Why Content Marketing is key to Success.

Content marketing should be front and center of your inbound marketing strategy.

Not only will it provide tons of awesome traffic to your website or blog, it also shows you are an expert in that niche.

An inbound marketing strategy means:

• content marketing

• infographics

• video marketing

• PDF files

• whitepapers

• email marketing

• paid traffic (Adwords, Bing ads etc)

• Banner ads

• Re-targeting

• push notification These types of inbound marketing strategies will help you build a sufficient distribution network for your content. When combined with social sharing it’s a pretty formidable and efficient way of getting your message across. It just needs to be organised properly and consistent.

Done right, your content will be shared thousands of times and will be referenced by other authors in your space.

Before you start writing your content you need to know what you’re trying to convey to your reader. What are you actually teaching and what will they learn?

Would your content better achieve your goal, if you produced a video or even infographic instead of a whole page of written content?

Can you get away with slang words or does your content need to stay straight forward and official? Depending on your niche, you’ll need to decide which path you’d like to follow. Get this wrong and you’ll end up turning away an engaged reader who was ready to share your content.

There are many moving parts, when it comes to digital marketing and social media:

Using technology to boost your content marketing efforts is a must. If you don’t, I’m afraid you’ll get left behind.

One of the most powerful tools at your disposal, when it comes to distributing content, is an email auto-responder. An auto-responder allows you to collect email addresses of potential clients or even existing ones and provides a means of communication via email.

It’s your choice whether you email this list once a day, week, month or year.

You could also ask your clients which social network they prefer to use.

Back in the early 2000’s, content creators used to stuff their articles with lots of keywords to rank for certain search terms (called keyword stuffing). What you ended up with was really badly written content that wasn’t legible to humans but written for search engines. We recommend an article length be no shorter than 1000 words. This ensures that you have covered your topic fully.

Make sure you interlink other articles you have written within your posts. Using them as resource makes those articles stronger and allows the search engines to crawl this older content again.

Simply writing content and not sharing it is a surefire way to go nowhere fast. Unfortunately, that’s what the vast majority of companies do.

Content marketing means just that. “Content” and “Marketing”. You shouldn’t have one without the other.

How?

• Have a strategic plan to share your content on social media

• Email that content to existing clients and ask them to share it

• Turn written content into slides, videos and infographics

• Use your content to guest-post on non-competing websites

• republish and share older posts that may have been forgotten

The headline for your article is one of the most important elements of a successful content marketing strategy.

Headlines that work really well, grabbing the interest of readers:

• 7 ways to get your {content read}

• 10 things about {article writing} you never knew

• 15 steps to {greater writing}

Writing a quality piece of content, accompanying it with high quality images or video, will not only get your content noticed, your readers are more likely to share it on social media. A badly written piece with really bad grammar and spelling mistakes won’t win you any rewards.

Poor quality can come in many different forms:more

• A small 300 word article that doesn’t cover the very basic points of the topic

• Bad formatting, no header tags, no bold italic, no underlines

• Article doesn’t flow and is written more for search engines

• The content written doesn’t match the title

• There’s no real introduction or conclusion to the article

• The data used is old and out of date

• The images used are generic stock photos not related to the content.

Most companies don’t take their content marketing seriously at all. This is a huge mistake, as the search engines (Google and other search engines) won’t take your content that seriously when you finally get round to producing some content.

The more content you produce and the more times your website is updated, actually helps your overall SEO strategy.

Google likes when websites are regularly updated and it also likes well written, highly referenced content (it’s whole business model is built on great content and showing ads alongside your content). Provide this on a regular and consistent basis.

People like to know that the author of the piece they are reading or viewing is an expert on that topic and that you know what you’re talking about.

If your data is old or your information is wrong, you’ll lose all of your credibility within minutes of them reading your content.

Even if you’re not a total expert, just make sure that your information is well-researched and the data used is correct.

One good way to do this is to link out to authority sites on the topic throughout your content. This gives the appearance of credibility without you having to write ALL the content they consume.

Just make sure you’re not trying to sell to them in your content. Trust me, they’ll run a mile and click away from your website.

The main goal is to have the reader so impressed with your work that they’re willing to share it on social media.

Conclusion

When done correctly, content marketing can be a really powerful tool towards your inbound marketing goals.

By creating content people enjoy reading and actually learn from, it will increase both your credibility and the amount your content is shared.

Don’t forget, you need to have a great title, make sure the formatting is spot-on and ensure that your grammar is correct. Of course there are more advanced strategies, but this is the bare minimum you need to do.

We hope you enjoyed this post.

We will follow up with "HOW TO FORMAT THE PERFECT BLOG POST" in our next article.