Coaching For Success
Posts tagged content marketing
Repurposing Your Web Content
Sep 6th
Business Internet marketing is an art form. There are numerous online routes through which you can promote your business and many platforms to which you can post valuable content and redirect Internet traffic to your business website.
One of the hardest thing to do is have good unique content to post to all of these platforms as posting the same content on all them could potentially hurt your ranking efforts, your promotional campaign and will become a mundane activity. This post discusses some tips to help you bring variation to each platform of your content by repurposing it.
Concept of repurposing
The aim of repurposing content is to bring some variation to the way a message in an article is conveyed in different places online. The overall intent of the message may remain the same but it should be presented in different forms so as not to kill the interest of visitors or make search engines see your site or articles as spam.
The variation can be in simple things like textural changes or images. There can also be variations in the message delivery by use of video or audio as well. The objective of repurposing your content is to promotionally market your Internet business to a wider audience area in the hope that it will develop interest among your target audience on those platforms to visit your website and be a part of your business.
Using variations to change your article format
An article can be in the form of text, video, audio or images. Depending upon the media habits of the audience visiting any chosen platform on which you are going to promote an article you can choose the appropriate format to change the article into.
If you are promoting your website on video sites like ‘YouTube’, you should try to do either a short video promoting the article or better still do a video article post where you actually read (naturally of course, this is not the 10 o’clock news) the article and use a bit of ad lib –ing.
This is great as you can record the audio as well and use that later for audio sites. You can also use simple PowerPoint presentations you read over which always work well instead of just displaying simple text on video. You can also post these PowerPoint presentations on websites like ‘scribd.com’ to help your Internet marketing efforts.
Promotion on social networks like ‘Facebook’ can be effectively done by participating in discussions and posting links of your website. The message can again be conveyed in a more personal way and can also incorporate video, audio text and images. When discussing an article or topic try not to go in guns blazing but get a feel for the people who might be interested the best way is to offer advice for free on the topic or ask a question that will allow you to bring the topic into play.
Text articles are best promoted through various article directories like ‘ezineArticles.com’ remember to either spin or change the wording in these articles so as to have variation. The audio version can be uploaded on sites like ‘BlogTalkRadio’. The important thing to remember is that content on your website should be different from the ones which you post on other forums. Any kind of offer or additional information you want to give free (i.e. an ebook) should always direct prospective customers back to your Internet business website.
Variations possible in the content of message
Apart from changing the format of your article, you also need to look at moulding the message content to suit each different platform. If you are promoting on discussion forums, then you should try to make use of questions and answers to engage people.
Likewise, an article, which is posted on article directories, must be in the form of informational content to help show your expertise in a particular area while the content posted on your webpage must be focused on self-promotion and sales of your Internet business products and services.
One of the easiest ways to repurpose content particularly textural content is to take small snippets, and expand on them by writing around the snippet to generate a whole new mini article which refers to the full article on your site. These snippets can also be posted on social networks like twitter and can be used on forums and places like LinkedIn to start discussions. These discussions can be great as you can use feedback from them and expand on them to create new content for your website, which can allow you to rinse and repeat the process again.
Search engine variations
Search Engine Optimisation is necessary for increasing visibility of your website. You can bring in variation of the SEO parameters as well. The variation can be done in the anchor text that is visible in the search results. Since different search engines have different algorithms for page rankings, you can customise your web content accordingly i.e. for some search engines you must highlight your backlinks; some search engines automatically navigate to your website only on the basis of keywords. These variations can also help with generating traffic to your Internet business website.
Whichever techniques of variation you use for your business Internet marketing, the basic objective of the content remains one and the same, and that is-’generate more traffic to your website’. This process is supposed to help generating interest about your Internet business products and services to prospective customers and hopefully goes on to engage them in a long term relationship.
Engaging Your Blog Readers
Aug 10th
It is Important to Engage With Your Visitors
Writing a blog has now become more than just a hobby. Blogs are no longer just meant for leisure; instead they have become powerful tools for promoting your business on the internet. The success of a blog is measured in terms of the number of readers visiting that blog. The higher the number of visits to the blog generally means the more visibility for your business on internet.
A survey of small to medium businesses was conducted by hubspot.com showed that companies that have a blog have far better marketing resukts than those that do not. The average company that blogs has approximately 55% more vistors, 97% more inbound links and over 300% more indexed pages – yes you did read that figure and it is correct. With these statisics it is clear that blogging in an engaging way is important.
In order to get more internet traffic on your blog, you must present your content in such a way that readers become interested in it and appreciate your skills. This is known as developing ‘Engaging content’ for your blog. We will discuss some ways to develop engaging content for your blog.
What is an Engaging Content?
Engaging content is much more than just information provided to the readers. Engaging content develops the interest of the reader. Research has shown that an average internet readers attention span is about two seconds. So you have only two seconds to convince the reader to read the whole article, therefore it goes without saying that the content must be ‘unique’ and ‘well written’. If you fail to create interest, then you may lose your readers. You may also fail to get backlinks from other sites.
Image Curteousy of http://www.hubspot.com
Presenting Content Effectively
The presentation of the content is as important as the content itself. Simple texts and images may not catch the readers attention. An effective way of presenting content would be to classify it and put it under one heading; add bolds and italics wherever you feel they are required; and add the correct spacing between the paragraphs. Use of pictures at appropriate places goes a long way in catching the attention of the user. It also helps you to promote your brand. You can make elaborations by using charts, diagrams or infographics. But you should be careful to avoid too flashy an article i.e flash animation etc which can adversely affect the performance of your website.
Be Expressive
As mentioned earlier, engaging content is not just a piece of information, lively content is one which reflects your original thinking. Your target audience is the important so you should post the content in a way that is paletteable to them. You should not hesitate in expressing your opinions about any topic, but ensure you do this in a way that does not invoke negative attitude towards you or your business. You can share your experiences and pass on your personal reviews on products. Honestly written blogs can motivate its readers to post their opinions freely and hence they can be easily engaged. Moreover, your visibility among the reader community builds up. Thus, having a voice in your content helps you to augment your personal internet brand. You can even make jokes to make your discussion as informal as possible.
Using Creativity
We all appreciate simplicity, as a reader, no one wants to read complex concepts which are full of technicalities and are incomprehensible. This is where a writer can use their wit and creative skills. The best way to elaborate a difficult concepts is by using life or live examples i.e. explaining Google analytics is easier to relate to a person if you use a busuness type like a plumber. Witty comparisons of different situations help readers to develop their own reasoning. Readers tend to think and express their own opinions. Hence a creative piece of writing is very helpful to engage your readers. If the content is just rephrased material from other sources on the internet then it will not do as well. People will lose interest in your blog. SO, being original is a pre-requisite. You can create new ‘concepts’, new ‘terms’ or post ‘controversial’ comments; but you must be original in your thought process.
Clearly it can be seen that honest efforts must be made to write your blog so that it does not seem to be just another ‘me-too’ blog on the internet. You need to go the extra mile to pull the visitors on your page and grab their attention. If you are able to initiate a thought provoking process in your readers, your objective of writing the blog is fulfilled.
Content Marketing For Lead Generation
Aug 6th
Internet marketing is a popular word in the marketing arena these days. Every business wants to promote itself through online media. Businesses are investing a large proportion of their budget on developing their websites and internet business marketing.
They know that a good website attracts more customers. The core of any website is its content. Content marketing is a technique that uses the creation and distributing of highly relevant and good valuable content (information) to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined target audience. The idea being that the content will help to ultimately drive sales. This post looks at the fundamentals of content marketing and content management.
A survey conducted by King Fisher Media in 2009 and published by emarketer.com showed that 70% of participants felt that content marketing was an effective way to communicate with prospective clients only beaten by Social Media at 73% of votes and Business websites at 75%. This shows why good content should be important to your business efforts. If this is combined with a good website it almost doubles your chances of getting new prospects.
Marketing Survey Results Showing 70% of Participants Think Content Marketing iI important
Factors influencing the content of a website
One of the important factors in content marketing is ‘information gathering’. This is a research based process. You start by identifying your target audience. The content should be developed as per the expectations of the target audiences. An ideal piece of content is one which is tailor made for that particular segment of the market audience. If visitors of your website find the content relevant to their interests then they are more likely to return to you next time for information, saving themselves wasted time searching elsewhere.
Keyword enrichment of the content is important your internet marketing efforts and is also a pre-requisite for content marketing. Optimised content attracts search engines that in turn send more visitors to your website.
Nature of the content
Social media sites are conversational in nature where users interact while exchanging views about a topic. In such cases, proper etiquettes must be adhered to. Also, it is never advisable to use these sites for pitching purposes. Instead, you must focus on using content for spreading information and awareness among the audience.
Try to link that information to your products but make sure the tone of the content does not sound like you are pushing your products, this type of promotion is what is called a ‘Value Proposition’ for your customers. As far as gaining competitive edge it is considered that your content should highlight your strengths vis-a-vis your competitors’.
Your content should highlight the differentiating factors that set you apart from your competitors. It is not always advisable to poach customers who are complaining about your competitors as they may also make similiar complaints about you later on, try to engage them in friendly manner without knocking your competitors, gaining a poor customer but equally by not shooting yourself in the foot by turning them away.
Tools for content development
Content development is not a one step process, you need to constantly monitor the kind of visitors that visit your website and the kind of content they have looked for. Your content needs to be modified according to the responses, attraction and requests of customers. There are online tools available for profiling of customers which are known as ‘Context-aware tools’ that perform ‘experience sampling methods’ to analyse the behaviour and profile of visitors.
There are some other ways to enhance the content of your website; one of them is ‘cross-linking’ of content with other relevant sites. This way you can also get some new back-links and hence lead to more traffic via Search Engines. The monitoring operations of your website can also be outsourced to third parties like Internet Marketing Services.
How to measure the effectiveness of content
As mentioned earlier, a website must be constantly monitored to gauge the success of the content. Tools like ‘Google Analytics’ help you to check your website traffic and its marketing effectiveness. They give you a about the demographics of the visitors. They also give you detailed reports about the revenue generated by the site visits (if using PPC,CPC systems) to help you to gauge your return on investment (ROI) in addition it can show you where traffic is coming from and what landing pages are hot.
Apart from this, there are advanced tools customised to your needs which are available at reasonable prices. Some examples are- Hubspot, Alexa, Quantcast etc. One important piece of advice here is, not to rely too much on keyword analysis as customers read content and not keywords. Keywords are only meant for search engine algorithms.
Online content marketing has great potential for generation of new leads for your internet business as well as to build long term relationships with the existing customers. With the correct knowledge you can start revamping your content process for your website and reap the benefits.
Content Marketing – Essential to Growth
Jul 26th
Content Marketing is Essential for Growth
The Internet has changed the way internet business’ market themselves all over the world and a lot more innovative techniques have been invented to market products to gain an advantage over competitors. Regardless of the new techniques coming out the reason for them is the same as the old one to attract customers. The easiest way to do this is to provide them valuable content, hence the term ‘Content marketing’.
‘What is Content Marketing?’
Basically Content marketing is a number of techniques used to create and share the content on your business website in such a way as it will engage with the maximum amount of potential customers.
It works on the principle, ‘the more useful information you provide to a customer, the more they are attracted to you’. So, The idea is to aim at delivering high-quality content that will add value to the potential customers knowledge so they can gain a better understanding and insight to that particular field.
When you look at content marketing it has three main elements to it these are textual content which is important as it is the basis of on-page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), creative images which should natural support the textual information on the page and if used a highly convincing video relevant to the message being conveyed.
Apart from adding these essential components, you must make sure that content is regularly updated at least 2-3 times a week. There are lot of tools which can keep your site up-to-date like Blogs or or webinars and RSS feeds.
‘Content Marketing Techniques’
Once your essential elements are in place there are a number of ways you you can look at to do your internet business content marketing. The basis of any format you use is to empower your customer through knowledge rather than pitching them a product or service.
Publishing ‘Case studies’ is a great way for service industry businesses to present how they have solved problem for clients through their product offering which can generate curiosity among readers grabbing their attention.
‘Online newsletters’ which is highly used by many internet marketers, are a great way to spread awareness and educating your customers as you can spread up-to-date information related to your business. You can also offer ‘free online tutorials’ on the topics related to your business.
You can even develop ‘Quizzes’ and ‘Polls’ using tools like survey monkey to trigger discussions and attract more traffic. You can also make content more useful by posting ‘reviews’ on your products or services. You can also do ads or use testimonials from customers to create impact.
‘What Can Content Marketing do for Me?’
Content marketing is a great tool, however if you are looking for an overnight miracle do not look here, you need to be patient enough to allow the content to be dissimenated and to get out there. You will also need to keep going, keep writing new content and get it out to the right sources to help drive traffic.
The better the content is the more traffic it will bring you, the more driffic coming to your site isthe more potential customers coming with it. This increases your chances of converting some of those prospects into customers.
Another great thing about good content is that if it is relevant and unique is the greater the chances are of increasing your search engine rankings through ‘back-links’, basically if your content is good enough it will create a buzz about your business which can help generate new sales.
If you put great content together your business will flourish with time, getting this step right is crucial to the online survival of your business and its continued growth.
