Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to increase the visibility of your client's business online. In the great attempt to learn tips, tricks, and tools to make it more effective, however, it’s easy to lose sight of the basics.
Optimization is great and anything you can use to make your efforts more effective should be used. Just don’t forget these 7 basic rules:
1. Content Must Be Valuable
You can follow every trick in the content marketing book perfectly, but if your client's content leaves something to be desired then it’s all just a waste of time. Their content must tell readers something they didn’t already know in a way that makes them want to come back in the future for other information.
2. Create Shareable Content
Instead of spending hours building backlinks and promoting something you spent five minutes creating, try the reverse. Put a lot of thought into what you say and how you say it. Give your customers something they can use, not just a bunch of babble. The Internet already has more than enough useless content—don’t create a reputation that adds your client's company to that pool.
3. Remember That It’s Not About You
While your clients' customers do need to know who they are and what they have to offer, that isn’t the only thing on their minds. Plenty of good, authoritative content exists on the internet that covers the diverse range of information your readers are after. Consider linking content to one of these sites or place a short quote from one inside your content. Who knows? Perhaps the owner of that company or website will return the favor!
4. Digestible Content is Better Than Content Overload
If someone put a 20-ounce sirloin steak in front of you and told you to swallow it whole, you’d probably look at them as if they were crazy and walk away. Content is the same way, except there aren’t any knives and forks your readers can use to conveniently portion up large slabs of text. If you expect readers to swallow a 500-word piece of content whole, they’re just going to click away.
Instead, break up the content into short, digestible sections. Use bullets, numbered lists, and small paragraphs. Insert subheadings in bold. Don’t overwhelm readers or you won’t have any readers. That isn’t to say that your content can’t be lengthy and comprehensive; just present it in a way that it doesn’t look like a college dissertation.
5. Don’t Neglect Your SEO
Yes, make your content about your client's readers first. But don’t forget to add your SEO power to your content before you start promoting it. Get those keywords in, but don’t force them. If you have to modify a keyword a little to make it sound natural, that’s ok. Make an effort toward multimedia results, too, as search engines are beginning to reward this type of optimization.
6. Promote, Promote, Promote
Pay for promotion if you can afford it. You can’t rely on organic traffic alone to get your client's content seen. This isn’t a “set it and forget it” world here. It's a good idead for your clients to purchase ad space on social networking mediums, share links on forums in which they are an active member, and leave comments on blogs they follow. You must be active in your marketing efforts if you want to see results.
7. Build Organic Credibility
When you start receiving fan-generated media, you know you’re doing something right. When people share your client's content, what it says to others is that they trust them for helpful and accurate information. The more third-party promotion your clients receive, the more of a credible source you appear to be. How do you get fan-generated media? Follow all of the first six rules and encourage others to share content.
It’s easy to forget the simple basics of content marketing when you begin to learn bigger and better ways to get results. Trying a new technique from time to time isn’t a bad thing. It’s when you leave the basics behind in pursuit of larger results that you crash and burn. Always remember these seven rules, no matter what new tricks you learn, to ensure that your client's content marketing efforts are always successful.
To learn more, check out our white paper, "What is Content Marketing? And Why It's So Important."
