Have you been implementing content marketing for your business lately but have not been getting results? First, let me congratulate you on your step to take content marketing serious. A lot of businesses will be taking content marketing serious in 2014 following revelations that content marketers are producing more content than they did a year ago.
If you’re just about to start using content marketing for your business, while I hate to tell you this, you’re coming on the band wagon a lot late. However, these ten secrets of content marketing will help make you feel as if you’ve been in the game for a long time.
So read on to find out the content marketing secrets that will help you make a mark in your industry.
#1. Blogging is as Powerful as Social Media in Content Marketing
In a study conducted by Tactic to determine B2B content marketing usage, results show that, even though social media takes the lead for the most used form of content marketing, 76% of marketers use blogs as the preferred form of content marketing. This is not for no reason, considering that blogs gives the content owner more control than any other form of social media.
If you want to take content marketing serious and consider it your core means of link acquisition, then you need to have a blog through which you will publish contents regularly.
For added SEO advantage your blog should be a directory on your main website, eg: yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com. Since blogs give websites more indexed pages, you don’t want to have a leak in this area.
#2. Keyword is VERY Important in Content Marketing
Creating blog posts for your website can help you kill several birds with a single stone! Using contents to improve your site’s dominance on Google for a particular keyword is one of the birds you’ll be killing with one single stone. But the fact is that this is an underused method among several webmasters.
To increase the effectiveness of your content marketing, ensure you’re optimizing your content with the keywords you want your website to rank for.
Using a keyword planner tool will help you to better optimize each blog post for the keywords you want your site to rank for. It is however, very important that you avoid overusing a particular keyword in your blog posts to prevent attracting penalties from Google. Using a word too often in a blog post can result in keyword stuffing which will attract a Google penalty.
#3. Constant Publishing Will Increase Traffic, but Quality is Better
If you’re looking for traffic, then consistently publishing content is going to pay off. However, high quality content will always win. A B2B report based on study of inbound marketing trends revealed that 82% of marketers that blog daily are able to get clients from their blogs as opposed to 57% of marketers who only blog monthly.
If you do not have so much incentive to blog daily, then this report might be a good reason for you to do so.
#4. Linking Out in Your Content Actually Boosts SEO
If you’ve been linking out to authority sources in your blog posts, then I have good news for you. Linking out to authority sources in your content can help you boost your search engine rankings and increase the amount of traffic you get from Google.
There might be several reasons this boosts SEO, but the most logical reason I embrace is that it shows you’ve put a lot of time into research for the content. And this will also help readers trust your content more.
So when next you’re writing a blog post, make sure you’re linking out to relevant authority sources.
#5. Citing Experts in Your Content Will Increase it’s Chances of Going Viral
It’s only logical that your content go viral by citing experts and authorities in your industry in your blog post. For instance, a roundup of expert advice that I did last year comprised of a lot of authorities like Neil Patel, Brian Dean and others and because of their participation in the content, it easily went viral.
So if you want your content to easily go viral, a guaranteed way to do this is to get input from authorities and respected people in your industry.
#6. Long-form Blogging and Infographics Drive the Most Awareness and Sales
Even as people’s attention span decreases, long-form blogging alongside infographics has proven to be the most reliable form of content marketing to drive sales and awareness for businesses. If you’re limiting your content marketing efforts to just social media sites, this means you’re not making the most out of the idea of content marketing.
Long-form blogging will help your business gain sustainable growth by increasing traffic to your website. Infographics on the other hand is known to help earn droves of backlinks.
BTW, you can hire us to increase your company’s website backlinks by using inbound marketing methods.
#7. Blogging Boosts Search Traffic, Faster than SEO
You know that a new or existing website needs the touch of expert SEO to increase search visibility, right? With the right SEO team on your website, search engines will crawl and index your website pages faster and help increase targeted traffic.
But did you know that blogging will increase customers even better? According to an inbound marketing ROI data, blogging leads the way when it comes to traffic generation while SEO takes the second position.
What this means is not to discredit SEO, but it is to encourage you to pay more attention to blogging.
#8. Blogging Can Cure Online Reputation Crisis
For people suffering from ORM crisis or online reputation management crisis, starting a blog can help you improve your online identity. By creating a blog in your own name, or by authoring the posts published on your company’s website, the content that are written will help suppress the negatives that your name ranks for in search engines.
While hiring a professional ORM company to help you solve your online reputation problems is the best option, starting a blog that is attributed to your name will go a long way in improving your identity online.
#9. Graphics Perform Better in Social Media Marketing
When your content marketing includes social media, you might want to know what type of contents work best for each social networking sites. While for twitter, it is reported that texts perform better than images images still perform well on Twitter.
For Google+ and Facebook, images are the leading champion, and the same goes with Pinterest and Instagram. See here.
#10. Content Marketing is Cheaper than Traditional, and Performs Better Still
When it comes to cost, content marketing is the unbeaten champion at cost effectiveness. When compared to your traditional marketing spend, content marketing will cost you 67% less and will generate 3 times the amount of leads per dollar spent (Demand Metric).
When you’re planning your next marketing budget, you might want to consider content marketing as a better alternative for your brand’s online presence.
What other content marketing secrets do you know about? Feel free to share your findings with us in the comment section.
