Have you ever wondered what is the driving force behind successful online businesses? It's not SEO or social networks, but it's Content Marketing. When done right, content marketing can change any website's fade.
Follow our 15 content marketing tips below and boost your rankings and traffic.
What is Content Marketing?
There are many sophisticated definitions of content marketing, but my own simplified version is:
Content marketing is the process of creating content for the purpose of increasing your web traffic, getting new customers, making more sales, or simply increasing brand awareness.
Take a moment and think about what the Internet actually offers to people – its various types of content through different channels (websites, social networks, email, apps, forums, etc).
Content marketing makes this kind of communication more official. In other words, instead of just publishing content on the Web with no purpose, you create and distribute content to satisfy specific marketing objectives.
What is content?
In the context of content marketing, content is everything that can be published on the web. For example text, videos, images, infographics, graphs, audio, pdf, podcasts, slideshows, etc. It's information that can be made available in digital format.
What Are The Advantages of Content Marketing?
Content marketing has many advantages to offer to an online business since content is the starting and ending point of any online campaign.
In particular, the benefits of content marketing are:
- Get more targeted visits from Search Engines – Good content can get you higher rankings and more targeted traffic from search engines
- More visits from Social Media – Good content is more likely to be shared on social media, which in turn can generate more website traffic
- Increase User Engagement – Users engage with good content by providing comments, reviews, and ratings.
- It’s good for SEO – Good quality content is the heart of SEO. Websites that combine good content with proven copywriting tips are better off than websites that don't have good content.
- Increase brand awareness – Publishing great content is one of the best ways to promote your brand and online reputation.
- More conversions – Good content can generate more leads and sales.
15 Effective Content Marketing Tips
- Create a content marketing plan
- Publish evergreen content
- Write for users, optimize for search engines
- Content marketing, SEO, and Social Media are best friends
- Build topic relevancy
- Publish thorough content
- Publish shareable content
- Pay attention to content formatting
- Publish content consistently
- Create catchy titles
- Create content that is better than your competitors
- Promote your content
- Organize your content into categories
- Optimize content for conversions
- Approach content marketing as a long-term investment
1. Create a content marketing plan
A successful content marketing campaign starts with a good plan.
When we talk about content marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is blogging.
This is not wrong, but having a content marketing strategy, it's not just about setting up a blog and starting publishing content.
Blogging is an important aspect of content marketing but that’s not the end of the story. It's only one of the mediums to execute your content marketing plan.
A well-constructed plan must include all the tips outlined below.
2. Publish evergreen content
The first item in your plan is what type of content to publish.
For long-term success, you need evergreen content.
Evergreen content has the following characteristics:
- It's unique and original
- It's useful
- It’s always relevant (not associated with a specific time period but it’s relevant whenever you read it)
- It is thorough, detailed, and informative.
- It is searchable – it covers topics users search for on Google
Evergreen content will help you establish a solid online presence and over time will also help you to build high rankings on Google, which in turn will get you more traffic.
3. Write for users, optimize for search engines
I know it’s a cliche to say it, but it's the truth. When thinking about content, you should write for users and optimize for search engines.
I know that a number of people disagree with this approach, but let me explain why both are equally important.
Search engines serve one purpose, to make users happy by answering their questions or queries.
If you only care about what people want to read without taking into account what search engines can understand, at the end of the day you will publish great content that nobody reads.
On the other hand, if you first think of your users and the type of content they need and then optimize it for search engines, you have a win-win situation.
Related Guide: Read my previous guide on content SEO to learn how to optimize your content for search engines.
4. Content marketing, SEO, and Social Media are best friends
If you manage to make these 3 tools work together, you have more chances of succeeding online.
You need content to boost your SEO and you need content to feed your social media networks.
Anything that you publish in your blog or website has to be part of your SEO strategy and in-line with your social media marketing strategy.
Before creating a new piece of content, make sure that it's aligned with your SEO and social media efforts.
5. Build topic relevancy
When you start publishing content on your website or blog make sure that it is related to your niche and area of expertise.
For many, this might be obvious, but some people still get it wrong.
For example, if you are running a tech blog you should not publish a post about cooking just because you like it. Nobody will punish you for doing so but the chances of getting any benefits from that post are minimized.
The best approach is to publish related content that is aligned with the overall goals of your website.
For example, if you are selling coffee makers online then besides providing all the technical information about your products (specs, photos, reviews, videos) you should also provide a blog with articles related to coffee (making, drinking, recipes, advice, etc).
6. Publish thorough content
When it comes to text content like blog posts, various studies identified that lengthy content (above 1500 words) ranks higher in search engines and it is more shareable in social media.
The lesson we can learn from these studies is that it is better to publish a long detailed post that covers all aspects of a topic rather than publish 2-3 smaller articles.
Since lengthy content is more shareable on social media this means that you are not only fetching food to search engines but also giving users what they want.
7. Publish shareable content
You need to search social networks and find out what type of content people like.
For example, people searching for fashion might want to see more images and videos than text content. This means you should adjust your content marketing strategy to satisfy this need.
Some ideas for shareable content that are suitable for all niches are:
- Top 10 lists…
- Best-of lists…
- How to …
- 10 ways to…
- Most popular ways…
- Best tips for…
8. Pay attention to content formatting
Good content provides original, well-researched, and unbiased information about a certain topic.
Even if your content meets the above criteria, it still needs to look good as well.
By good-looking content, I mean text that is beautified by the use of paragraphs, bold, italics, headings, good font size, etc.
Taking care of the formatting of your content is also good for SEO and a sign that you are trying to build a high-quality website.
In general, if you manage to combine different types of content together (i.e. text, images, videos) then this makes the user experience better which will generate a number of other benefits.
9. Publish content consistently
Besides providing up-to-date and accurate content, another tip you can follow is to make sure that you keep a consistent publishing schedule.
Having a pre-defined publishing calendar will help you organize your time better and will also help you build a list of loyal fans.
Do not forget that new content is also an incentive for:
- Search engines to visit your website
- Get more visits from your newsletter and RSS feed
- Get more visits from social media
- Keep your repeating visitors happy
10. Create catchy titles
The title of a page or post is very important for many reasons. This is SEO 101 but it is worth mentioning that a good title will:
- Help search engines understand what the content is about
- Help social media sites understand what you are sharing
- Attract or not users' attention and encourage more clicks to visit the particular page
So, before hitting the publish button make sure that your content has an optimized and catchy title.
Related Guide: How to optimize your page titles
11. Create content that is better than your competitors
Content marketing is a great way to increase traffic and sales, but that’s only good news.
The bad news is that you are not alone and if you want your content to perform well, it has to be better than your competitors.
Before creating your content search Google, Facebook, and Twitter (or the network that is closer to your target audience) and analyze what type of content comes in the top positions.
Notice things like content length, content type, quality, and format, and try to make your content better in all aspects.
Content that is not better than what is already ranking on Google, has no chance of getting high rankings.
So, better to spend more time and make the content better than rushing into hitting the publish button and losing your time.
12. Promote your content
Don’t expect that your potential customers will search to find your website, make a visit, and buy your products.
When you publish a new piece of content you need to go out and promote it so that it gets the attention it deserves.
There are many ways to promote your content without exaggerations and without taking any risks so the next immediate step after hitting the publish button is to do a good promotion.
Your best bet is social media because results are extremely fast and immediate but never underestimate the power of email and RSS. This is a task that cannot be done manually that's why you need to use the right tools to help you reach your target audience.
13. Organize your content into categories
When you do content marketing consistently for a number of months (or even years) you will end up with lots of content and if it is not organized correctly then you will get lost.
The best strategy is to organize your content into relevant categories and use tags, keywords, and descriptions for searching purposes.
Related Guide: How to optimize your site structure for SEO
14. Optimize content for conversions
Last but not least, don’t forget that the main reason you create content is to increase conversions.
Depending on your case, conversions can be different things from getting email subscribers to banner ad clicks, to more product sales.
If your content does not produce good results then you need to change your content strategy and think of alternative ways to produce and promote content.
Hiring a professional company is always one of your best options not only for getting better results but also to give you more time to concentrate on what you are doing best.
15. Approach content marketing as long-term investment
To make money from content marketing, you first need to spend money and time.
If you have a decent amount of traffic visiting your website and following your social media pages, then with content marketing you can try and turn those visitors into customers (it’s not that easy but this is the theory).
If this is not the case and you are just starting out then this means that you need to spend money (or your time which is still valuable) to create good quality content to build your social media following and rankings.
Eventually, you will get more visits and gradually these will create enough business (or clicks if you are using AdSense as a way to make money) so that you make a profit from content marketing.
What I am trying to say is that content marketing can help a business grow financially, if you have the patience and money (or time) to do it correctly.
If you need faster results you can start with AdWords but if you want consistent results that can generate a long-term stable return then invest in content marketing.
How much does content marketing cost?
Let’s assume that you have a small business selling diet-related products. Your products are good, and your website is modern and SEO friendly, but the niche is so competitive and you hardly get any traffic from Google or social media.
What is the solution, how can you grow your business?
You can use Google Ads or Facebook ads to get traffic to your business and hopefully make enough sales to cover the advertising costs and generate a profit.
If you keep on advertising you make sales, if you stop advertising sales drop to 0.
That’s a model that works but let’s see how content marketing can turn things around and why in order to make money from content marketing, you have to spend money.
You decide to start a blog and provide advice to people looking to lose weight or start a diet.
People will read your articles and some of them will buy your products, right? Wrong.
First of all, if you start a new blog in a competitive niche you will not get any traffic unless you advertise your content.
Even if you advertise your content you won’t make any sales unless your content is of top quality and this is the part of ‘investing in content marketing that comes into place.
The solution
You have to spend time and money to create a content marketing plan that will identify the content (in this case the actual blog titles) that can make your users happy and also give you more chances in ranking.
You have to spend money to create the actual content. In this particular example, you have to hire a dietician to write the articles so that they are accurate and convincing.
You have to spend money to do the above 2 steps consistently for a number of months (or even years) until Google trusts you and until you have enough followers on social media that will LIKE and distribute your content for free.
What is the cost of content marketing so far?
Assuming that you publish 3 articles per week for 6 months and you spend on average $150 for each article (that’s a low amount for top-quality content), you end up with an initial investment of $10800.
And that excludes any money or time needed to create the plan, publish the posts and make sure that they comply with SEO practices, etc.
The point I want to make with the above example is that while content marketing works and it is the way to go, it is not a low-cost approach (either in terms of money or time) and this is why most businesses fail with content marketing.
Creating a blog and throwing content without purpose or value is a waste of both time and money.
Conclusion
Content marketing is important for all types of businesses. The benefits of content marketing are a lot and recent studies have shown that a large percentage of people (more than 70%) prefer reading articles about a company rather than reading advertorials.
When designing your content marketing strategy you need to find the right balance between content creation, user satisfaction, and conversions.
