Content marketing is a process through which companies use compelling content – articles, books, case studies, blogs, testimonials, videos, podcasts and others – to attract, engage, convert and retain website traffic. A content marketing plan is essentially the strategy of attack; how those content assets are formulated, created, marketed and promoted to achieve a specific goal. It’s a simple concept but one that has a lot of potential when used properly. The process includes defining and researching the target market; creating relevant content for them; sharing this content with your target audience regularly; and engaging them in the process. To help you with this process and in turn, transform website traffic into money-making opportunities, read on:
Creating a compelling content marketing strategy begins by defining your target audience and researching your potential competitors. This will give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t. If you are new to Internet marketing, start small, create one or two pieces of useful original content and then share these with your target audience. By doing this, you’ll be able to gauge their reaction to your content and if they’re enjoying it, you’ll be able to increase your production and move on to another strategy. But for those who want to take things to the next level, creating an extensive b2b content marketing strategy that incorporates social media, viral marketing and SEO strategies is highly recommended.
In order to make your content marketing efforts pay off, it is important to understand how to drive website traffic from search engines. One way is to optimize your website for certain keywords; another is to link your blog or website to relevant authority websites. If you don’t have any idea how to do this, try to join discussion boards on the topics you’re interested in and use their “contact” form to ask them if you can leave a comment or link to one of their articles.
Content marketing allows you to provide your readers with useful and timely information. Aside from that, website traffic gained through such efforts also builds backlinks to your own site, which in turn increases your search engine rankings. Backlinks are important because they improve your page rank; in turn, this means more visitors to your site and thus, more website traffic. The result is that you get more website traffic and the ability to make more sales.
One of the most powerful ways to use content marketing is to use it as the main ingredient of your blog. If you are still starting up your blog, start by writing about topics related to your field of interest. As your readership grows, you can incorporate other useful content into your blog, as well as post some excerpts from your own book or website. You may also want to write guest posts on other blogs, which are posted by people who have a good way of presenting information. This is a great way to attract blog readers because not only do you increase your own credibility and visibility, you also give other bloggers a chance to share their own ideas and experience.
Of course, content marketing should never replace quality content with information. However, content written to promote your website traffic is often an excellent complement to quality content. For example, if you are writing an article about a certain travel company, you could include a few helpful tips about that particular travel company or even a quote about its services. In this way, both the content marketing and the quality content work hand in hand to create one powerful strategy to promote your website traffic.