Content Marketing – Strategies that Work

Content marketing is still the reigning king,even in the age of video, live streaming, and social media.

Using content marketing you can build successful campaigns that will drive in traffic, and bolster sales and prospect activity.

It’s also still the most effective way for both new and seasoned marketers to connect with potential leads.

What is Successful in Content Marketing?

Successful content marketing requires more effort and thought. It requires a more complex strategy than ever before, but it’s certainly not difficult to do.

There is a system – an absolute formula – for creating successful content marketing campaigns. And I’m going to lay it all out on the line for you.

Outdated Content Marketing Tactics

Here are a few tactics that either don’t work anymore, or don’t work as effectively as they once did.

Keep an eye out for these, so you don’t end up penalized by the major search engines:

Keyword Stuffing

Never, ever include the same keyword any more than necessary to convey the point of your article. You could get penalized or even banned from search engines if you try stuffing too many keywords into your content.

Backlink Farming

While it’s still important to build backlinks to your websites from authority sites. Getting too many backlinks too quickly, or obtaining a lot of low quality links will do nothing for you. And may even cause your site to be penalized by the search engines. Instead, focus on building quality links over a longer period of time. Slow and steady.

Keyword Domain Names

The tactic of registering keyword-based domains in order to rank better in the search engines isn’t always successful. While it won’t get you penalized. It won’t necessarily help your ranking either. Instead, register domain names that are easy for visitors to spell. Are relevant to your website’s content, and help you build brand recognition. And make sure they’re memorable!

Overuse Of Anchor Text For Backlinks

Years ago it was vital that you use your main keyword in all or most of your backlinks. But these days you could be penalized for that. Instead, you should spread your backlink anchor text amongst a range of components. Such as your page and article titles, main keyword used within content, keyword variations, etc.

Pages For Every Variation Of A Keyword

Many people used to create a brand new article (which was usually just a slight variation of another similar article) for every single variation of a keyword. These days that’s not a good idea. One long, high quality article is much, much better than 10 or more thinner articles.

Basic Content Marketing Strategy

Since it takes so long for newer sites to gain traction in the search engines these days. It’s actually a better idea to focus more on getting traffic from other sources. Like social media, rather than specifically focusing on search engine traffic. Not only will you get more traffic faster, but you will actually boost your SEO rankings significantly!

A basic strategy would look something like this:

Write long, high quality articles between 900 and 1,200 words each and post them to your website or blog.

Optimize them for the search engines with relevant keywords used throughout content, article titles and create a linking strategy that directs readers to other relevant articles on your website.

Social like/share buttons on every page of your website or blog.

Share all of your content to your own social media profiles.

Ask your followers and visitors to like, share, and comment.

Build links naturally.

Key Performance Metrics

In order to gauge the success of your content marketing efforts. There are a few key performance metrics you should pay attention to.

Most marketers just look at their traffic logs to judge whether their content marketing is successful. But there’s so much more to it than that.

Traffic

Obviously traffic is your most important metric.

Not only should you pay attention to your overall website traffic, but to a few other important traffic metrics, as well such as:

Traffic to individual articles – This will help you decide what your visitors are most interested in reading about. And whether or not you’ve been delivering that to them.

Where your traffic is coming from – If you’re getting very little traffic from certain sources and more from others. You can either choose to focus on those you’re successful with to get even more traffic from them. Or focus more on those you’re getting very little from in an attempt to increase traffic from those sources.

How many people are sharing your content – It’s very important to find out how many people are liking and sharing your content. Because this will tell you whether you’re truly reaching your audience or not. People won’t like and share content that doesn't interest them.

Comments – Comments are always a good indicator of whether or not your content is living up to the standards people expect. If you receive very few comments. Or people don’t have a lot of positive things to say. It might mean you’re not hitting the right points with your content.

Conversion rate – Pay close attention to your conversion rates to see if your content is doing its job. Your content is useless if all it’s doing is attracting traffic. That traffic must also convert into email subscribers, CPA leads, sales, etc.

Impact

The bottom line is making sure your content marketing efforts have a positive net effect on your business. Rather than a negative one. There are several ways your content marketing can actually have a negative net impact on your business. And that’s something you want to avoid at all costs.

Negative impact can be caused by a number of things:

-Poor quality content

-Content that doesn’t resonate

-Content that sells without informing

Positive impact happens when you create high quality content that truly connects and resonates with your target audience.

How to Create Content Marketing that Converts

Anticipating exactly what kind of content your audience is most interested in. Is difficult to do without first conducting market research.

The key is to research potential content before you write it. And there are a few ways to accomplish that quickly and easily.

Social Media

The first easy way is to evaluate social media, like Facebook or twitter. To look for articles that have received a high number of likes, retweets and shares.

That’s a clear indication that the type of content being shared is well received. And in demand by your target audience.

You can also keep tabs on the type of content that has very few likes and shares. To see if you can spot why it may have performed so poorly. You can look for the differences between poorly received content and information that generated a positive response from your target audience.

Quite often it isn’t just about which author had the larger following, but about the type of content itself.

Social media provides you with a clear and concise snapshot of content that is being widely distributed.

Through sharing and content that is stale (no retweets, limited sharing), making it easy for you to create content based on the formats proven to be successful.

This type of market research also puts you in the seat of your potential prospect. Providing you with a different perspective on what you would find engaging. And what kind of content truly reaches out to you and pulls you in.

Comments

Another easy way to research what people are looking for. Is to explore the comments pertaining to an article on popular websites in your market.

Make sure to also include Facebook comments, blog comments, etc. This type of direct feedback can be an absolute goldmine of information. And will help to shape the type of content you decide to create for your audience.

Setting Yourself Apart with your Content Marketing

Let’s take a look at some ways you can set yourself apart and develop the most effective content marketing strategy possible.

Create A Content Plan

Most people go into content marketing without a plan or strategy in place. They think simply writing articles for their blog or website, and sharing links to those articles through social media is enough.

It isn’t if you want to create high performing content marketing campaigns. You need to take things a step further, and develop a plan of action as well as a content plan.

Don’t Forget Existing Content

If you’ve been in content marketing for a while, you may already have a base of content you’ve built up. Maybe it’s not performing well or isn’t receiving a lot of exposure.

It can be remarkably effective to go back and edit that older content. In order to add new information, update material, remove anything that has become outdated. And improve the quality of the content itself.

Include Multiple Formats

You can also take existing content and rebrand it into other content formats. Such as by creating a SlideShare, a video or an infographic. Repurposing content is also an affordable way to breathe new life into content. While providing your website with new material at no cost.

These days,want to see interesting images, infographics, videos, slideshows, reports, and more. They are looking for magazine-quality content or better. If you can’t deliver that, there are thousands of other sites that can.

Conclusion

Content is still King, and it always will be. Without high quality content, you will struggle to draw in prospects, gain interest from new customers, or build a recognized brand in your industry.

It takes more work, more effort, than ever before. But that means you have a chance to stand out. While others still cling to that bygone era of easy traffic through outdated methods.

To Your Success,

Joshua