Tag Archives: Video Content

Content going viral doesn’t always translate into money

As explained in this Buzz Feed News update about a content creator from Canada called Kevin Parry whose video generated millions of views on multiple platforms (15 million on Instagram, 28 million on TikTok and 30 million somewhere else).

Here is a tweet from him saying that he didn’t make a single penny directly from the video:

 

Intriguing, although, I’m not surprised. It depends on which platform you publish your content.

As he explains in the Buzz Feed interview, there is no TikTok video-monetization scheme for Canada, otherwise, he may have made some money because when TikTok hadn’t been banned in India, I came across lots of people making some good money when their videos went viral.

When you are creating videos, it’s YouTube where you can make money when your videos go viral because the video hosting service embeds advertisements within the videos, and it has some model of sharing revenue with the creators.

Even there, it depends on what sort of video content you are uploading. If the sponsors don’t find your content suitable for their brands, they won’t advertise. Hence, even if lots of people watch your videos, you may not make any money.

I don’t think platforms like Instagram and Twitter have some revenue sharing program for content creators. Hence, no matter how many million views you can generate from these platforms, you cannot make money directly.

But then how do you make money?

Kevin says that he got lots of work because of the video. Many big companies looking for talented videographers like him approached him, so, it was in that sense that he must have made lots of money.

It also happens with my business blog. I publish blog posts as regularly as I can manage. This improves my search engine rankings for my important keywords. This gets me traffic. The traffic draws clients who would hire me as a content writer. I get money from my blog.

What is the future of content marketing?

Future of content marketing

Future of content marketing

Quick note: Of late I have been very busy with work (which is a good thing, right?) and I haven’t been able to publish my regular blog posts. For the time being, I will be publishing smaller, quicker blog posts, that I will be mostly referencing from other content marketing websites and blogs.

So, what is the future of content marketing?

I came across this quandary on this blog post.

In the past, content marketing simply meant publishing lots of articles and blog posts on your website and it would get you good traffic.

Back in 2002 when blogging hadn’t yet been invented (or maybe it was, I’m forgetting) I used to publish .asp web pages on my website and then I would manually update the index file to include the latest web page.

I knew it generated traffic (although, it didn’t help me grow my business much but that’s a different story).

I also published lots of web design related articles on other websites because I knew that would to get me traffic, and it did.

Since then, content marketing has turned into an industry, and, “content marketer” is a profession.

There are two trends that have mostly affected content marketing over all these years:

  1. Advertisements are no longer effective; in fact, people devise ways to avoid them.
  2. Google has been continuously changing its ranking algorithm, increasingly giving prominence to content that is high-quality, relevant and useful.

Social media has also impacted the way people consume content and hence, content marketers are constantly brainstorming on how to format their content and how to steer their content marketing strategy to get more attention from their social media followers.

The continuous effort is to get more eyeballs and, through more eyeballs, more targeted traffic to the website or the blog.

What has changed in the past and what is going to change in the future for content marketing?

In the past content marketing has become, from just a form of increasing your search engine rankings, to a full-fledged form of marketing.

Just as content marketers paid close attention to what the search engines did to their content, the search engines now pay close attention to what the content marketers are doing to their content.

Aside from that, there are different forms of content that are continuously gaining prominence over the written content.

Yes, written content still matters, but you can get traffic to your website through all types of content including images, sound files (audio files like podcasts), GIFs, PDFs, and of course, videos.

According to a Cisco study that came back in 2016, by 2020 75% of mobile traffic will be video (source).

It means video may dominate content marketing – more of your content may exist as video rather than text and images.

But if you are a big fan of content writing – text – focus on content clusters. I have written about content clusters in the blog post titled What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how they improve your SEO?

It means you create very long web pages and blog posts – 3000-400 words – and cover your topic from every possible angle.

Writing individual blog posts and web pages for your keywords and key phrases is frowned upon by Google these days.

Comprehensive blog posts and web pages also help you bring down your bounce rate because people get lots of valuable information on a single page and they don’t have to come back to Google to look for additional information.

Talking about creating topic clusters, one thing that I must point out is that to create very long blog posts and web pages, your writing needs to be very engaging and conversational.

Long streams of boring text are going to send people away.

I’m already observing this trend among my clients – they are coming to me for the need to publish very long pieces of content and they know that I can keep their readers interested.

So, this is a new door of opportunity for writers who can write well.

Anyway, the purpose of this particular blog post is not to publish something very structured and informative. Due to my ongoing workload, I haven’t been able to publish much. I’m trying to figure out how to regularly publish on my blog while writing for my clients.

What exactly is “content”?

What exactly is content?

We are constantly using terms like content marketing, content writing, content strategy, SEO content, social media content and so on, but what exactly is content?

People who write think that what’s written (text) is content. Those who produce videos think that videos are the content. The ones who deal with images think that it’s the images that make a major chunk of content. So if you have a blog where you’re constantly writing about your business the text that you have written for your blog is content for it. If you’re posting videos that are somehow related to your business, your products or services on YouTube then it’s video content. If you find your muse on Pinterest than images are your content. What you have written on your homepage, the images that you have used and if you also have animations and videos on it, they all constitute content. The product descriptions and service descriptions are a part of your content and so is your company profile and the “about us” section.

Everything existing on your website that communicates with your visitors, conveys something, elicits some response, is content.

Why am I writing this?

Because people don’t take content seriously enough. They think they require content only to improve their search engine rankings so for them, content means publishing informative articles and blog posts. This is why they want to pay pittance to content writers and this is why content writers are ready to work for pittance: both have no idea how important content is.

You lose at 2 fronts if you don’t take your content seriously or if you don’t understand properly its significance:

  • You don’t optimize your existing content
  • You wrongly optimize the content that you get created for better rankings

So in the end you aren’t exactly gaining anything.

Have a close look at the content that you have on your website and this means, all the pages and not just blog posts and “SEO content”. Even streamlining your existing content can significantly improve your conversion rate and search engine rankings.