I am often asked tons of questions related to content marketing. What I have learned from my experience is that people have a lot of confusion regarding content marketing.
Today, in this guide, I am going to reveal to you the tricks of content marketing that actually works. All it takes is 5 simple steps to make a content marketing strategy successful.
Throughout my career, I have often heard people grieving about the fact that they are not getting enough leads. Many of them are even bothered about not getting the desired results.
The main problem which you are missing out is the lack of strategy. Just creating an online presence and churning out content are not enough if you are not backed by a full-proof strategy. You cannot expect to achieve results with non-targeted content.
In order to succeed in content marketing, you need to determine your goals first, after which you need to create the strategy.
Without any further delay, now let’s game up your content marketing strategy with the help of the guidelines given below.
What is Content Marketing?
Before moving on to the steps, let us first take a look at the definition of content marketing. In order to plan ahead, you need to first know what content marketing is.
Content marketing is basically all about creating high-quality content that is targeted towards a particular group of audience. It includes regular and frequent publishing of content that educates, inspires and entertains the readers or customers.
The main part of content marketing is to turn strangers into customers. This is where you need a full-proof content marketing plan. If you are worried about needing a huge lot of resources, don’t be. You can even achieve your goals with a small team or even as a solopreneur.
I have a small team of 5 people and we are the living proof that content marketing doesn’t need many resources. With our hard work, we have been able to improve our digital marketing.
We mostly create entertaining blog posts and ads for Facebook. Our main aim is to provide our customers with high-quality visual content.
Below is an example of a visual content we created a while back:
And because it was so good, it was shared by Larry Kim.
Not bad.
One more thing is to have an effective SEO strategy. You cannot make a content marketing strategy without focusing on your digital marketing strategy and SEO.
If you may know, they both work together. Having said that, now let’s move on to the definitive guide of content marketing strategy.
Process To Create A Content Marketing Plan
For your convenience, I have prepared a step-by-step guide which can help you create an effective content marketing strategy. Having a full-proof strategy means you can even improve the ranking of your website.
I have listed below the 5 simple steps that you need to pay attention to. Focusing on your digital marketing strategy is, after all, going to bring you good gains.
Here are the steps you need to follow:
1. Keyword research
If you are in the content field, you must already know the importance of keywords. Content is always made around a particular group of words or phrases.
But the main question here is that how do you know which keyword or phrase to work on?
This is where you need to do keyword research.
Keyword research is undoubtedly the most crucial step in creating quality content. Therefore, there is no way you can neglect the need for it.
The first thing you need to do is figure out the keywords or phrases that may interest your target audience. This is the thing that going to drive your entire content creation process ahead.
What I do is start thinking about keywords that are related to my niche and I want you to do the same.
Now you need to put the keywords in any of the keyword research tools and get the list of keywords you can work on. Well, this should be easy for you.
Here is an example:
Enter a broad keyword into the suggestion toolbar and click search. Let’s use “how to make money online” as an example:
Here are the results:
In total, I have about 6 keywords to choose from.
Fantastic!
Furthermore, one of my favourite keyword research strategies is to spy on my competitors. What I mean is that you can also check out the keywords and phrases that are used by your rivals.
You can use the top performing articles of your competitors and get the list of keywords you need.
2. Create your content
Now that you know how to dig out keywords and you already have a list of keywords to target, its’ time to create the content.
Content creation is all about maintaining the balance between quality and the speed of production. Sadly, I won’t be able to help you much with this. It is up to your creativity and skills to produce quality content.
I can, however, give you some tips following which you can create quality content.
Let’s say, you are about to write an informative eBook for your website. You can search the topic on the Internet and get an idea of the subtopics that you can include in your digital book. These are some handy tips and tricks I follow.
You can follow this trick for any type of content you write. It doesn’t always have to be a digital book or a blog post. It can be any piece of writing that goes up on your website.
From my experience, I can say that creating quality content is not an easy task. It requires a lot of time and dedication to curating content for your target audience.
You also need to keep an eye on the checklist for your SEO strategy. After all, content is nothing without an effective SEO plan.
3. Promote your content
After you have created your content, promotion is the most important step you need to look into.
Promoting your content could be the most hectic part of your content marketing process.
What is the value of your content if it is read or viewed by none?
In my opinion, search engine optimisation is the best way to promote your content.
What is our main goal here? Of course to get more eyes on your content. When your content is SEO optimised, you no longer have to promote it. People can naturally get to see it when they search for it.
Here’s a good example:
First, enter your page’s target keyword into Google Images.
Then, check out the words and phrases that appear above the image results.
After that expand your content by adding the results above as subtopics. Blend the relevant keywords or phrases naturally into your content. And, when Google sees subtopic terms on your page, they’re much more likely to consider it comprehensive and you can expect higher rankings and more traffic from Google.
The best part is these are the topics that people interested in. If you have included those in your content, it will give more value to your business or startups.
Considering the nature of SEO, it can be said that this is a long-term tactic. With each content, you can continue to get passive leads.
Other ways of promoting your content are through smart repurposing, email list and paid ads
Let me tell you a bit about the other techniques as well.
Smart repurposing is all about sharing your content on social media platforms. This could be an effective method to promote your content online. In order to get the best results, you should experiment a bit with this.
For instance:
Turn content into an appealing Infographic using an infographic maker.
People like visual content. According to Visualteachingalliance.com, 90% of information is transmitted to the brain visually.
This post from Dailyinfographic.com is an excellent example. In the tweet, Dailyinfographic keeps the text as a standard blog post, but is presented in a much more visually appealing format.
The next is email lists which is the oldest trick in the book.
Every time you create content, you should send it out to people who might be interested in it. It can generate maximum customers for you.
And then you have paid ads which are considered to be the fastest way of generating customers.
No matter how much you hate it, you know the importance of paid ads. When you already know who your target audience is, paid ads could do wonder for you.
4. Monitor your results
Creating and promoting content is not enough. You also need to monitor the results. This will help you to know the status of your content.
This could be a hectic task but the good news is that you can avail a lot of ways in order to make the task easy.
The best way to keep track of your results is through Google Analytics. I personally rely completely on Google to check the progress of my work.
Below are some of the important metrics to look into:
- Traffic
- SERP ranking
- Pages per visit
- Bounce rate
- Domain authority
Other than Google Analytics, there are also tools you can use. Ahrefs is one of the popular tools you can use to monitor your progress.
The tool generally uses Rank Tracker to track the keywords ranking over time. So you can keep an eye on the keywords movement.
Although there are various tools available, some may not be that effective or lack of many features. But I will leave it up to you to decide.
5. Rinse and repeat
Now that we have reached the end of your content marketing process, hopefully, you have got the hang of things.
At the time of creating content, you need to prioritize your business goals. You need to make sure that your content is able to create a lot of passive leads for you in the long-run.
Once you are done with all the above steps, it’s time to do it all over again. Yes, you heard it right! Every time you create new content for your business, you need to follow the same steps above.
This will help you to be consistent in your work.
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Over To You
Remember, content marketing is all about creating quality content backed up by an effective SEO strategy. If you can pull this off, you know your content marketing is successful.
Follow the steps I mentioned above and you will be good to go. I follow the same and I am doing quite well in my field.
If you find this article useful make sure you share it to help spread the knowledge.
About the Author: Bill Acholla
This article is first written by Bill Acholla and edited by our editorial team. Bill Acholla is a digital marketer helping small business owners build their brand through creating and promoting visual content. Connect with Bill on Twitter.
