11 Content Marketing Tips to Make You Win

SOURCE: Relevance.com

While brows­ing the inter­net, I was intro­duced to a lot of con­tent and con­ver­sa­tion programs.I read the ideas of some amaz­ing Con­tent Mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als who have shared their insights and experiences.

Since, I believe in learn­ing by col­lab­o­ra­tion, I raked up some of my learn­ing from these blog posts with my actu­al experience.

There is a lot to learn as you try to scale up your blog, and it is not going to be easy. What I have done in this post is to val­i­date my expe­ri­ence and learn­ings with the opin­ions and learn­ings of oth­er experts from the Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Industry.

Fol­low­ing this guide will be enough to get your Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Strat­e­gy to start show­ing incred­i­ble ROI.

1.  Explain ‘How Search Results Work’ to Your Writers

The man­ner in which you frame the con­tent, deter­mines the kind of search results it will yield, says Matthew Brown, Con­tent Strat­e­gy for Publishers.

It is use­ful to give writ­ers a per­spec­tive on the type of results pages that are going to be use­ful to a spe­cif­ic theme rather than rely­ing on key­word tools and sort­ing through volu­mi­nous information.

As con­tent cre­ators start learn­ing to dis­tin­guish between var­i­ous types of results Google gives for a search, they devel­op a sense of how best to  adapt their con­tent to high­er nat­ur­al rankings.

Instead of let­ting his writ­ers build their piece around fea­tured snip­pets or answer box data, he would tell his team, “Let’s look at what Google is doing today and how it changes how you view a topic.”

2.  How Panda Survey Helps?

Tom Critchlow of Enter­prise Con­tent Mar­ket­ing finds that the Pan­da sur­vey is, after all this time, still use­ful for ver­i­fy­ing a website’s effec­tive­ness and that it can be applied to small sam­ple groups.

When he used it recent­ly for a client with three web­sites and one big rival, he was able to rep­re­sent the respons­es on a graph which revealed that users had quan­tifi­ably high­er trust lev­els for their competitor.

The num­bers con­vinced the client of the need to strength­en its brand per­cep­tion by users.

This method gives the client a con­crete basis for action­able strat­e­gy, rather than good advice which is unsub­stan­ti­at­ed by data.

3.  Lengthy Videos Can Be Given a Miss

Accord­ing to Bri­an Dean, YouTube SEO, “The big thing about YouTube or any plat­form, you want to be the excep­tion, not the rule.”

Cur­rent trends favour short videos but buck­ing the trend to make longer ones is debat­able. Longer videos, though eas­i­er to make, need tech­ni­cal exper­tise and even so, retain­ing view­ers for a longer dura­tion is challenging.

4.  Looking Beyond Comparisons

Refer­ring to the end­less rounds of PPC pro­pos­als gar­ner­ing, Jonathan Dane, Con­tent Mar­ket­ing for Agen­cies says, “The down­side of PPC, espe­cial­ly on Google Search, is that it’s a com­par­i­son engine.”

Accord­ing to him, such com­par­i­son chan­nels are a drain on the process of enter­prise build­ing and thought leadership.

He prefers work­ing on the next new step of the busi­ness strat­e­gy and believes con­fer­ences offer far bet­ter oppor­tu­ni­ties than PPC for his own business.

5.  Keep It Relevant

Brit­ney Muller, In-House Con­tent Mar­ket­ing, reit­er­ates the val­ue of know­ing which con­tent has rel­e­vance and advis­es against ‘rein­vent­ing the wheel.’

He illus­trates this by point­ing out how the excel­lent qual­i­ty of Siege Media’s video series, thumb­nails, impact­ful fonts, and colours made them a suc­cess on YouTube.

What is impor­tant is to exam­ine the nature of the con­tent that exists and look at ways for mak­ing it more excit­ing using audio and/or video.

6.  Keep Your Content Fresh

Cyrus Shep­ard, Google Rank­ing Fac­tors, finds that many peo­ple resort to mere­ly chang­ing dates on their posts in the name of updating.

Instead, they must reg­u­lar­ly revise their con­tent to keep their pages updat­ed. There is sig­nif­i­cance to every part of the page that is updat­ed; the same goes for links pro­vid­ed in it.

Con­sis­tent­ly revis­ing and/or updat­ing pages helps retain the fresh­ness of the con­tent and indi­cates con­tin­ued inter­est in main­tain­ing them.

7.  Lead the Search With the Problem

Kevin Indig, Start­up Con­tent Mar­ket­ing believes that key­word research focus­es more on solu­tion type queries and that chang­ing tack by lead­ing with the prob­lem is much more efficient.

He gives an anal­o­gy of bad breath as a prob­lem to a com­pa­ny that makes tooth­brush­es. In terms of key­word research, those dots may not get eas­i­ly con­nect­ed. But when con­sid­ered in reverse, it is logical.

This strat­e­gy allows you to word your search­es more cre­ative­ly and be reward­ed with hith­er­to unknown, even inspir­ing find­ings, which can then be con­vert­ed into new content.

8.  Tap Sources of Inspiration

Accord­ing to Rand Fishkin, “This is a more dif­fi­cult tech­nique to imple­ment” for those who wish to route their brand build­ing through con­tent and links.

He recalls Burg­er King’s ad copy on net neu­tral­i­ty send­ing the inter­net into a tizzy, which indi­cat­ed a size­able pop­u­lace with that mindset.

Observ­ing the rise in engage­ment with social and polit­i­cal issues, he rec­om­mends the web­sites Meme­o­ran­dum and Twit­ter to gauge the trends for poten­tial content.

9.  Separate the Analysts and Content Marketers

Accord­ing to Ash­ley Ward, Con­tent Ana­lyt­ics, it is imper­a­tive to have a ded­i­cat­ed team of ana­lysts. For them, visu­al­iz­ing data as sto­ries comes naturally.

How­ev­er, from a con­tent marketer’s per­spec­tive, that cor­re­spon­dence does not always lend itself to con­tent creation.

Medi­um to large enter­pris­es are par­tic­u­lar­ly prone to the pres­ence of ana­lysts and their expo­sure to all that is pro­duced.  For this rea­son, she prefers ana­lyt­ics to be sep­a­rat­ed from con­tent marketers.

10.  Never Mind the Yoast SEO Greenlight

Joel Klet­tke, SEO Copy­writ­ing, would like noth­ing bet­ter than to erad­i­cate the notion that get­ting that green bul­let on Yoast SEO is the rai­son d’être of all content.

He shares the con­cerns of copy­writ­ers who are required to revise their con­tent because of some SEOs’ extreme reliance on this metric.

In his opin­ion, it must be done away with, as it is not an accu­rate mea­sure of the qual­i­ty of con­tent cre­at­ed by a writer and the use of focus key­words in it.

11. The More Your Brand is Mentioned…

Sujan Patel, B2B Con­tent Mar­ket­ing, firm­ly believes in the pow­er of brand men­tions as against link building.

It is fun­da­men­tal to his strat­e­gy and receives the bulk of his efforts, be it on links or otherwise.

It is a depend­able indi­ca­tor for him, of the poten­tial for new rela­tion­ships and busi­ness prospects that can be tak­en up.

The resul­tant increase in the num­ber of rela­tion­ships, or the vol­ume of con­tent pub­lished, rein­forces the suc­cess of that strategy.