The term “content marketing” is repeated far and wide nowadays. Many people, however, don’t understand what it takes to effectively market their content. The basic problem is that not everyone understands the distinction between content creation and content marketing. Creating content is only the first step. If you want to find an audience for your content, however, you have to actively market it.The web is saturated with content. Think of all the emails, Twitter and Facebook posts and articles you see every day. The internet is overflowing with content, to the point that many people experience information overload. For this reason, when you add your own content to the mix, it’s a real challenge for anyone to notice it. Whether you are sending out a newsletter or posting an article to your blog, you are competing with countless other units of content. Many of these will be in the same or similar niche as yours. This is why simply creating and even publishing content is not sufficient and does not equal content marketing. To actually be a content marketer, you have to take active steps that ensure people see, hear or read what you’ve created. You should start off by creating relevant, high quality content for a targeted audience. This is something you’ve probably heard before, but it bears repeating. You must have a target audience in mind for every article you write, every image you post and every video or podcast you create. Then you must focus on sharing, marketing and promoting.
[ctt title=”To actually be a content marketer, you have to take active steps that ensure people see, hear, or read what you’ve created” tweet=”You have to take active steps that ensure people see, hear, or read what you’ve created – http://ctt.ec/U9hy1+” coverup=”WNDf9″]When you create any type of content, you should get as much mileage out of it as possible. To simply post it in one place, whether it’s your blog or Facebook page is a waste of effort. It only takes a few extra seconds to share something on a variety of social media sites, social bookmarking sites, Web 2.0 sites, document sharing sites and so on. Obviously the places you will share something will depend on exactly what it is. Images can be shared on Pinterest and Instagram. Videos can be shared on a wide variety of video sharing sites such as Vimeo, Vine, MetaCafe and lots of others. Twitter and Facebook can be used for just about any type of content.
You may think that once you share something on a social site, your work is done. To get the most exposure, however, you should post to sites like Twitter and Facebook multiple times. The feeds on social sites are extremely busy and the odds of someone actually seeing what you posted go up dramatically when you repost. You don’t have to overdo it. You could, for example, tweet something three times rather than just once. This should be done at different times, to fit the varying schedules and time zones of your followers.
Repurposing means transforming one type of content into another. You can, for example, transform an article into a video or podcast and vice versa. Articles and blog posts can also be made into slideshows, which, in turn, can become videos. This allows you to get extra leverage out of everything you create.
The title of a blog post, article or video has a huge impact on how many people bother to read or view it. When creating your titles or headlines, think of both your readers and the search engines. While you definitely want to include some keywords, you should also make the title compelling and original.
While Google’s latest updates have penalized sites that use low quality links, that doesn’t mean that backlinks are no longer essential for ranking your site with the search engines. There are even rumors going around that “SEO is dead.” The truth is that as long as there are search engines, it will be important to learn how to optimize your content. Google and other search engines still use links to decide how valuable your site is. The only difference between links today and five or ten years ago is that you now have to be much more careful about where your links come from. Focus on getting links from high quality sites in your own or a similar niche. Guest blogging is still an effective way to do this. While there has been talk that Google no longer values this strategy, this is another instance where the quality of the site where your guest blog appears makes all the difference. Links from authority sites are always valuable.
If you have the budget for it, paid advertising is always a fast way to market your content and get traffic. This includes PPC, display, banner and other types of advertising. There are also offline ways to promote a website, such as mailing out postcards or advertising in magazines and trade journals.
Public relations is a field that predates the internet and is still important today. PR is increasingly connected with social media and content marketing. The best known PR technique is sending out press releases. This is another strategy that has come under fire recently. Google no longer favors the practice of blasting out press releases that are thinly disguised advertisements. Sending out a press release to legitimate news outlets for a story that’s truly newsworthy, however, can still be beneficial for links and traffic. Don’t overlook other PR techniques, such as getting interviewed by traditional media. This may include local radio stations, print publications and TV stations. You can also seek podcasts in your niche who may be looking for people to interview. In conclusion, it’s essential for business owners, bloggers and website owners to understand what content marketing is really about. In 2015 and beyond, it’s no longer enough to simply write an article, post it to your blog and hope for the best. If you want to truly make an impact and reach your audience, you must forcefully market your content.
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