Content Marketing Strategy
SEO, Social and Email Marketing in 7 Steps
If you know something your clients don’t know and it’s something they’d like to learn, you have an opportunity to do Content Marketing...
When you write, you can position yourself as credible expert. You can keep in touch with people through "drip" marketing, staying relevant, building your brand. And - if promoted correctly - a nicely-written piece can help you in a number of ways: Website SEO, Email Marketing and Social Media.
How can one article help with all of these aspects of your web marketing?
- Search Engine Optimization
Align content with common search phrases, keep content fresh (SE’s like this), create opportunities for internal linking, create “link bait” to promote link popularity. - Email Marketing
Produce content for outbound marketing, drive traffic, stay relevant. - Social Media
Provide fodder for Twitter and Facebook. Host content within a blog. Encourage comments (but watch to make sure comments are appropriate).
But what should I write?
Call it anything you’d like: Newsletter? Email? Article? Press release? White paper? Blog post? Case study? It doesn’t really matter. Who cares! It's all content! Here are some easy questions that often generate topics for web marketing:
- What questions do people ask you?
- What things that you talk about are perceived as valuable to your listeners?
- What do you know that most people don’t?
- What is the best advice you can give?
- What is your favorite thing to explain?
- What topic do you find most interesting?
- Which conversations do you have more than once?
- What pages on your site are most often visited?
Keep the idea of writing in the back of your mind. Soon, you’ll be jotting down topics at random times as ideas for pieces strike you.
Where do I begin?
Now that you have a topic, it's time to get started. Follow these seven steps:
| Steps |
SEO |
Social |
Email |
| 1. Research | • | ||
| 2. Write | • | ||
| 3. Post | • | • | |
| 4. Tweet / Test | • | ||
| 5. Email | • | ||
| 6. Submit | • | ||
| 7. Invite Robots | • |
Step 1: Research
Find a good keyphrase related to your idea. The ideal phrase is one that lots of people are searching for (high search volume) and not a lot of people trying to rank for it (low competition). Use these tools to guide you:
Step 2: Write
Don't worry if you're not an expert writer. Trust that you have something to share with people and that some of them are interested. Keep it simple and helpful. Here are a few tips:
- Title
Use your target keyphrase. Make it 66 characters or less, if possible. (Google cuts off titles at 66 characters. Yahoo lets you use 120) - Body
Jot down an outline, then write a few paragraphs. Be concise. Get straight to the point! Write 500-1000 words. Keep in mind the perspective of the reader and avoid jargon. But also keep the search engines in mind. Use your target keyphrase at least 3 to 5 times, if possible. - Sections and Headers
Break up the article into short sections. This will make it easier to read for visitors. It's also good for search engines, because the headers and subheaders are great places to include your keyphrase and related keyphrases - Links
Look for opportunities to link to other pages on your site. Again, this is good for people and search engine robotos. Links can contain the keyphrase, and they're an important way to guide people toward your contact form. Remember, the ultimate goal is convert the visitor into a customer or lead. - Formatting
Pay extra attention to text formatting, such as bolding, bullets, links, etc. This makes it easy for busy readers to scan and get your message quickly. - Excerpt/Summary
Write a separate summary of just a few sentences. This will come in handy later... - Tone
Make it personal and keep it real!
Step 3: Post
- Post it in WordPress (or on a page on your site). Ideally, WordPress is embedded into your site, within the same domain name. If your blog is within another domain (such as yourblogname.wordpress.com) you will not enjoy the SEO benefit of WordPress.
- Check the links.
- Commenting: For WordPress, Make sure the “Allow people to post comments on new articles” box is checked. It's nice to get some comments early before you promote it more widely.
- Make sure it appears on your Facebook fan page if you have one (WordPress may help you do this).
- Connect it to your LinkedIn profile (also a WordPress plugin).
- Make sure search engines can get to it. Link to the article from other pages on your site, such as the home page and sitemap. Also, be sure the meta tags - description, keywords and robots - are set properly. If you want to be really careful, generate a new XML sitemap.
Step 4: Tweet/Test
Testing the title and hopefully you get a few early comments...
- Consider tweets that include the word “you.” Consider adding a “comment here” link in the tweets.
- Subject line test: use Twitter to tweet two versions of the title to see which gets more clicks. Schedule: Wednesday and Thursday, 4pm and 6pm.
Step 5: Email
Getting the email ready is the most time consuming step, after doing the actual writing.
- Subject
Use the more popular tweet as your subject line. - Email Body
Use the short excerpt of the article in the email, with a link to the site/blog, for those that want to the full article. Don't put the entire article in the email or else the reader will get all of the information without going to the site! Remeber, one of your goals is to drive traffic to your site. - Supportive Content
It's good to include smaller, more digestable bits of content in your emails. If you add some bite-sized pieces of information along with the main course, it will teach your subscribers that they can get value from just glancing through your emails, which can increase your open-rate over time.
The Orbit newsletter has a picture of the author, a statistic, an inspirational quote, buttons to recent website launches, clickable thumbnail button to recent video projects, other links to our site and of course, a link to unsubscribe. - Links
When linking to your site from an email, use the Google URL Builder to convert those links before putting them in your email. This will make it much easier to track traffic in Google Anlytics. - Send!
Use a professional email service provider with good deliverability and nice reports (ie: Constant Contact, MailChimp, Reach Mail, etc.). Be sure to only send it to opt0in subscribers - people who really want to get it!
Step 6: Submit
Submit to article distribution services, such as iSnare and Ezine (WP plugin). No need to write a variant or change the text before submitting (and don’t worry about duplicate content penalties). Article length?
- EzineArticles.com: 250 – 5000 words
- iSnare.com: 500 – 2000 words
- ArticlesBase.com
Step 7: Measure Results
For most of us, the ultimate goal is leads, but there are many ways to measure results. After a few days...
- Email stats (within the email service provider)
a. Open Rate: 35% (more than double the industry average)
b. Click Through Rate 32% (more than double the industry average) - Social Media: retweets, likes, comments
After a few weeks...
- Traffic (within Google Analytics)
40% more on those weeks and days - Inbound links (within Google Webmaster Tools)
Orbiter gets roughly 10 - 25 per submission. Note: keyphrase-rich articles get picked up more, since many publishers may be thinking about SEO themselves...
If it's not getting results, consider editing the article. If it gets great results, write a follow-up!
Extra-Credit
More types of media... Since people have different learning styles (visual, auditory and kinesthetic), give them different types of media:
- Audio / Podcasts
- Video, Making of the Video, etc.
- Book / eBook – combine many articles into a book for print or eBook publishing
Conclusion
Make writing a habit. After penning a few pieces, you'll start getting ideas for content all the time. And in order to get the best results, I recommend following these steps on a regular cycle, even if it’s infrequent. The Orbit newsletter goes out every 6-8 weeks and has since 2007.
If you do only one thing for your web marketing, do this: write something, then leverage it. It's inexpensive, measureable and effective.
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