Back in January I wrote about the demise of search engine optimisation and the rise of content marketing and how this will affect blogs.
Well, the digital world is really starting to hot up about content marketing, because as far as the search engines (Google) are concerned, it is a hit! It has succeeded in putting the cat amongst the pigeons (not necessarily the Panda amongst the Penguins) by putting all those specialist SEO marketing agencies’ noses out of joint.
Gone is the need to find out which words stimulate the search engines and then saturating your articles with them. Gone is the need to try and be clever by beating Google at their own game. Gone are the creation of boring and unreadable articles and blog posts that are totally illegible and incomprehensible all for the purpose of raising a website higher in the search stakes. Gone is the intense duplication of articles being placed around the net to increase the keyword impact with the search criteria!
Thanks goodness! The web was getting full of absolute rubbish. SEO was not helping real writers producing articles that had proper meaning, good content and exciting prose. The search engines were realising that people preferred to read conversations in social media than boring SEO-ed posts. They liked good writing styles, intelligent messages and collaborative communications, written by people like bloggers and professional copy-writers who had something worth saying.
But of course content marketing can go a bit further if you are ready for that sort of thing. Any article on the web doesn’t only have to be well written, but meaningful, authoritative, containing quality that can be consumed, experienced and then shared elsewhere. That is the crux: what information are you imparting that will make a difference to the reader, broaden their lives, tell a story they would enjoy, create awareness in a subject that wasn’t there before, give them something they can take away and act upon? And it needs to be so good that it demands sharing and deserves being seen by a wider audience.
Content marketing needn’t be confined to just words (as neither should be blogs). People consume information in many different ways, and some better than others. If you want to capture the attention of everyone who is eligible, you need to be flexible in how you deliver your message.
Consider images (adapted into infographics, the latest trend in sharing information in an exciting, visual style), audio (it’s easy to create a podcast via Audacity or even using Siri on your iPhone) or video (captured easily on an iPad or your digital camera if it has that facility). Video can be extended into webinars and other screen-capturing mechanisms (I’ve just found one on my Mac that is totally brilliant: check out my first attempt about what is CMS), brilliant if you wish to show-case your expertise in a better light or promote your products another way.
And once you’ve made the leap and created your content marketing in a variety of methods, publish them on your blog! It’s so easy to expand from there onto your website, various social media profiles, groups and pages, newsletter lists, guest blogs – anywhere they will be seen by more people! All this will create valuable awareness of what you do, and to increase that all-important ROI, make sure the message is clear, the call to action is compelling and the links are relevant and directed to an appropriate webpage where business transactions can take place.
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About the author:
Alice Elliott is a digital marketer and blogger, who runs the Fairy Blog Mother, an educational website resource that trains, explains and creates awareness about blogs. Find out what she can offer you regarding blogs and digital marketing at http://fairyblogmother.co.uk
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