6 Tips on Marketing Your Online Content

Content marketing is a simple phrase. It involves just two key elements.

“Content” which can be articles, videos and images in all their various multi-media formats.

“Marketing” which means taking that content and letting the online world knows it exists. In essence it is implementing strategies and tactics of making your ideas spread.

Marketing your content though is a challenge in a world where there are over 2 billion internet users who are bombarded with emails, streams of tweets and banner ads.

The process of content marketing involves the creation of material that is informative but is also written on a perspective which shows your business in a positive light. Good content marketing will create interest in your business, attracting traffic to your website and hopefully, sales or conversations as well.

Great content will position your business as a thought leader in its industry and it will also educate, inform, entertain and inspire.

There are many ways of doing content marketing but not all methods yield the positive results! Here are six tips to get you started on marketing your own content:

Tip 1: Drip feed your content

There is a tendency to create too much content, unleash it on the Internet and then expect it to carry traction throughout the year but this isn’t always a good idea. News and current events change all the time which means your target audience may not be searching for the same things as they were searching for two or three months ago. Publish content consistently and persistently making your sure the content you produce has some relevancy to current events and what your target audience may be interested in at the present time.

Tip 2: Monitor old content

Use Analytics and visitor level call tracking software to monitor your content. Once you find out what types of articles seem to be the most effect, you will have a better idea as to what types of content your target audience are interested in. The success of your content will be measured in many ways but broadly speaking, an article that produces a high level of the following would be considered good content:

• High Traffic
• Prompts interest and enquiries
• Generates sales

Tip 3: Make use of social media

Once your content has been published, the main objective is to get as many people to see view it who may be interested in your business and leveraging social media is an excellent place to start in order to achieve this. Posting content on your social media accounts will bring your content to those following your social media accounts. If these people like your content, they may choose to share it with their followers and a snowball effect is created which may possibly result in your content going viral!

In addition to this, we already know that Google uses social media signals when deciding your positions in the search results so an article that gets a good number of ‘Likes’, shares, comments, tweets, +1s is likely to improve your search engine positions as well.

Tip 4: Aim for quality not quantity

Hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of content are created every day. A web surfer is spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing content to read. Creating an interesting title will definitely be effective in getting a user to click on your article rather than the next person’s article but a poorly written, uninteresting article will just get scanned and then discarded. This means no social love and definitely no enquiries or sales.

Find out what your target audience are interested in and create high quality, engaging, thought provoking content that they would be interested in. no doubt in the time needed to create one high quality article, you could’ve possibly created two, or maybe three low quality articles but that one high quality article will prove more beneficial than three lower quality ones.

Tip 5: Incorporate the right amount of SEO

Your article needs to be able to turn up in search engine results pages (the holy grail is to be on page one at the top of the page) and then by having the right headline and description attract the right people. To do this, you should include some relevant keywords into your article but don’t overdo it. Adding too many keywords may result in the article losing its readability factor. As a general rule you should always add keywords but the article should be written for a human, not a search engine.

Tip 6: Inform rather than sell

People receive sales pitches all the time, be it in the electrical store, through the post, a popup advert on the Internet or whilst passing a billboard. They’ve become very good at noticing a blatant attempt to make them purchase something which is why all marketing articles should aim to inform rather than sell a product. Provide genuinely useful information on a topic which would allow you to mention your product or service along with some of its merits. A well written article will make the reader come to a conclusion without sounding like a sales pitch.

At the centre of any content marketing strategy is the creation of high quality content. Once high quality content has been created, it needs to be promoted and monitored using web analytics and call tracking solutions. Do this and you will well on your way to having a successful content marketing strategy.

Guest Author:  Rashed Khan from Response Tap who specialise in call tracking.

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