Zerys Content Marketplace Blog

It seems as though entrepreneurs and companies everywhere are jumping on the blogging bandwagon, and for good reason. Business websites with regularly updated blogs appear higher in search rankings and gain more traffic than websites without blogs.

Put some time and thought into the content you choose to publish, and consider your blog an important piece of your overall content strategy. The goal of blogging for business is to grow your business, widen your customer base, and ultimately increase sales.  Here is a short list of five ways to use blogging to grow your business.

If your branded content isn’t dynamic, it’s passive. Lackluster. Which would you rather serve up to your audience?  

As a freelance writer, I hear the same dilemma over and over: “I need quality content for my website, but I don’t have a very large budget. What should I do?”

CLEVELAND – May 3, 2012 – Zerys Content Marketplace has been highlighted as the Sponsor of the Week for Inbound 2012, a HubSpot event to be held August 27-30, 2012, in Boston, Mass. 

Corporate executives often prove resistant to change, especially when it comes to new technologies which evolve far too fast to readily comprehend. By the time someone prepares an easily digestible PowerPoint presentation explaining them all, something new comes along to replace them. The liability for this resistance to innovation is the potential for being left behind while nimbler organizations capitalize on newer, more efficient ways to attract customers and capture market share.

The phrase “content is king” is nearly a cliché due to overuse by web marketers. While the phrase itself is losing some of its potency, the truth it conveys has not. Every day, the importance of a solid content marketing strategy grows more evident as old SEO tricks are given the “heave-ho” due to search engine algorithm changes, and good content rises to the top of both SERPs and social media.

For those thinking of integrating content marketing into their business plan, here are a few tips to get you started:

It seems like there are as many websites on the Internet as there are people in the world, and all that competition for visitors makes it tough to build a business online.  That's why SEO content marketing has become such an integral part of marketing your website.

Content is what you market, but SEO is what you use to market it.  SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is necessary to rank high enough in search engine results that people find and eventually click on your website.  

Why is this important?  Because searches yield thousands of pages of results, but results beyond the first page don't get noticed, let alone clicked.  That means you have to use as many tools as possible to get your content read, clicked, and shared.

What can you do to make your SEO content marketing strategy a success?  Start with these three techniques. 

Create Unique Content

Content can come in many forms, from standard landing page copy to more dynamic videos and infographics.  But whatever format your content comes in, it has to be unique and relevant to your target audiences.

You can use any type of content you want as long as it stays within the scope of your overall content strategy.  For example:

As a marketer, you hear every day that content marketing is the new way to target your prospects. You've put together the case studies, white papers, and special reports, and you're on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest posting interesting links and infographics - or are you?

One of the biggest problems with content marketing is evaluating whether the content is actually solving problems for the reader or just cluttering up her feed with useless information - creating noise, if you will. So how can you tell if you're educating or just annoying? Here are some tips:

Social media and content marketing have matured to a point where practically every business has adopted some form of them in their lead generation efforts.

The problem is that with such a large influx of marketers hitting the major platforms, the biggest ones being Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn, it is getting harder to differentiate yourself and be heard in the constant barrage of tweets, status updates, and 400-word blog posts. Even Facebook is growing a bit long in the tooth, so brands that have been playing the content game for a while might be in a bit of a rut as to their web marketing efforts.

How often do we really step back and take a good look at our marketing content from our reader's (and prospective customer's) point of view? Probably not as often as we should.