Creating Your Content Marketing Strategy

Your website’s organic presence depends more and more on the short and long-term impact of content marketing. Search engines and social networks thrive on fresh content and the greater content you put out, the higher likelihood that you’ll grow your traffic, social shares, and links over time. And with Google’s recent changes to the link schemes page in the Webmaster Guidelines, the link earning potential of your content is more important than ever. Here’s a quote from the Google release:

Recently, Google has been more explicit about adding nofollow links to online press releases, guest blog posts, widgets and infographics, pretty much any content you might create offsite. This means your own business blog should be the focal point of your content marketing efforts. We know that site owners and marketers struggle with content creation and how to make that content stand out. One extremely effective way to address your content marketing quandaries is to start your blogging efforts by answering the most common questions.

Even while some information may seem quite obvious to you and your compatriots, someone who is just at the early stages of learning about your industry or product may be really enlightened by your words. It pays to take a few steps back and think about your industry as if you knew nothing. What kind of information you would you need to learn? What questions would you have? What issues do you need resolved? These basic questions are the foundation of your content marketing campaign because these are the questions of your potential customers.

If you stop and really think about it, there are dozens of angles you can take with your content marketing efforts. You may just need to gain perspective and talk to others in your company, perhaps a few people who have just recently joined your firm. With this approach, it’s likely that you’ll never run out of content ideas. It takes planning, ingenuity and a tad bit of organizational soul searching to provide questions and answers that your audience truly will appreciate.