Content marketing basics are fundamental and essential. Content marketing will help you acquire customers by creating relevant and valuable content. As content marketing is already mainstream, competition has become tougher than before.
What content are your potential customers looking for? How can you build your content in a way that helps your customers take action on your site (i.e. make their purchase decisions)? Most importantly, how can content marketing help your online business become more profitable?
To answer these questions, you need to know the following 7 essentials of content marketing basics before you start out with a content marketing strategy.
1. Create content in your niche
It is important to create your niche site around your users. You need to really understand your business objectives and strengths.
By publishing content that demonstrate your industry expertise and highlights your business’s unique strengths and services, you’ll help establish a loyal audience of the exact types of people your are trying to target for your business. It’s just like shooting in the dark without a clearly defined niche.
2. Create link bait content
Links especially from other websites are vital to SEO because the more links you have on your site, the more search traffic and customers you will get.
Once you established a quality site, then you need to create link bait content to acquire such natural links from other websites. This can be a painfully slow process at the beginning.
To create link bait content, you need to take a little effort to stimulate your audience’s emotional reaction. For example, you can create content that is controversial, funny, moving, or which attracts on any other natural emotions.
3. Quality over quantity
Does a website get a better overall ranking if it has a large amount of basic articles rather than a few amazing articles? It is true that if you have more content, you have more different keywords and have more opportunities to show up on top of search engines.
However, more articles or pages on your website doesn’t guarantee a higher ranking on search engines. Search engines such as Google like your site more if you have more good quality content. Therefore, you need to concentrate on creating quality content that is helpful and interesting to your audiences.
4. Create content in different formats
Quality content doesn’t have to be written and text is not the only media format. Other media formats like audio and video have become more and more popular in recent years. If you are not good at writing, then think about implementing video or audio content on your website.
5. Drive people to read your content
Many online marketers have overlooked one important thing: promote the content to drive people to read it. This is simply because they are so glad to have the content finished.
However, writing is only half of the battle. After you complete your content, you need to spend time promoting your content to the public.
One of the best ways to promote your content is to use social media platforms, such as Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, etc. In the article “ Social media marketing: a new trend to market your business”, you can get some ideas on why social media marketing is important and how it works.
6. Update content frequently
Search engines such as Google like fresh content on website. They search how often a website is updated. The more you update your website, the more likely that you can get a higher ranking and the more people will see your website.
In addition, updating your site content on a regular basis can make people believe that your site is a trusted source of information. Therefore, this will attract more returned visitors to your site.
7. Create content for different devices
The rise of smartphones and tablets has changed our life. People spend more time browsing on mobile devices in these days. I have seen many people glue their faces on the screens of their mobile devices while they are waiting or on the public transit. Therefore, it is very important that your content is optimized for those mobile devices.
