Content marketing is known by many other names, such as internet marketing, social media marketing, digital marketing or even online marketing. This is a way of promoting a brand, business, products or services on the Internet using tons of tools for the purpose of driving traffic, generating leads and making sales.
Internet marketing covers a whole host of promoting strategies and tactics, such as promoting using Pay Per Click (PPC), search, email, videos and content, to name a few.
One way to get a know-how of online marketing is to read up on the subject, and you need experience to see it in action. When content is high quality, it can do wonders for your business. Given below are the most popular content types that can help you get your business off the ground and set it up for great online success.
1. Content Marketing Basics Using Blog Posts
Blog posts and articles are the most popular types of content on the internet. A blog is a like a library that sends readers to your website. Or it can serve like a tree trunk. Each blog post is like a branch of the tree that reaches different corners of the web and search engines love it (especially when you SEO blog posts). The most popular content management system for blogging is WordPress (although WordPress CMS can be used for any type of website including eCommerce)
When an online searcher comes across your blog posts through search engines, they may follow it to get to your site. And those visitors may find your products useful and place orders right there and then.
From a SEO point of view, targeting your ideal audience through many different search cycles will set your website as the authority. Meaning, when creating content to rank higher in search, don’t just focus on how many visitors you may get per day week or month but rather see the long term implication of your blog post creation.
For example: I’ve created how to rank for keyword fast and also rank in Google in 24 Hours related content 3 years ago, and people are still finding that content through Google search. That means, just do the math for long term web site traffic your blog posts will bring.
2. Infographics is Under Utilized Content Marketing Strategy
On Page SEO guide (PDF Infographic)
As far as content marketing goes, infographics is a great means of providing valuable information in an easy to understand manner. They may consist of illustrations, pictures, graphs and charts or anything that will be appreciated by your audience.
The great thing about infographics is that they are easy to digest and share over the Internet. When creating PDF’s, remember that Google can understand the content within Adobe PDF’s including links, that means you want to also optimize that content from an SEO point of view by including hyperlinks as well (when shared, it will count as a backlink).
3. Case Studies
Case studies also make for a greatly effective content marketing strategy. Generally, a case study is a detailed review of an action that your business took that brought a lot of success to your customers.
For instance, by doing a case study, an digital agency may showcase how their professionals carried out a content marketing campaign. According to many other experts, case studies are a powerful way to nurture strategic business relationship.
4. Podcasts
I’ll be quite honest by saying I haven’t explored creating my own Podcasts but have interacted with those who successfully use this type of content marketing. And as a business owner and online marketer, if writing blog posts are not your cup of tea, you can try other methods which may be more ideal both for yourself and also your target audience.
If you don’t know, podcasts are like radio shows or storytelling that can be published anywhere online including on a blog. People can also download each podcast, which is usually in the form of an mp3 audio file, and can listen to it however and whenever they want.
Podcasts are a great means of internet marketing for those who are good interviewers and speakers and they your audience likes to listen audio on their mobile devices. Podcasts can help you share valuable information in an easy way. I like to think of Podcasts as your voice being cast over the digital space to reach the ears of those who are interested in your voice. Find your unique voice online.
5. YouTube Video Marketing
YouTube is the largest video sharing platform on the planet, videos are watched and uploaded by millions of people each day. According to the reports from Social Media specialists, more than 500 million hours of videos are viewed on YouTube on a daily basis, today around 82% of internet users will watch videos instead of spending time reading articles or blog posts.
And we don’t need to explain why videos are going to become more popular method of content consumption for the foreseeable future. Videos are interesting, entertaining and engaging; information shared in videos is easy to digest as well particularly for visual viewers and learners. For example how to videos by RankYa is popular with over 40+K followers and over a million views so far.
As a content marketer or a professional, you may want to produce informative videos to get your message across to your viewers through your blog, website or YouTube channel. But whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of treating your YouTube channel as a means to create commercial promotions only (that hardly works). Also, note that you can control the privacy of YouTube videos by setting them public, unlisted, or private.
Since videos are popular, you need not stop with YouTube because you can also promote the same videos on Facebook Vimeo and others. Furthermore, each video you create can include a backlink to related web pages within the video description = natural backlinks Google loves.
How Content Marketing Helps SEO?
When you think of content, remember that you are dealing with technology. Even if you see a stunning image or video on a website, computer programs don’t look at content same as we do. For complex algorithms, its all 1’s and 0’s binary data. Therefore, although you would not embark on Social Media Marketing for the sake of Google rankings, realize that content marketing helps search engine optimization in a sense that you can obtain natural backlinks through the content you shared (or website visitors shared), and also because more people will be able to find your website due to content marketing, this compounds backlink count over time which in-return helps you gain even more backlinks as well as exposure for your brand.
How can content marketing help with SEO? You’ll attract more people to your website, and Google follows people. You’ll obtain natural backlinks over time, and Google follows links.
Online Marketing is Continual Process
Regardless of your industry, you can find fresh and creative content marketing strategies, growing and thriving an online business requires time and effort on your part. However, the rewards await you.
