Content Marketing—for Your Website and Beyond
“The only marketing left is content marketing.”
–Seth Godin, Marketing Guru
Content marketing is providing useful, helpful, interesting, authoritative articles, audio podcasts, videos, images, and other rich media that engage people. The content can be online or offline; however, we’re focused on the online publishing aspects for advertisers and publishers in performance marketing. Outstanding, fresh content is one important factor to distinguish your merchant or affiliate website in the search engines and with online searchers.
Marketers are all publishers today. You need to think like an editor.
Here are some ways you can get in on the content marketing revolution:
- Create video, audio, slides, rich media and article content that is helpful, informative, fun, and engaging.
- Develop a marketing plan for each key piece of content; it can be reworked and repurposed into a different form, such as article to video to podcast to slide show.
- Publish the content on your site and blog, as well as on syndication and sharing sites such as YouTube, iTunes, SlideShare, and eZineArticles.
- Promote the content on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter and in online news releases
- Use tools to automate updates to social media. For example, now you can easily import your blog posts into your Facebook fan page, then automate Facebook to send an update to Twitter, and automate Twitter to update your individual LinkedIn profile page, use services such as Posterous or Ping to update all your social media outlets at once.
- Update your LinkedIn company profile page and other directory listings with content that has changed or is new.
- Generate links and additional traffic back to the site for conversions by commenting on key influencers’ blogs and forums, answering LinkedIn questions and other Q & A sites with a helpful link back to an article on your site or in your email signature.
- Continue to build Web traffic organically as it is viewed, shared, and promoted by others.
With a little bit of creativity, some time and effort, and not a lot of money, you can attract visitors to your website and make them fans of your business before they even buy. Then, when they need your services, you will be “top of mind.” That’s the beauty of content marketing–another useful tool in your online marketing toolkit.
By Sally Anne Dishong, SEO + Social Media Content Editor




