A long-term strategy may be your best bet
Every business owner wants to see results quickly. I recall days of selling marketing campaigns when my boss would tell me “three-five campaign sales by the end of the week would be great”.
Sure, three-five campaign sales would always be great, but often times the logistics behind achieving goals are overlooked, especially in a time when economic woes have made things just a bit harder.
Thankfully I am not selling marketing campaigns anymore. I am now a purveyor of information and content. It doesn’t involve gimmicks or lies, but knowledge that has come from experimentation and statistical data.
A timetable for content marketing
Content marketing is not a quick-acting fix for the marketing of information, but it does involve a detailed strategy that will help create a robust content-based system.
The best content marketing systems will be a culmination of extensive information, often times article-based, that is properly created with a main phrase, primary keyword clusters and potentially hundreds or even thousands of secondary keyword phrases.
Over time the amount of articles within the content marketing system will grow. The articles published should include SEO keywords within the headline, subhead, description, body, meta-title and meta-tags to be strong from an organic search engine perspective.
This may take some time, but the time will be worth it when Google picks up your content and ranks it well.
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How to get Google to pick up your content
After your collection of content grows, you can offer free reports or free eBooks. These free products will need a rapid conversion landing page where they can be downloaded, and that page needs to be optimized for your search terms if you want Google to rank it.
Beyond written articles
As we’ve discussed before, content marketing doesn’t have to be just about the written word. If your company works well with a different medium, like video or audio, use that medium as a direct way to communicate with your audience.
After releasing video or audio content, create an article or press release promoting for that content.
Quick fixes with content marketing
I realize that I previously stated that content marketing isn’t a quick fix for the marketing of content. However, there are aspects of content marketing that you can engage in right away that may help you see results in a timely manner.
The first would be to optimize your website and add keywords to any posts that you currently have. Be sure to keep your keyword density to around 3%. Optimizing for keywords will give you a fighting chance at ranking in Google.
Second, offer free product downloads if you aren’t currently doing so. This will show the quality of your work to unknowing audience members.
Lastly, write keyword-rich press releases for your free products or interesting articles and distribute the releases through free press distribution sites like PrLog.org or BigNews.biz. This will inform a larger audience and potentially boost page rankings.
To learn more about our 7-step strategy for content marketing, join Don and Kim now in a city near you for a Content Marketing 2010 Seminar.
Hi Chris,
I don’t think you can underestimate the power of a blog for both short-term and long-term content marketing strategies. I advise clients to have their blog as part of their website. Posting 2-3 times a week will improve your SEO dramatically and position you as an authority in your field. The longer the blog is around, the more weight it holds.
Hi Sarah,
I absolutely agree with you. On the short-term blogs can be picked up by Google and displayed in their “Blogs” section at the bottom of page-one. And as you mentioned, in the long-term they will be building SEO, improving upon page rank and showing their credibility to the online community. Thanks for your insight.
My strategy now is to offer a free eBook:
(http://www.mgvx/websitediagnosis.zip)
to list owners to distribute to their customers.
The book had no opt-in, but does have embedded affiliate links, and an option to opt-in if they want.
Chris: Good ideas here. You said, “Be sure to keep your keyword density to around 3%.” Don’t know what that means. Can you explain?
Hi Patty,
Thanks for the response. Keyword density refers to the amount of keywords in a given article. If “content marketing” was a keyword phrase that you were targeting, in order to find the keyword density of the piece you would count up the number of times you used the phrase “content marketing” and divide it by the total number of words in the article. If you used the phrase 15 times in a 500 word article, your keyword density would be 3%. Hope that helps.