.

One thing is undoubtedly clear: user generated content is one of the fastest and cheapest ways of generating targeted content and consequently, boosting your content marketing. Through user generated content

  • You are letting your users, visitors, customers and clients tell your story and participate in your evolution.
  • You let people talk about your brand instead of the marketing message coming from you.
  • Other people, not directly connected to your business, increasing your brand presence.
  • People themselves talk about the pros and cons of working with you.
  • User generated content, especially if it is favourable to your business, provides you ongoing social proof.
  • Your prospective customers and clients find user generated content more trustworthy. According to a Nielsen study 92% of consumers trust organic, user generated content more than traditional marketing messages.

It also gives the search engines lots of content to crawl and index, on an ongoing basis.

This Search Engine Land blog post says that though user generated content can help you, it can also be counter-productive and hence, whenever you plan to make user generated content an integral part of your content marketing strategy, you need to make sure that it helps your SEO efforts, and doesn’t hurt them.

How to incorporate user generated content into your content marketing?

Using user generated content for content marketing isn’t a random exercise that you can immediately kick-start by installing a few plug-ins into your website. You need to keep in mind that unsupervised discussions can take tangential turns and turn into uncontrollable disasters.

But the question of uncontrollable disasters happens only when you have enough content to cause you trouble. So, first, you need to figure out how to make people, how to enable people, to generate content for your brand. Here are a few things you can do:

  • Allow people to leave comments: This facility might already be there on your blog or website if you’re using a content management system like WordPress. Many Webmasters turn this feature off because of the comment-spam problem, but if you can establish a mechanism to monitor your comments, this is one of the finest ways of getting user generated content on your website.
  • Install a discussion forum: Online forums and discussion boards are one of the oldest mass conversation channels on the Internet. Even when there were no browsers, there were discussion boards. Online forums can have very rich SEO-centric content especially when your forum catches on and people begin to use it on a regular basis. Again, spam can be a big problem.
  • Allow people to post blog posts on your website: Many websites allow visitors to set up an account and post content. You can let them submit entries as drafts and later you can review them and publish them.
  • Start a review section: In this section people can leave reviews on your products and services, just like Amazon has it.
  • Start a Q&A section: Questions and answers are favourites of the search engines. This is because most of the searches were carried out in the form of questions – you ask a question and Google provides you the answer. In a Q&A section the questions and answers are already there.
  • Allow people to upload images and videos: This can be an expensive affair because images and videos mean more online storage space and more bandwidth. But if you can afford it, you can generate lots of traffic to this type of content. One-fourth of Google searches are images.

The main problem with user generated content is of course, moderation and protection against spam. Spam bots can post thousands of comments in a single day, bringing your entire website down and irreparably harm your SEO. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why people shy away from installing online forums on their websites. Otherwise, you would find them on every website.

My personal suggestion is, stay away from installing an online forum unless running a forum is your primary activity or you have a dedicated department to oversee the conversations.

The most useful forms of user generated content in terms of both content marketing and SEO are inviting people to write blog posts for your website and encouraging them to participate in the Q&A section. This way, you can control the flow and direction of your content.