Content marketing is a critical part of your business plan. By producing good, quality content to your website, you create traffic, backlinks and conversions. Below are the five C’s to content marketing:
1. Carefully
What does carefully mean with regards to content marketing? It’s simple. Don’t plagiarize other people’s content. Of course, there are a hundred different writing approaches you can use to tackle the same topic. Checking out your competitor’s blogs and writing within the same realm of a topic they have written about, is a valid tool in producing quality, competitive content. However, in the interest of: being unique, being creative and being professionally courteous, it is imperative that you don’t adhere to a copy paste job.
When you quote someone, use their image or implement their infographic into your post, be sure to properly cite the original post or site, of the content. This is something you learn all the way back in middle school, when you are writing book reports. It is never alright to steal someone else’s work and pass it off as your own! In addition, that produces duplicate content and Google will penalize you for it!
2. Curate
Constantly be curating content and ideas. Research your work. Bookmark things. When you have an idea for a post, take the time to rough draft it, dictate it (smartphones have WordPress apps that allow for this) or hand scratch the idea. How many times have you had an idea and entertained it, but later, have difficulty remembering the details? When an idea comes to me before bed, I jump up while the creative juices are flowing and start writing. You can come back to do final edits later.
3. Creative
We, in the content marketing world, hear the word creative thrown around a lot; but what does it mean? Think: innovative, fresh, new, exciting and state of the art. Bring something new to the table. I realize that when you run a business that sells white walls, there is only so much you can say about them before it becomes repetitive and dull. Find a way to add color. Paint the walls in a new way, or people will stop reading. Do your keyword research and craft content with titles that have good keywords placed in them when possible. However, don’t create content for the sole purpose of keywords and links. That writing is stale and easy to dismiss.
4. Consistent
Consistency is key in growing your business. After you carefully, curate and create your content, it is important to publish at the same time each time. Research has indicated that Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon PST (Pacific Standard Time) are the best times to publish new content to the web. With WordPress, you can draft and schedule your content in advance. Meaning, there is never a reason not to have content cued and ready to go out at these times. Sporadic and infrequent postings will result in a loss of engagement and potential conversions from your website’s business. The number one area we see businesses slack off in is their blog. This is detrimental to your site.
5. Content
You can’t market content, if you have not carefully curated and created it! Content doesn’t just describe words on a page. Other forms of content include: images, infographics, podcasts, videos and ebooks. It is important to take all forms of content into consideration when taking your place on the internet. These outlets of content strategy exist; however, it may not be in your businesses interest to utilize all avenues. A blog is the biggest tool that your website has to market all forms of content, including the written text. Use it! WordPress is free and offers hundreds of free themes and plugins to help you establish a respected and well read blog online.
By adhering to these five C’s of content marketing, you’ll be well on your way to publishing content to your site that will bring in the traffic, create quality backlinks, engage social shares and assist with conversions.