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Posts Tagged ‘content marketing’
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
Mikal Belicove makes a good point when he says that not all publicity is good publicity.
Are you still sending out press releases to every online source you find? You might want to rethink that strategy. Reputation matters and if you get associated with low quality spam sites, that will be a hard reputation to shake. It could stay with you for the rest of your online life.
Mr. Belicove mentions four specific ways that bad PR can hurt your business:
- Promoting to audiences not likely to become your customers.
- You could drive traffic away from your website with bad PR practices.
- Placing your news article or press release on bad sites with unfocused content, cheap PPC ads, or other issues.
- You could benefit the other site more than you benefit your own.
These are all valid concerns. You don’t want to take on the practice of just publishing anywhere you can get a byline. Rather, you want to examine and analyze every website you find to determine whether or not that website is a good place for you. Don’t publish content anywhere it could hurt your business.
In an age of online content marketing, public relations is not all good. Some can hurt you long term.
Tags: content marketing, online reputation, public relations
Posted in PR for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011
One hard truth that every sales pro must learn sooner or later is that perception is reality. What the prospect perceives to be true is true. Or it may as well be because the prospect is going to act as if it is true, and you will either win or lose based on that perception. That’s true whether you are doing business online or off line.
The same thing is true of your current customers. If they are not satisfied with the level of service they are receiving, you have to fix that.
How do you do that in an online environment? There are strategies for building perceived value through content. In fact, that’s essentially what content marketing is all about. You must build a solid reputation for yourself as a knowledgeable expert within your niche. Your ability to do that is directly related to the level of content that you produce. High quality content speaks to high quality skill. That’s how your customers and your prospects see it.
In the SEO world, quality content means maximum SEO. That’s how the SEO community views it. But what does that mean? You can’t second-guess an algorithm. Especially when you don’t know it.
True content marketing is about making yourself appear to be the expert that you are. Your prospects have questions; you have answers. They have problems; you have solutions. When you position yourself to be the solution to your prospects’ and clients’ problems, then you are building perceived value. Do it through content, then do it through service.
Tags: content marketing, online marketing, selling, traditional marketing, value
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
Monday, October 24th, 2011
Internet marketers have had a phrase – a mantra – that we’ve repeated over and over since the very first days of the Web. That “mantra” is “Content is King.”
To the Internet marketing newbie, that phrase may not mean much. But to those of us who have been doing this awhile, it means everything. Content is the master of all. The big question is, Why? And does is still apply just as well today as it did in 1995?
You bet it does.
Here’s a question to ask yourself. If I build a website with no content and point a hundred links to it, getting it to rank No. 1 for a specific key phrase, will that benefit me? I think the answer is obvious, don’t you? A website that ranks No. 1 for a key phrase but that can’t close a sale due to lack of content is an ineffective website.
Now ask yourself this question: If I build a website with great content that achieves mediocre rankings and has no links to it, can it still make me money?
Yes it can. All you have to do is drive traffic to that website by any means and if if the content is well written with good calls to action, it will make you money. So content is king.
Ideally, you want a website with great content and great links. You should consider links to be a part of your overall content strategy instead of seeing it as a separate activity from your on-page content. Building a web business means doing all the things necessary to help you succeed. That includes building links. But it starts with writing great content.
Tags: content, content marketing, internet marketing, link building, SEO, website content
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »
Friday, October 7th, 2011
Google+ just seems to keep getting more and more popular. But should we consider it content marketing?
That’s an interesting question and it really gets to the heart of what exactly is content marketing. So let’s answer that question.
Content marketing goes beyond your own Web properties. When you build a web page for your website, that’s content marketing. When you write a blog post for your blog, that’s content marketing. But is that all there is to it? In a word, no.
Content marketing is any effort you undertake to draw attention to your content, your products, your services, or your brand. In that regard then, links can themselves be a form of content marketing. Social media is a form of content marketing.
That extends the concept into farther reaches. When you put a Like button on your blog, that’s a kind of content marketing. It allows your readers to show their approval or their affinity for your content through their own social media profile on Facebook. As a result, your content gets pushed farther that it could or would otherwise.
Google+ operates on the same concept. You write a blog post and share it on Google+. That content has the potential to go places that it wouldn’t go by virtue of your extended network on Google+.
When you think of content marketing, you have to think about it terms of its full potential. Don’t get sidetracked into thinking it’s only what you produce on your Web properties.
Tags: content marketing, google, links, website
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 6 Comments »
Monday, August 1st, 2011
Article marketing is generally thought of as something that takes place off of your website whereas blogging is generally something thought of as something that takes place on your website. However, you can publish articles on your website and you can blog apart from your website.
However you look at it, both forms of marketing can fit nicely into what we call “content marketing.” Here are 5 things blogging and article marketing have in commong:
- High quality content is very important. If you are going to publish articles that promote your website and drive traffic back to your website, then you want that content to be the highest quality possible. The same is true of onsite content designed to gain search engine rankings.
- Speaking of traffic, they both have the potential to deliver high quality targeted traffic to your website.
- Consistency is key, both with article marketing and with blogging.
- Both article marketing and blogging have the potential to affect your reputation online in both the short term and the long term and for better or for worse.
- As with any type of content marketing, articles and blogs both have huge SEO and social media benefits. Be diligent in your efforts and it could pay off big time.
Forget the hype and just focus on the benefits – both for article marketing and blogs.
Tags: article marketing, blogging, content marketing, Reputation Management, SEO, website traffic
Posted in Article Marketing | 9 Comments »
Sunday, July 3rd, 2011
It’s important, as a small business, to have a content marketing strategy. What’s the alternative? You could just post random content and hope it gains traction, drives traffic, and wins customers. But that’s kind of like wishing in a well. A better strategy is to plan your content marketing so that all levels of your content work together for the good of your customers and your company.
So how do you do that?
First, you need to outline what content strategies you are going to employ. For instance,
Define which content marketing tactics you will use in your business, then make sure they work together to drive your message home.
That’s not as easy to do as it is to say. Creating content in any format takes time. Chances are, if you are a small business owner, you won’t have the time to manage every aspect of your content marketing strategy. You’ll either have to hire someone in house to handle some of your content needs, or you’ll have to outsource it. Tandemizing your content will be an absolute necessity.
To get your content to work together, you need a blueprint. An SOP (standard operating procedure) for your content. You have to define the way that you will publish your content. And that begins with creating a sales funnel.
Your Sales Funnel
Your sales funnel is the way that you drive traffic to its final destination. The ultimate goal is to get your audience to buy something. Do you do that on your blog? Do you have special landing pages on your website? How does your newsletter fit in? These are all questions you need to think about for your content marketing strategy.
Once your sales funnel has been defined, then you can set about tandemizing your content. That’s when you get into the nitty gritty details of how your content all fits together. If you’d like to know more about tandemizing your content, sign up for a consultation today. Get your one-on-one strategy planning consultation today.
Tags: content marketing, marketing strategy, small business
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 5 Comments »
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010
Search engine marketing and social media marketing is all about one thing: Content. And quality is the name of the game.
In the game of poker, whatever the wild card is trumps everything. Got a Four Of A Kind? Good. The player with a lower Four Of A Kind and a wild card trumps your perfect hand. That’s a Five Of A Kind.
Your goal as an online marketer is to get that Five Of A Kind – a trump hand. How do you do that? There’s only one way.
The surest way to maintain your reputation as a quality content producer is to churn out consistently good content on a regular basis. And that’s not easy. But it can be done.
Keep in mind that quantity is nice. Obviously, if you can write keyword-based content every day and achieve a website with 1,000 pages against your competitor who churns out one page a week and has a couple of hundred pages then you will have an edge. But a couple of hundred quality content pages will go a lot further than a thousand sub-par pages. Quality is the trump card.
Spend money on pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing or another newfangled marketing approach online and you’re just tipping your hat. Channel that budget instead into quality content and you’ll do far better in the long run. After that, supplement your trumps with other marketing channels.
Tags: content, content marketing
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
There are several ways you can use gadgets and one of those is to create one that can be distributed to other webmasters. The benefits are multiple. First, if you brand your website with a back link then every time your gadget is used it will create a back link to your website. Those are great for SEO purposes. Secondly, since the initial information within the iframe exists on your website, you actually help the search engines find you better and crawl your website more.
An iframe is created from existing information. The information is your site. Even after the iframe is placed on another website that information still exists on your site. And the back links from the other sites to yours will get the search engines to your site to crawl that information more often. The combination of the often-crawled content and the back links to that content (with highly valuable anchor text) can help your search engine optimization efforts tremendously.
Another way iframes help you is through marketing. It gets your content in front of more eyeballs. Every time a website uses your gadget you are getting your content and website in front of more human eyes. And that’s good marketing!
Tags: content marketing, gadget, iframe, website optimization
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
One of the most misunderstood aspects of doing business online is the entire nature of it. Many businesses are still stuck in the 20th century where marketing is concerned. They believe that marketing is all about positioning their company in the market place. That is true, but online marketing is so much more than just market positioning. It’s content positioning.
So what does that mean exactly? Well, it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But in a nutshell it means that you’re in the content marketing business. You aren’t just marketing your business. You’re marketing your content.
Content is defined as anything that holds value for someone else whether they do business with you or not. That’s pretty well all encompassing isn’t it? I mean, an ad that simply says “Buy this widget” isn’t really content because it’s a sales message and that holds value only for you, the seller. But an article that explains the benefits of owning a widget like yours (sans the sales message) is content. So how does that benefit you, the seller?
It benefits you when the reader of your content has trusted you enough to visit your website (based on the value of your content) and decided to do business with you.
Your job as a business owner doing business online is to create valuable content. Make it valuable enough and people will do business with you because they trust you, like you, and want more value. That’s content marketing at its best.
Tags: content marketing, doing business online
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing, Social Media | 2 Comments »
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