Google wants people who use its search engine to find what they are looking for – good quality information about whatever product, service, place, person, or other topic that they are interested in.
Here’s a simple checklist for you to refer to when building a content marketing strategy:
- First & foremost, write the content – don’t cut corners, make it so good that whoever reads it will want to come back for more, over and over again. If you can’t do that, and most people can’t, then hire someone who can.
- Publish the content on your site
- Find other, relevant, places to publish your content in a different from, i.e. rewritten so as to avoid it being identified as duplicate copy.
- Remember that content doesn’t have to be text. consider including video, graphical, (e.g Infographics), and audio content on your website as well and then publish it elsewhere, e.g. YouTube – the world’ second largest search engine and Pinterest – a great place to publish great graphics and build up a following.
When you have the content in place, then it’s time to make sure people can see it. If you already have a website that is visited by thousands of people on a daily basis then you have little to worry about – but if you don’t, which is probably why you’re reading this article, then you need to get the content out there where people can see it, interact with it and follow it back to your website so that they can find more.
There we have the part of the content marketing equation that is most often missed, or misunderstood, by would be content markets – how can you get your content out there where it can be seen. Fear not, dear reader, for unlike those who would have you struggle to be seen in an increasingly crowded and complicated online world, I shall be showing you exactly how to break through the confines of your own website and harness the power of true content marketing to bring those much needed visitors to you.
This is probably the time where I should introduce you to our range of Content Marketing courses which have been designed to take you from beginner to accomplished content marketer in just a few short hours but, as they say, “I’m not here to sell you anything”, at least not yet.
So lets look at how to go about achieving escape velocity with your content marketing.
We already mention above that if you are going to use content to market your company it needs to be stellar stuff, content that stands up to the competition you will no doubt face. Hire a great copywriter to do this for you. It is the best investment you can make and your audience will appreciate it.
Then we need to get it out there, in front of the right people,and that’s by far the most difficult part to do properly so here’s how it’s done.
Guest Blogging
The big attraction of guest blogging is that is gives you an opportunity to put your content in front of an audience that is already committed to the website on which your blog will appear. Bloggers often welcome guest posts from competent and well informed guests as it takes off the pressure for them to find material themselves on a daily basis and, in return, they are usually happy for you to include a link through to your own website where the reader can find more of your content.
I should stress however, at this point, that I am not recommending that you use guest blogging as a means of obtaining backlinks to your website for SEO purposes. Google doesn’t approve of this and is not above putting penalties into place for those who do it.
It’s OK for you to ask for a link so that people can come to your site to see more of what you have to offer but these links should be of the “no follow” variety that do not pass on pagerank authority and are ignored by Google.
Google’s SEO guru, Matt Cutts, who lead the team responsible for policing the web from the point of view of spam prevention, gave this advice; “OK, I’m calling it: If you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.”
So how then do you get the opportunity to write a guest post for a well-established blog? You could just send the blog owner a polite request, but they are likely to be receiving many of these and are likely to ignore it unless they know you, know of you or you have been recommended to them.
There is, however, another way.
