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Are You Guilty of Neglecting Your Content Marketing?

Content is king. How many times have you heard or read that phrase? It’s getting a bit boring now but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. If you have a website (seriously, if you don’t have a website you need to catch up) a carefully constructed blog can be used to engage your customers, increase the rank of your website in the search engines, develop your authority in the industry, to develop loyalty and trust as well as generate sales.

Most businesses are now blogging and focusing on creating unique and engaging content, but what they’re neglecting is the marketing side of blogging. The content is there, the marketing is missing and yet the readers are still expected to turn up, and that is not likely to happen unless you put in a little more time and effort.

How Can I Market My Content?

If you’ve been posting on your blog and leaving it there you too have been neglecting the marketing aspect of blogging. So what should you be doing to help push your content out there in order to reap the benefits that your perfectly constructed and engaging content has the potential to deliver?

SEO Optimisation

Think about how you can make it easier for the search engines to stumble across your content so they can identify your keywords and phrases and index them correctly.  There are all sorts of plugins available for WordPress websites that will make the process easier, but in general you need to add the keyword in the following areas:

    • within the headline in a way that is completely natural
    • the URL of the page
    • naturally in the content
    • the meta description
    • the image alt tag

 

Sharing Via Social Media

If you’re not sharing your content using social media you’re missing a very important trick. You need to set up your profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Pinterest at least. Also consider using Instagram, Flipboard and even Snapchat, depending on your target audience. Even if you don’t intend on using all these networks in your marketing and customer service plans they are essential for sharing your blog posts. At the very least you need to share via:

      • Twitter – A powerful network that works perfectly with blogging. This is the first place you need to share your published blog post, adding the headline, a link and a few hashtags (generally no more than two or three hashtags).  Don’t feel you can only Tweet your content once, you need to Tweet it a few times on the first day and providing the content doesn’t age it can be Tweeting time and time again long into the future.
      • Facebook – Optimise your post by using an image and hashtags to make it stand out and be searchable.
      • Google+ – You’ll need to add in hashtags, an image and the link to ensure it stands out and gets noticed.
      • Pinterest – You’ll need to add visual content such as the feature image as Pinterest is a visual network rather than text based. Pin directly from your website so the image links automatically back to the corresponding blog post and use hashtags in the description box.
      • LinkedIn – Even though this isn’t the place for content to go viral it’s still worth sharing with your contacts.

 

Send to Your Email List

Begin building your email list as soon as your website goes live and share your blog posts in your newsletters. Never add the entire blog post, instead add a teaser and a link so your readers have to visit your website in order to read the full content. With any luck (or engaging content and great web design) your subscribers will want to hang around on your website for longer.

So there you have it, a few tips on how you should be marketing your content. Do you have any favourite tips you want to share? Follow @sharpmonkeys on Twitter and share your favourite tried and tested methods with us.