What is content marketing you ask? Content marketing is creating valuable content with the intention of attracting consumers to your business online.
It is probably safe to assume that you are asking how this pertains to you and your business or blog. To put it mildly, content marketing can drive masses of traffic to your websites.
The goal of most website owners is to rank high in the search engines, drive loads of traffic to their sites and make some money. Especially in the blogging arena. You would be hard pressed to find a blogger who doesn’t wish to make some money with their blog.
Content marketing can and will help in this area. Listed below are the top 3 reasons why you need content marketing.
- Brand Engagement– While you are posting articles on your blog, you are building your brand. Your brand can be your blog, your product, anything having to do with your business. People want to interact with you and your brand. Therefore, you need content discussing that brand and encouraging consumer interaction. That is, whether you want people to consume your product or just your blog posts.
- Social Media Matters- Nowadays, it’s not just keywords that propel your blog to the top of the Google charts; but it’s your social media interaction as well. Why do you think all the fortune 500 companies now have Twitter buttons or Facebook “like” buttons? They know a good content marketing strategy will elevate their social presence and sky-rocket them to the first page of Google. Google looks at a business or blog’s influence in the social spheres and rewards kindly for movers and shakers. So, ensure that your content is easily able to be shared and linked to.
- SEO- Search engine optimization is not going away. As a matter of fact it is becoming more stringent with new algorithms. Google is making an honest attempt at returning only valid, relevant results to searchers. For example, when a user would search for “dog training tips”, they do not want to see an article from 2003 as the top result. Users want real-time results returned to them and only the latest and greatest information. To this end, you need content marketing to market your brand so to speak. You need the search engines to find you and rank you; then you will have traffic coming to your site to digest all of your top-notch content. When running a blog, all you have to lay as a foundation is your content, so why not market it correctly?
We have become a very consumer-centric society and social media reigns supreme in this area. Brand and content go hand in hand and one can not succeed without the other. If you lack the content marketing skills necessary to get your information in front of real people, your site or blog will become a ghost town.
Think of it this way, a football player can have all the skill in the world, but if no one notices him, then what does he have? If he doesn’t market himself and his “content” he will never make it to the top.
The same goes for your blog. If you write content without SEO in mind or without utilizing social media, what happens to your blog now? Nothing. Exactly nothing. If you have been lacking a content marketing strategy and have left out some key aspects in this area, I urge you to take a look at how you can improve.
It is not a difficult task, but an important one. One that will make or break your online efforts in no time at all.
