As we have already covered in many different posts on this website, having a great and agile content strategy is of crucial importance to any type of business. If you want to see some real results from your activities on the Web, you need to think ahead. Not just one or two posts. You need to think far, far into the future.
Big or small, it doesn’t really matter what size is your business, if you’re using content as a tool to promote your brand, services or expertise online, you need to invest some serious brain power into its design. Everything has to be there for a reason. There’s no room for impulse posting. You need to create a good plan, back it up with some bulletproof knowledge and choose your battles if you want to see your efforts pay off.
You cannot just write and publish everything that comes to mind about anything and expect people to notice your work. No. You need to find your niche, get familiar with your potential audience, check their pulse and dominate that market.
Most people tend to see content strategy and content marketing as synonyms. Although closely connected, content strategy and content marketing are terms that stand for two different things. Like any other strategy, content strategy points to a field of practice useful for different purposes, like marketing and product or service development, while the term content marketing is usually used to describe the amplification of everything written in two rows above.
There are numerous of questions that you need to answer when coming up with your content strategy. One of the most important of all is: How do you plan to market your articles?
Article marketing is one of the most basic and powerful promotion methods. Although quite effective, it’s frequently underappreciated and underutilized. Most business just fail to see the real value behind it.
When you really sit and think about it, article marketing is nothing more than content that is meant to live elsewhere. His main job is to serve as an ambassador abroad for your business and create great impressions about your work.
Although Google Panda has brought some serious changes to the table and helped most of our competitors lose their rankings, article marketing is still something worth producing. If fact, now that all the noise is gone, it’s a lot easier to generate great leads via article marketing.
Every article marketing strategy should focus on 5 things: Audience, brand, personal goals, keywords and headline. Before you start writing your article, you should always have a clear picture in your head who are you trying to reach, how and why.
In order to help you have a better picture on why you should invest more than just a few brain cells into creating and distributing your content all around the web, I’ve came up with a list of 4 major reasons on why your online business should have an article marketing strategy:
Reason 1: Domain Authority and Rankings
Basically, article marketing is a way on how you can easily and successfully improve your domain authority and position in Search Engine results for some of your favorite and most valuable keywords.
It consists of creating short pieces of content, providing a hyperlink to your website, and posting these articles to different directories on the internet such as medium.com.
Article marketing does several things. It can basically be seen as a form of free advertising that helps you raise your brand awareness beyond your site. It helps you spread the word about your work and your business in a fresh and organic way.
Article marketing is all about producing great content and finding more and more high-authority places where you can amplify it. The more material there is about your business on the internet, the more people who will be exposed to your business. Simple as that.
Promoting articles outside of your own website can get you a lot of traffic, which in turn will boost your articles’ likelihood of getting higher rankings in Google, especially if you’re just starting your business.
Reason 2: Website Traffic
Articles drive traffic to your website. They help people come into contact with your business. Every article you post basically creates a first impression for business. It’s like some sort of a visit card. Apropos that, we can agree that if people don’t like your writing, the chances are they won’t like your products and services as well? It’s quite important that you do all that you can in order to provide your potential customers with quality content.
If you manage to interest your targeted audience, once the reader gets to the end of the article, he or she is invited to click on the link at the end for more information about you. By providing lots of high-quality content, you can capture prospects that are searching for information.
For instance, they may enter a product name or keyword phrase into a search engine. The more articles you have in cyberspace about that topic, the more likely that one of these articles will be displayed in the results.
Like I already wrote above, article marketing builds authority. The more times people see your brand name in all sorts of scenarios, the more likely they’ll develop some sort of memory of your work. They might remember you as someone who’s fun and interesting, and thus, form a quite positive opinion about your company, or they can even see you as someone to whom they can come when they’re in need of all sorts of answers or advice about a particular niche.
When done correctly, article marketing can push you higher in the search results, placing you higher than your competition.
Reason 3: Search Engine Optimization
Apart from raising awareness and building up brand authority, article marketing also helps with optimizing your website for search engines (SEO). The number of times a site is accessed through external links (called “backlinking”) is one of the most important things in SEO. The more different backlinks you have, the higher the site ranks. Making it easy for prospects to find you is critical to promoting your business.
SEO and content marketing come together on so many different fields. As Neil wrote in his Kissmetrics blog post: “SEO makes demands, content delivers.”
I know that there are a lot of internet marketing professionals out there who claim that article marketing is dead. I disagree. It’s not dead, it’s just different. I have a few friends who not only gain effective SEO results but also earn money from their article marketing. How? – By producing great content, of course.
Almost every their article get picked up by some niche website. Then they contact to the particular website owners and write guest posts for their websites once in a while and earn money.
All they have to do is write an article which people actually want to read. You can do the same. It will not give you an overnight fame and fortune but once you taste it, you’ll see just how article marketing can still play a great part in your success story.
According to Rand Fishkin, guest blogging is still pretty much alive. Watch this Whiteboard Friday video on MOZ to learn more on how you can achieve your goals by writing stuff for other websites.
Reason 4: Reputation Management
Yes, article marketing can help you build a solid reputation for yourself and your brand online. It’s true. There’s no better way to gain new customers and make them trust you and your services than by showcasing your expertise on different high-authority sites that they already love.
When people are searching for information online, articles about your business or industry can steer them to your website. By providing great, detailed and actually useful information, you are cultivating relationships with your potential customers. The more information you provide, the easier it will be for you to transform these prospects into customers.
I remember, Rand Fishkin of MOZ once said that, according to their data, it takes around seven visits to their website before people even consider signing up for a free trial for one of their products.
Article marketing is all about the numbers. You need to produce tons and tons of great content if you want to see some significant results from your work. Don’t expect that one article is going to bring you thousands of new customers. Don’t get me wrong, it might, but the chances are that it won’t, which is also ok, if you setup realistic expectations for your article marketing strategy.
Thank you for reading this post. If you have any questions or just something to add, feel free to write your thoughts in the comments sections below.
That’s it for now,
Take care.
Goran @ AltusHost B.V.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
