Learn how to effectively manage, track, and improve your content marketing methods and results.
Content Promotion
Learn how to effectively manage, track, and improve your content marketing methods and results.
Content promotion is the process of distributing content through different channels to reach its intended audience.
The aim of creating content to grow your business is to get it in front of as many people in your target audience group as possible.
The more people in your target audience your content can reach, the greater its impact on the growth of your business will be.
It is beyond the scope and purpose of this course to cover areas of content marketing and promotion in-depth. There are many excellent sites and resources that provide exhaustive information on these topics and we list a number of these in this module’s “Resources” and “References” sections.
The focus of this module is to help you understand the role of content management in areas like content marketing and SEO.
Additionally, we recommend subscribing to our free content management course email lessons if you haven’t already, as these provide a practical step-by-step way to implement the lessons in this course.
As a subscriber, you will also get notified when new posts containing practical information and valuable content management tips are added to our blog.
The Role Of Content Management In Content Promotion
When we think of content promotion, we mostly think of using different strategies and methods to distribute and promote different content types across different distribution channels.
For example, we might think of using paid and organic channels to promote blog posts, videos, or downloadable guides.
Many organizations, however, develop their content promotion strategy to include a multi-channel marketing approach and build their brand across many different platforms using many different tactics.
This means that the content used in your promotion methods has to be tailored and customized to the various different platforms used in your promotional campaigns.
For example, let’s say you are asked to create a piece of content to promote your business on social media. That same piece of visual content will need to be reworked and resized to comply with the image dimensions of different social platforms. This means not only making the content horizontal for Facebook and Twitter, square for Instagram, vertical for stories, etc. but also modifying captions or the accompanying copy to fit the platform’s requirements and be as effective as possible.
Additionally, as part of the promotional strategy, the same content may need to be repurposed for use across different platforms. For example, using the same piece of content formatted differently for social media, blog posts, and email newsletters.
All this content needs to be documented and stored for easy access and retrieval by the marketing team.
A good way to think of the role the content team plays in the area of content promotion, then, is that you can help your organization’s sales and marketing team become superheroes by being their most trusted and reliable sidekick.
How To Effectively Manage Content Used In Content Promotion
As a content manager or a member of a content team, it’s important to understand your organization’s marketing strategy and how to manage the content used in areas like sales and marketing activities.
For example, when looking at your company’s marketing mix, renowned sales trainer Brian Tracy defines 7 ‘P’s for sales and marketing success. Each of these areas involves using content, which needs management:
Product – While the marketing team is responsible for determining what the company’s products and services are, what they stand for, what differentiates them from the competition, whether they meet market demands and customer needs, and come up with appropriate messaging that communicates this, the content team also plays a role in this area. For example, by helping to manage and produce content (e.g. content designed to get feedback from users to create new products or services or improve existing ones).
Pricing – Your company may need to seasonally increase or decrease the pricing of its products or services to remain competitive and engage in sales and promotional activities. It’s important to make sure that wherever there is published content displaying pricing information, it can be quickly and easily updated to reflect accurate pricing changes.
Promotion – This area includes all the ways the business tells its customers about products and services. The content team can help deliver the business better results in this area by reviewing and suggesting improvements to promotional copy (e.g. headlines, calls to action, etc.) and reviewing content metrics.
Place – This is where your products and services are actually sold. It’s where the customer meets the salesperson. Since much of this activity now takes place online (e.g. eCommerce), digital content plays a vital role in all sales and marketing communications.
Packaging – It’s important to look at every element of content in your company’s products and services packaging with a critical eye just as a prospective customer would. Are there any improvements to the text or visual elements of the packaging that could be made to create a better impression on customers?
Position – This is about winning the hearts and minds of your customers. What are the specific words that people use to describe your company’s products and services to others? Can you create more content around this to improve the way people think and talk about your company and its positioning in your market?
People – Ultimately, everything is done by people. Having the right people in the right roles creates better results for the business. Content plays an important role in selecting, recruiting, hiring, and retaining people. For example, HR content such as documents outlining roles and responsibilities, policies, company guidelines, training, staff manuals, etc.
All aspects of marketing related to content promotion need content management.
If we return to the basic premise of this course (i.e. “all content needs management”), then it’s clear that content promotion also needs content management.
Earlier, we talked about the role of the content team in content promotion as being like a superhero’s trusted and reliable sidekick, handling the tools in their ‘utility belts’ when help is needed, and providing the business with the support and information it needs to run its marketing activities smoothly and deliver consistent results.
The lessons in this module look at what this means from a practical perspective.
Content Metrics
Content metrics help you track how well your content is performing and measure the success of your content marketing strategy.
Although Google won’t disclose the ranking signals they use to drive content higher in their search results, they do allow you to understand their mindset by sharing extensive documentation with clear guidelines on how to create quality content that will help to improve your rankings and the questions they ask when writing algorithms to assess site quality.
Promoting your content to the right audiences using the right content types via the right channels helps you get the content you create in front of the audience you create it for.
Now that you understand the content promotion process better, it’s time to create your content promotion plan.
Your content promotion plan is a document that outlines the strategy and tactics for promoting and distributing the content created by your business.
It typically includes the goals and objectives for your content promotion, your target audience, the distribution channels to be used, the timing and scheduling of promotions, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your content promotion activities.
Your business needs a content promotion plan because it helps you to effectively reach and engage your target audience and to maximize the impact of the content you produce.
By having a plan in place, your business can also more efficiently allocate resources and budget toward content promotion and track the performance of your promotion efforts over time.
Additionally, a content promotion plan can help your business to identify and leverage the most effective distribution channels for reaching your target audience and to stay consistent and on-brand with your messaging.
Furthermore, having a specific plan for the promotion of your content, allows you to maximize your reach, it will ensure that your content is seen by the right people at the right time, rather than just publishing it and hoping it will be found. It will also allow you to track the effectiveness of your promotion and make adjustments as needed.
In short, your content promotion plan is your strategy for getting the word out about your business’s content. It helps your business increase the visibility of your content and drive engagement and conversions.
Content Promotion Plan Goals And Objectives
Common content promotion plan goals and objectives include:
Reach and engagement: The goal is to increase the visibility and reach of your content to a wider audience through various promotion channels. This can be achieved by sharing content on social media, sending newsletters, and creating and sharing infographics on social media platforms.
Brand awareness: The goal is to increase your brand awareness and visibility by promoting your content so it aligns with your brand’s messaging and values. This can be achieved by creating and sharing branded graphics, videos, and infographics, and guest blogging on relevant websites,
Search engine optimization (SEO): The goal is to improve the visibility and ranking of your content in search engines through strategic keyword usage, meta-tag optimization, and backlinks. This can be achieved by researching and including relevant keywords, optimizing meta tags, and creating internal and external links.
Lead generation: The goal is to generate leads and collect contact information from interested users by promoting content that includes calls to action. This can be achieved by creating and promoting e-books, webinars, and other content that requires contact information for access.
Influencer marketing: The goal is to increase the reach and credibility of your content by partnering with influencers in the industry. This can be achieved by working with influencers in your niche to create and promote content and collaborating with influencers to create sponsored posts.
Email marketing: The goal is to promote your content and increase engagement through email campaigns. This can be achieved by sending a newsletter that includes links to recent blog posts or promoting a new product or service through email. (Also, consider using video marketing)
Paid promotion: The goal is to increase the visibility and reach of content by paying for advertising on various platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Twitter Ads. This can be achieved by promoting a blog post on Facebook and running a Google Ads campaign to promote an e-book.
How To Create A Content Promotion Plan
Here are the steps you can follow to create a content promotion plan for your business:
Review your content: Before promoting your content, make sure it is of high quality and relevant to your target audience.
Identify your target audience: Determine who your target audience is and where they can be found. This will help you decide which channels to use for promotion.
Select your promotion channels: Decide on the channels you will use to promote your content. This might include social media, email marketing, video marketing, paid advertising, influencer marketing, etc.
Create a promotion calendar: Use a calendar or scheduling tool to plan out when and how you will promote each published piece of content.
Create promotional content: Create promotional content like social media posts, email subject lines, ad copy, etc. to share with your audience to drive engagement and increase visibility.
Use metrics to measure your results: Set up metrics to track the success of your content promotions. Use this data to optimize your promotions over time.
Evaluate and adjust your plan: Review your results and make adjustments as needed to improve your content promotion plan.
Example Of A Content Promotion Plan
Here is an example of what a simple content promotion plan to promote a B2B company’s webinar might look like:
Audience: Business owners and managers in the manufacturing industry
Goals: Increase brand awareness, generate leads, increase attendance to the webinar
Competitors: Industry leaders and peers
Topics:
The latest technology for the manufacturing industry
How to increase productivity and reduce costs
Plan:
Promote the webinar on social media: 1 week before the webinar
Email the audience: 3 days before the webinar
Reach out to influencers in the industry: 2 weeks before the webinar
Run Facebook and LinkedIn ads: 1 week before the webinar
Distribution:
Social media: LinkedIn, Facebook
Email marketing: Weekly newsletter
Paid Advertising: LinkedIn Ads, Facebook ads
Influencer marketing: Reach out to industry leaders
Promotion calendar:
Social media posts: Start promoting 1 week before the webinar
Email the audience: 3 days before the webinar
Reach out to influencers: 2 weeks before the webinar
Run Facebook and LinkedIn ads: 1 week before the webinar
By following these steps and regularly monitoring your results, you’ll be able to create a content promotion plan that helps you reach your target audience and achieve your business goals with your webinar or any other content.
Content Promotion Challenges
Promoting your content can be a challenging task, as it requires a combination of technical skills, marketing strategies, and audience engagement.
While content promotion is a crucial and necessary part of your content strategy, it can also present the following challenges:
No clear strategy: Without a clear and well-defined content promotion strategy, it can be difficult to effectively promote a website’s content and achieve desired results.
Audience engagement: creating content that resonates with the target audience and encourages them to share and engage with it.
Competition: There is a lot of competition for attention, visibility, and engagement on the internet, and it can be difficult to stand out among other websites and content creators.
Lack of traffic: Without a significant number of visitors to a website, it can be difficult to gain traction and promote content effectively.
Limited budget: Promoting content can be expensive, and websites with limited budgets may not have the resources to effectively promote their content.
Limited reach: Even with a large amount of traffic, a website’s reach may be limited if the majority of visitors are not within the target audience.
Producing high-quality content: The quality of your content is very important. Poor-quality content will be hard to promote and get noticed by the audience. Ensuring that your content is informative and of high quality is important for keeping your audience engaged.
Search engine optimization (SEO) – making sure the website and its content are optimized to rank well in search engine results pages.
Algorithm changes: Search engines and social media platforms frequently update their algorithms, which can greatly impact the visibility and reach of a website’s content.
Content promotion activities: Actively promoting the content through various channels such as social media, email marketing, and advertising.
Measuring and analyzing performance: Tracking content metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates, and conversion rates to measure the success of content promotion efforts.
Content Promotion Checklist
Define promotion goals: Clearly define the goals for promoting the content, such as increasing website traffic or generating leads.
Identify target audience: Identify the target audience for your content and where they are most likely to be found online.
Create a distribution plan: Develop a plan for distributing the content through various channels, such as social media, email, and paid advertising.
Optimize for SEO: Optimize the content for search engines by including relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and alt tags.
Use social media: Share the content on your company’s social media platforms and encourage your followers to share it with their own networks.
Reach out to influencers: Reach out to influencers in your industry and ask them to share the content with their audience.
Leverage email marketing: Include your content in your email newsletter and send it to your email subscribers.
Leverage video marketing: Include your content in videos and upload these to popular video-sharing platforms.
Use paid promotion: Consider using paid promotion, such as Google Ads or Facebook ads, to reach a larger audience.
Track and analyze: Use analytics tools to track the performance of your promotions and gather insights for future campaigns.
Repurpose and refresh: Repurpose the content and refresh it with new information and insights to reach new audiences and keep existing audiences engaged.
Continuously monitor and improve: Continuously monitor and improve your promotion strategy based on the results and feedback.
Content Promotion – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content promotion:
What is content promotion?
Content promotion involves strategies and tactics used to distribute content to reach a broader audience. This may include sharing it through social media, email marketing, paid ads, or collaborating with influencers.
Why is content promotion important?
Content promotion is vital to increase visibility of your content, attract more traffic, engage audiences, and ultimately drive conversions. It helps to ensure that your valuable content reaches its intended audience and doesn’t just sit unnoticed.
How do I choose the right platforms for promoting my content?
Select platforms based on where your target audience spends their time. Analyze demographic data and platform popularity among your audience. Tailor your approach to fit the platform’s unique environment and user behavior.
What are some effective content promotion strategies?
How can I measure the success of my content promotion efforts?
Use analytics tools to track metrics such as page views, user engagement, social shares, and conversion rates. This data will help you understand the effectiveness of your strategies and guide future efforts.
What role do SEO and keywords play in content promotion?
SEO and keywords help to optimize your content so it is more likely to appear in search results, increasing organic visibility and traffic. Keyword optimization should be strategically aligned with the content topics and the search habits of your target audience.
Can I repurpose my content for promotion?
Yes, repurposing content across different formats (e.g., turning a blog post into a video or an infographic) can maximize its reach and appeal to different audience preferences, making it a versatile tool in content promotion.
How often should I promote my content?
The frequency of content promotion should depend on the platform and the nature of your content. Regular updates and reminders can keep your audience engaged without overwhelming them. Balance is the key to maintaining interest and relevance.
Summary
Content promotion activities such as content marketing and SEO including the promotion channels used to distribute this content all require content management.
Your content team plays a vital role in this area, helping to make the marketing team’s work more effective.
The process of content promotion involves getting your content in front of the right people, at the right time, and in the right format.
However, this can be challenging as there are various hurdles to overcome, such as increasing visibility, standing out in a crowded digital landscape, measuring performance, and budgeting.
Additionally, creating high-quality content that resonates with the target audience and encouraging engagement and sharing are also important aspects of effective content promotion.
Without a well-planned approach, promoting content can be a difficult and time-consuming task.
Action Steps
Review all areas relevant to content promotion in your organization and make sure that systems for managing, documenting, and accessing the content in these areas have been effectively implemented.
Resources
Content Promotion Kit – Includes a content promotion checklist (PDF), an editable checklist to customize for your business, templates for sharing content with leads, customers, and influencers, and templates for promoting content on social media.
Learn about using videos and video marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
Video Marketing
Learn about using videos and video marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
Research from leading online sources shows that people are watching more videos online than ever before.
According to sites like Wyzowl and Statista, for example, around 500 hours of new videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and more than 1 billion videos get viewed each day on TikTok.
It’s no wonder, then, that videos are an important part of marketing a business online effectively.
In this lesson, we provide a brief overview of video marketing and the challenges of managing your video content as part of your video marketing strategy.
We’ll look at:
What Is Video Marketing?
Your Video Marketing Strategy
Different Types Of Videos You Can Create
Managing Your Video Content Effectively
***
What Is Video Marketing?
“Video marketing is using videos to promote and market your product or service, increase engagement on your digital and social channels, educate your consumers and customers, and reach your audience with a new medium.”
More businesses are turning to video marketing and investing in the creation and distribution of video content to promote and market their services online.
And there is a good reason for this. According to Wyzowl, customers overwhelmingly prefer watching short videos to learn more about a product or service and buy physical and digital goods than reading text-based articles or blog posts, viewing infographics, downloading ebooks or manuals, attending webinars, receiving sales calls or trialing demos.
Also, the same research shows that people watch on average 2.5 hours of online videos and are twice as likely to share video content than any other type of content, including social media posts, blog posts, articles, or product pages.
In short, videos can be a powerful and effective way to:
Increase traffic to your website
Increase dwell time (the amount of time a user takes analyzing a web page before clicking back to search results)
Increase a user’s understanding of your product or service
Generate new business leads
Increase sales
Reduce support calls
Increase brand awareness
Generate good ROI
To reap the above benefits, however, you need an effective video marketing strategy.
Your Video Marketing Strategy
Video marketing is an effective way to promote and market your business online, but there are also challenges.
Online consumers are inundated every day with all kinds of marketing, advertising, and sales messages, and exposed to other types of interesting, and engaging visual content like live streaming, interactive 360 videos, augmented reality, and more.
On top of this, many competing businesses are also using videos.
For your video marketing strategy to be effective, then, you may need to create different types of branded video content and distribute these through different channels to reach your target audience and achieve your goals, taking into account the fact that most online consumers have very limited time and short attention spans, that there may be a lot of competition, and that your business may have very limited resources, such as a small budget, and a content team that lacks the time and the video production and editing skills to create really polished videos.
It’s also important to think about the purpose of your videos and where you plan to display these.
For example, some of the places you may want to display your videos include:
Landing or email-capture pages
Sales pages
Social media platforms
Social media ads
Private membership sites (e.g. welcome page, training pages, etc.)
Crowdfunding sites
Affiliate sites
etc.
Factors like your strategic goals, the story you want to tell using a video format, your budget, etc. will determine the types of videos your can produce and how you will distribute these.
For more information on creating an effective video marketing strategy, we recommend reading these excellent guides:
Most widely used video distribution channels. Source: Wyzowl
Research shows that in addition to posting videos on YouTube, more businesses are now planning to include channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok in their video marketing strategy.
For the latest video marketing statistics, including the most widely-used video distribution channels, go here.
Types Of Videos
What are the different kinds of videos you can create and what types of videos should you create for your business?
This all depends on your video marketing strategy.
According to Wyzowl, here are the most popular types of videos being created
The main types of videos being created. Source: Wyzowl
As the graph above shows, most video types fall into these groups:
Live Action – Live action videos are quick to film and edit, and can be made quite inexpensively (see description in the next section below).
Animated – Animated videos let you control every aspect of what viewers will see (see description in the next section below).
Screen Recorded – Screen-recorded videos essentially capture what you can see on your entire screen or a section of your screen, and can include mouse movements, callouts, annotations, in-picture videos, background soundtracks, etc. in the editing process. These types of videos are great for “looking over the shoulder” how-to tutorials.
And here are the most popular types of videos being created according to their purpose…
These are the most popular types of videos. Source: Wyzowl
Let’s go through these different types of videos:
Animated Videos
As stated earlier, with animated videos, you have complete control over all aspects of what will appear in your video.
You control the video’s look and feel…from background scenery to main characters, design, text, callouts, colors, timings, transitions, soundtrack, special effects, and more.
Additionally, animated videos can be created completely in-house on your computer. You don’t have to hire actors, scout for shoot locations, or worry about bad takes and reshoots. You can tweak and refine animated videos to your heart’s content and go back and edit them at any time.
You can also use animated videos to create almost all other types of videos, including video ads, teaser videos, sales videos, explainer videos, product demos, event videos, training videos, onboarding videos, and more!
Here is an example of an animated video used to explain food safety cross-contamination…
For more information and examples of animated videos, go here:
App demo videos (also called app explainer videos) show off what a mobile app can do…how it works, how it looks, how it feels, and all the features and benefits users need to know and understand to download or buy and use your app.
App demo videos are often made using direct screen recordings but can include footage of the app, elements of animated or live-action video, 3D device animations, illustrations, and more!
Many app demos can also double up as explainer videos by introducing your target audience to the features and story behind your app.
Check out this animated app demo video for a children’s learning app:
For more information and examples of app demo videos, go here:
“Behind the scene” videos let viewers meet the people working in your company, see your team at work, and gain valuable insights into your business processes and your company culture.
“Behind the scene” videos are not only great for personalizing your business and building trust but they can also act as an effective recruitment tool for your company.
Here is a great example of a “behind the scenes” video:
For more information and examples of “behind-the-scenes” videos, go here:
A corporate or business video refers to the production of video content for brands and companies that can be used for everything – from educating and persuading new customers, to providing informative walkthroughs and demos of your website or solutions, to training and onboarding new employees.
Corporate videos can include a mix of different video types – animated, live-action, screen-recorded, interactive, and more.
They are also quite versatile, in that the final video can be used for a wide range of purposes (e.g. social posts, emails, adverts, trade shows, etc.).
Here is an example of a corporate video created by a University for viewers who are deciding on which higher-learning institute they should attend:
For more information and examples of corporate videos, go here:
Onboarding videos welcome, educate, and empower customers and users about the full benefits of your company, products, services, and features, help them get their accounts and administrative settings up and running, show them how to assemble and use physical/digital products, and give them the knowledge and tools they need to get up and running quickly.
Onboarding videos also help to improve user experience and increase customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty, and revenue by upskilling and empowering them and providing them with timely information and support, reducing product returns due to buyer’s remorse.
Onboarding videos range from simple welcome videos to software demo videos, product walkthrough videos, detailed educational videos, etc.,
They can also be used in a range of different ways. For example, you can make them available as an on-demand “learn at your own pace” type knowledge portal, upload them to YouTube and add them to a ‘User Onboarding’ playlist, build the video content into your customer workflow as an interactive guide, and more.
Here is an example of a “bite-sized” customer onboarding video from Asana:
For more information and examples of customer onboarding videos, go here:
Customer service videos help customers troubleshoot and solve problems, answer questions about your products or services, and reduce support queries.
Customer service videos can include FAQ videos, video tutorials, and feature or product demos.
Publishing customer service videos publicly can also help to build trust with users and reassure them that your business will be there to support them.
If you are wondering how to create customer service videos that will help get you and your customers out of a pickle, watch the video below:
For more information and examples of customer service videos, go here:
Demo videos are short, educational video clips that showcase your products or services, highlight their key benefits, and explain or show how your products or services work.
Demo videos typically encourage viewers to purchase the product or service after watching it in action and can be done in the form of a tutorial, a showcase, or an animated video.
Here, for example, is an animated demo video offering an innovative solution to a problem that many new parents have to face (some do it bravely, and some just suck it up):
For more information and examples of demo videos, go here:
Event videos are great for grabbing the attention of viewers and passersby at events like exhibitions and trade shows and providing them with product highlights or a visual summary of what your business does.
You can also use event videos to generate a buzz (and sell tickets) before an event, add impact to award ceremonies (e.g. to introduce nominees, review “best moments”, celebrate winners, etc.), enhance sales presentations or investment pitches, give audiences a “behind the scenes” tour at internal events like annual team meetings, sales conferences, sales kick-offs, etc.
Businesses of all sizes can benefit from event videos and produce these as animated event videos or live-action videos with event videography.
Here is an example of an event video aimed at participants with a lot of dough to throw around:
For more information and examples of event videos, go here:
Explainer videos are designed to save companies time and help viewers quickly understand their business, product, or service by communicating key concepts and key points concisely.
Explainer videos are one of the most popular and versatile types of videos. They can be any length, but many are typically 1-2 minutes long, and once created, can be used repeatedly in multiple ways, such as:
Your home page
Social media
Email signatures
Paid social/YouTube ad campaigns
Events
Introduction to training or onboarding new customers or new team members.
Additionally, you can use elements from your explainer video as web graphics (e.g. a screengrab) and other print/digital assets.
Here is a video that tells you nothing, yet explains everything about what this company does:
For more information and examples of explainer videos, go here:
Unlike “linear” videos where users can only play, pause, rewind, and fast-forward content, interactive videos put users in control of their viewing experience by allowing them to click and interact with your video content to make decisions, answer questions, complete forms, buy products, and more!
An interactive video is essentially video content overlaid with interactive elements so the choices viewers make while watching determine how the video plays out.
Some of the most popular interactive features & functionality of interactive videos include branching stories with clickable hotspots and outcomes that depend on the choices viewers make, navigating to specific chapters in the video content, interactive quizzes, and built-in eCommerce allowing users to fill out forms and buy products on your ‘shoppable video’.
It’s important to note that interactive videos need to be hosted on a special server for the overlaid interactive functionality of the video to work.
Click on the image below to view an interactive video that walks you through Amazon’s company onboarding process using a gamified approach.
Amazon’s interactive onboarding video.
For more information and examples of interactive videos, go here:
A live-action video is essentially recording people talking on camera. This can be the company CEO, members of a team, clients, customers, etc. telling a story in their own words, and sharing their expertise or experiences (e.g. testimonials).
Featuring real people in your video puts a face to your brand adds a personal touch, and helps to build trust and credibility
If you are looking to create a high volume of video content (e.g. for social media), live-action videos are ideal, as they are relatively quick to film and edit.
Here is one of the most successful live-action explainer videos of all time:
For more information and examples of interactive videos, go here:
Microinteractions are trigger-based events where a user interacts with your website or mobile app through animation.
No doubt you have seen microinteractions on websites and social media. Simple examples are the ‘heart’ or ‘thumbs up’ animation that comes up when you like someone’s post or text message, and the animated ‘loading’ icon you see when you are waiting for a web page to load.
Microinteractions are designed to provide users with instant and relevant feedback, add “emotion” and status updates, and encourage user interaction (e.g. sharing, liking, and commenting on your content). They can help to improve site navigation and user experience and make your website more interesting and engaging to users.
Product demo videos let you educate, explain, entertain, and sell products by building customer confidence and removing barriers to purchase.
Product demo videos work in a similar way to explainer videos by showing users product features, explaining their functionality, and involving them so they can understand what the product does, how it works, and visualize themselves using it.
You can include live-action footage (e.g. someone presenting and giving a product demonstration) and/or animation (e.g. cross-sections, close-ups, etc.) in your product demo videos.
In addition to helping you sell products directly to consumers, product demo videos can also be used to educate your sales team, distributors, affiliates, clients, etc.
Here, for example, is a slick video aimed at coffee-loving consumers who want to enjoy barista-style coffees at home:
For more information and examples of product demo videos, go here:
Sales videos support your sales process by helping to convert leads into new customers.
In addition to educating potential customers about the benefits and features of your products or services, they help to build rapport, address frequently asked questions, and proactively overcome objections, inspiring and persuading prospects to become customers.
Sales videos are also great for people that don’t like being “sold to” as these can work for you as your 24/7 sales team, delivering a perfect sales pitch consistently, and allowing prospects to inspect what you have to offer in a place where they feel safe, comfortable, and at a time that is suitable and convenient for them.
Sales videos can save your sales reps time (by helping them spend less time on the phone taking and making sales calls), used instead of an actual sales team member, or included in a sales presentation.
Sales videos can be created using a blend of animated or live-action footage, and include text slides, testimonials, product demos or showcases, screen recordings, interactive elements, and more…whatever is required to get someone interested in your brand to the point where they make a decision to buy.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with injecting a little humor in your sales videos, so you can sell without actually saying much about your company or products, as shown in the video below:
For more information and examples of sales videos, go here:
Social media videos are short-form videos designed to tell stories that will attract viewers on social platforms and drive engagement actions.
Various types of videos work well on social media, including interviews, Q&As, live videos, announcements, reveals, behind-the-scenes, product demos, user-generated videos, giveaways and contests, promos and deals, event videos, and tutorials.
With most social media platforms, you can simply upload your regular videos, like the example video shown below, sourced from Facebook:
In addition to posting videos on social platforms, you can use animated videos and animated social graphics in status updates, profiles, news feeds, and other areas to keep followers interested.
Note: You may need to adjust your video formats and filesto use some of the advertising and promotional features available on various social media platforms.
For more information and examples of social media videos, go here:
Just like movie trailers, teaser videos give viewers a sneak peek of a product or service and are designed to raise awareness and build anticipation about new and upcoming features, products, and events (live events, online courses, etc.).
You can create a teaser video if you haven’t yet finished building your new product, service, feature, or idea. This allows you to get your promotion going and build momentum and anticipation for it earlier, as well as providing an opportunity for feedback from your audience.
You can then gauge the feedback and response to refine your development process and improve the chances of success for your final product.
Alternatively, if you are creating a teaser video for a more complete and fuller video-based product (e.g. an online course), here is an effective format for creating ‘sneak-peek’ videos:
Script and produce the full (i.e. complete) version of your video first
Identify an ideal spot in your video timeline to insert a break
Create an additional ‘click here to learn more’ slide
Produce two versions of the video: your full video and the shorter teaser video ending with the ‘click here to learn more’ slide.
You can also create the above sneak peek video by editing highlights of your course and compiling these into a “compilation teaser” video.
Once you have your teaser video done, make sure to share it on your website and social media platforms…maybe even consider boosting it with an ad spend or going offline (e.g. video billboards, events, TV, etc.) to generate maximum impact and awareness.
Below is a video compilation showcasing various product teaser videos:
For more information and examples of teaser videos, go here:
Allowing your satisfied customers and clients to promote and champion your business through testimonial videos (and case study videos) is a powerful way to build trust, boost credibility, and provide social proof for your brand, and ultimately increase sales of your products and services.
Just as many consumers check product reviews from other users before making a decision, many people also watch video testimonials to learn more about a company, product, or service and to help influence their purchasing decisions.
Testimonial videos are especially effective when your business can demonstrate through customers or client testimonials how your solution, product, or service has helped solve their problems and address their pain points, as many of your target audience will experience similar issues and challenges.
There are various ways to create testimonial videos. You can:
Create low-budget testimonial videos in-house by collecting written testimonials from satisfied customers, adding these to a slide presentation with a voice-over and/or soundtrack, and presenting these as a screen recording
Use video testimonial software (see further below), or
Create live-action recordings using a professional video production company.
You can add testimonial videos to product/service pages on your website, share them on social media, include them in video ad campaigns, and various other ways.
Here is an example of a low-budget yet compelling video testimonial you could shoot with just your phone and basic video-editing software:
For more information and examples of testimonial videos, go here:
Training videos are a powerful learning tool, especially “look over the shoulder”-style how-to screen recordings and videos that combine audio and visual elements with written text such as bullet point reminders, key concept summaries, checklists, diagrams, flowcharts, etc.
One of the main benefits of creating training videos from a business point of view is that these provide consistency in your organization. Videos can be used to train individuals or whole teams and explain your processes, policies, products, production workflows, and troubleshooting, as well as the culture, values, behaviors, and standards your organization expects from all team members.
They are also extremely cost-effective, as you can use the same video to train new team members or new customers or clients.
From the viewer’s point of view, there are many benefits too. Viewers can learn at their own pace and usually at a time that suits them, rewind over points repeatedly, and demonstrate in a couple of minutes what could take hours to explain.
Training videos encompass a wide range of purposes and can use different styles (e.g. screen recording, animation. live-action, or a combination of all of these) to communicate their information.
For example, you can create the following types of training videos:
Product training videos to demonstrate how products work.
Demo videos to provide an overview of how a software application or product works.
Orientation videos to welcome new members to your team and help them learn about their new roles.
Customer relations videos to showcase customer interactions and improve customer experience using ‘roleplay’ scenarios.
Sales training videos to empower your sales team to present effectively, handle objections, and convert prospects into new sales.
Retail training videos to show your team how customers should be treated and help them learn skills like upselling and cross-selling, dealing with difficult customers and complaints, etc.
Safety training videos to demonstrate how to operate safely and follow correct procedures.
HR training videos to explain your policies and make your rules and expectations clear.
Explainer videos to help your team members, customers, distributors, reps, affiliates, etc. understand your business, products, services, solutions, etc.
Training videos can also be of varying lengths. In some cases, long videos may be required, such as recorded presentations or webinars. In other situations, it may be more effective if the information is broken down into bite-size digestible short videos.
For example, here is a comprehensive video tutorial on using Photoshop that delivers almost one hour of training content…
And here is an example of a short instructional video dealing with workplace bullying:
For more information and examples of training videos, go here:
Video advertising is using video content to sell products or services.
Video ads are typically promotional-type videos introducing your brand, product, or service, which are created specifically for sharing outside of your business, where you pay for audiences to view or click on it.
Video ads can be quite effective if done right. The key is to capture the viewer’s attention within the first few seconds, and then keep them engaged with content that tells the right story without ‘hard selling’ them, and then asking for the purchase at the right moment.
Typical examples of video ads include:
Video banner advertisements appearing on a landing page or website.
Pre-, mid-, or post-roll video advertisements that are played before, during, or after an online video or a video posted on social media.
TV video ads aired as traditional commercials on TV or streaming services.
Live video ads shown as part of a real-time streamed event, conversation, or product launch.
Sponsored video ads (e.g. “This video is brought to you by…”) placed within other videos or marketing content.
Below is an example of a video ad aimed at mobile phone users and created to promote Android:
For more information and examples of video ads, go here:
“Videographics are an engaging visual representation of compiled data put forward in a graphically appealing and easy-to-understand way…
A videographic provides the audience with valuable information while entertaining them at the same time. It is a short, informative type of video that helps your audience digest your reports or statistical numbers better in a matter of minutes. “
Essentially, a videographic makes information easier to interpret by taking complex data and data-driven messages from statistics, polls, and survey results and turning them into compelling and concise visual information made simple, quick, and easy to consume.
Informative videographics encourage sharing on multiple platforms, resulting in better brand recall.
Below is an example of a videographic-based video:
For more information and examples of videographics, go here:
Here are some useful tools tat can help to improve your video marketing results.
Hookle
Hookle – Social Media Planning App
Hookle is an app that lets you manage all of your social media marketing in one place and lets you schedule and publish your videos to all your social media platforms.
Check out the video below for an overview of this tool:
For more social media management tools that you can use to track video performance across multiple platforms, see this section of the course: Social Media Tools
Create Cartoon Explainer Videos Easily
Cartoon explainer videos can be very effective when it comes to grabbing and keeping a viewer’s attention.
They can also be used to inform, educate, and convert viewers into prospective clients and customers, train users, simplify complex subjects, tell engaging stories, etc.
As stated earlier, explainer videos are great for getting your point across quickly, reducing customer support calls, and getting your videos shared online.
Cartoon explainer videos can also be expensive to create. A digital agency will typically charge thousands of dollars to create a short animated video for your business, and some will even charge thousands of dollars per minute of video!
For an inexpensive and easy-to-use cartoon explainer video creation software that you can use to create animated explainer videos in-house, check out Toonly.
Animated Video Creation Tool
If you are looking for a powerful video creation software tool that can help you create 2D & 3D animated marketing, explainer, and training videos, doodle sketch videos, and motion videos in-house in minutes, check out Doodly.
Live Action Video Animation
If you are looking for a video animation tool that lets you easily create stunning live-action video intros and logo stings with no video editing or production skills, check out Viddyoze.
Use any of the tools below to collect video testimonials from happy clients and customers and promote these on your website, blog, social media, etc.
Vocal Video
Vocal Video – All-in-one video testimonial software platform.
Vocal Video is an all-in-one platform for collecting, editing, hosting, and sharing testimonial videos.
This tool lets you easily and quickly collect testimonial videos, edit them, and apply your branding.
You can also trim your video, add graphics and licensed music, switch from video to audio, and create a video transcript directly from the tool with no additional software required.
VideoAsk is a “video conversation” platform that lets you and your customers quickly send video, text, or audio replies back and forth.
Essentially, it’s like communicating via emails but using videos instead.
You can use this tool to collect customer feedback, add video welcome messages for respondents, and use conditional logic to send pre-recorded questions to customers based on their previous responses.
VideoPeel allows users to click, record, and submit video testimonials automatically via mobile or desktop using a video capture link. The tool also automates thank-you messages.
VideoPeel displays all of your questions on one screen and offers you the option of choosing different video campaign templates (profile message, photo message, or video message). You can use their editing tools to add your logo, a simple text overlay, a star rating, and a disclaimer.
Collected video responses are held in a single repository for easy management.
VideoPeel also offers Shopify integration, Amazon syndication, and other eCommerce and social media publishing options.
Vouch is a video testimonials tool that lets you add questions and send a single link to one or many users.
You can review your video responses and transcripts, trim your videos or stitch them together to create a playlist using their video editing software, and publish or share these via a link, embed code, or integration.
The tool features speaker notes, calendar reminders, and unlimited takes, allowing users to easily record their video responses and send these back to you.
Vouch lets you add your own logo, colors, and styling to control your brand experience across all touchpoints, and integrates with many popular workflow tools, allowing you to collect and share video testimonials from tools you are already using.
Video monetization platforms allow you to get paid for the videos you publish online. When audiences view or download your content, you get paid, so the more that people watch, the more you earn.
If you would like to monetize your videos, consider using a tool like the one shown below.
Uscreen
Uscreen is an end-to-end white-labeled video monetization platform that supports subscription and pay-per-view models and is designed to generate revenue on OTT streaming services similar to Netflix or Hulu.
Uscreen provides everything you need to monetize, distribute and scale your streaming service business: video hosting, streaming, built-in billing, monetization, analytics, and even end-user support.
Uscreen also provides membership sites for your subscribers, fully-branded apps for mobile and TV, tools to host live streaming events, community and course features, and more than 1,000 integrations (e.g. Mailchimp, Salesforce, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, and many more!)
Video marketing is not only essential when it comes to promoting your content online effectively, it is also extremely challenging to track and manage effectively without the right strategy, systems, processes, tools, resources, and budget.
Before you start producing videos for your business, make sure that you have the following in place:
Your Content Strategy and Content Plan to ensure that any videos you create will contribute to achieving your business objectives.
A documented content production workflow – whether you decide to create videos in-house or outsource the creation to an external agency, it’s important for your video creation processes to be documented.
Content Documentation System – where are you storing all digital assets, files, and elements used in the production of your videos? Make sure these are easily accessible as you will need to update your videos in the future.
Video Metrics – Have you defined the important metrics you will be tracking for your videos? You will need these metrics to know which videos and video topics are generating the best ROI and to improve your results.
Tracking System – Your tracking system will help you monitor, measure, and evaluate the effectiveness of your videos and your video marketing campaigns.
Summary
Most businesses with an online presence today need to engage in video marketing. There are many types of videos you can create for your business, so it’s important to develop a clear video marketing strategy for your business.
Action Steps
Create a video marketing strategy aligned with your overall content strategy and objectives, set up the systems you need to manage it effectively, and schedule regular reviews to make sure that your video marketing strategy is consistently delivering your business its expected targets, continued growth, and a positive ROI.
Resources
The Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack – Download a free video marketing starter pack containing videos, templates, resources, and tips on how to get your video marketing strategy going.
Social Media Video Specs Guide – Visit this guide for up-to-date video formatting and file specifications for all the major social media platforms.
Also, see the sections below for additional information and video-related tools and resources that can help you create professional videos and video content inexpensively:
Learn how to drive more traffic to your site and more customers to your business by getting your videos to rank higher on YouTube and on Google’s search results.
Here are frequently asked questions about video marketing:
Why is video marketing important?
Video marketing is essential because it enhances engagement, boosts brand awareness, and improves conversion rates by delivering compelling content that resonates with audiences more effectively than text alone.
How do you properly execute a video marketing strategy?
To execute a video marketing strategy effectively, start by defining your goals, understanding your target audience, creating compelling content, optimizing for search engines, and analyzing performance to refine future strategies.
What types of videos are most effective in video marketing?
Product demonstrations, tutorials, customer testimonials, live streams, and company culture videos are among the most effective types because they engage viewers and provide valuable information in an accessible format.
How long should marketing videos be?
The optimal length depends on the platform and your audience’s preferences. Generally, shorter videos (1-2 minutes) work well on social media, while longer formats (up to 10 minutes) can be effective on platforms like YouTube for more detailed content.
How do I measure the success of my video marketing campaigns?
Measure success using metrics such as view count, engagement rate (likes, shares, comments), watch time, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Analytics tools can help track these metrics and provide insights into viewer behavior.
Can video marketing help with SEO?
Yes, videos can significantly boost SEO by increasing the time visitors spend on your site, reducing bounce rates, and providing content that can be ranked in search results, particularly if the videos are properly optimized with the right keywords and meta descriptions.
What platforms should I use for video marketing?
Use a mix of platforms for maximum reach and impact, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The choice of platform should align with where your target audience spends their time and the nature of the content.
How often should I release new videos?
The frequency should be based on your capacity to produce quality content and your audience’s appetite for new videos. Consistency is key, so choose a sustainable schedule, whether it’s weekly, biweekly, or monthly.
What budget should I allocate to video marketing?
Your budget should reflect your marketing goals, the quality of production required, and the expected ROI. Start with a manageable budget and adjust based on the outcomes of your initial campaigns.
How can I make my videos stand out?
Focus on storytelling, use high-quality visuals and sound, ensure your content is authentic and relatable, and consider incorporating interactive elements like Q&A sessions to engage your audience more deeply.
Learn about using emails. autoresponders, and email marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
Email Marketing
Learn about using emails, autoresponders, and email marketing effectively as part of your content marketing strategy.
A successful email marketing strategy will help you grow a targeted and responsive email list of subscribers.
You can then use this list to nurture leads into prospective clients and customers using emails targeted to your audience and distributed through email services and autoresponders.
This lesson will give you a better understanding of using email marketing to grow your business online.
In this lesson, we cover the following areas:
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Why Use Autoresponders?
Email Drip Feeding And Broadcasting Messages
Email Marketing Services
Email Integration With Your Website
***
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Covering everything you need to know about email marketing is beyond the scope of our course.
If you’re new to email marketing, watch the video below for a quick overview and practical tips to help you get started:
In the wider context of effective content management, it is useful to set goals when implementing an email marketing strategy to include the following:
Integration with Content Strategy: Ensure that email campaigns align with your overarching content strategy to maintain consistency in messaging and branding across all channels.
Ensuring Content Relevance: Deliver targeted email content that resonates with your audience’s interests, preferences, and stage in the customer journey.
Segmenting Email Lists Effectively: Divide the subscriber base into segments based on demographics, behavior, preferences, and past interactions. Personalize email content to cater to the specific needs, preferences, and interests of each segment.
Optimized Email Design: Design visually appealing emails that are mobile-responsive and easy to read. Incorporate clear calls-to-action (CTAs), compelling visuals, and concise copy.
Consistent Email Cadence: Establish a consistent schedule for sending emails to maintain audience engagement without overwhelming them. This ensures that subscribers anticipate and look forward to receiving your content, leading to better open and click-through rates.
Enhanced Email Deliverability: Ensure emails reach recipients’ inboxes by maintaining sender reputation, optimizing email content, and adhering to email regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act. This fosters better engagement and avoids email being marked as spam.
Improved Email Open Rates: This involves crafting compelling subject lines and preview text to increase open rates. Personalization, segmentation, and A/B testing can also optimize content for higher open rates, driving better campaign performance.
Boosted Click-Through Rates: Develop engaging email content with clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons and relevant links to drive recipients to desired actions, such as visiting a website or making a purchase].
Reduced Unsubscribe Rates: Provide valuable and relevant content to subscribers based on their preferences and behaviors. Regularly review email performance metrics to identify trends and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Performance Tracking and Optimization: Monitor email performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Analyze data to identify trends, optimize content, and refine email strategies for continuous improvement.
Ensuring Email Compliance: Adhere to email marketing regulations and best practices, as well as legal and industry regulations regarding email marketing, including obtaining consent, providing clear opt-out options, honoring unsubscribe requests promptly, and ensuring data privacy and security. Compliance helps build trust with subscribers and mitigates legal risks.
Lifecycle Email Marketing
Lifecycle email marketing is a strategic approach designed to deliver timely and relevant messages to the right audience, guiding them through their journey from awareness to advocacy.
It’s a potent tool for nurturing prospects and customers, influencing purchase decisions, and boosting revenue.
The Power of Lifecycle Emails
There are two key reasons why lifecycle emails are highly effective.
Lifecycle marketing comprehensively addresses all stages of the marketing funnel, including customer acquisition, retention, and upselling, making it a significant revenue driver.
Lifecycle Email Marketing Stages
There are eight stages in lifecycle email marketing:
Awareness: Introduce your brand and grab attention.
Knowledge and Interest: Establish authority and build trust.
Consideration: Nourish interest with targeted content.
Selection: Highlight why your offering is superior.
Purchase: Facilitate conversions and follow up post-sale.
Satisfaction: Ensure customer happiness and engagement.
Retention and Loyalty: Reengage customers and seek upsell opportunities.
Advocacy: Encourage referrals and foster advocacy.
Tailoring Content To Each Lifecycle Phase
Early Phase
Focus on addressing customer pain points without overt selling, building trust through educational content, and setting expectations through welcome emails.
Middle Phase
Continue nurturing post-purchase relationships with thank you emails, onboarding guides, feedback requests, and incentives like discounts or replenishment reminders.
Late Phase
Leverage satisfied customers to drive advocacy through referral programs and reengagement emails, reinforcing relationships built in earlier phases.
Tips For Effective Lifecycle Campaigns
Establish KPIs: Set objectives and benchmarks tailored to each stage to measure success effectively.
Avoid Urgency: Prioritize building value over creating urgency to foster genuine customer engagement.
Personalize Content: Segment your audience based on interests and behaviors to deliver highly relevant content that resonates.
When executed thoughtfully, lifecycle email marketing can be a powerful tool for nurturing customer relationships, maximizing revenue, and cultivating brand advocates.
Understanding the distinct needs of each stage and crafting tailored content accordingly is the key to unlocking the full potential of this strategy.
Why Use Autoresponders?
Another secret of growing a successful business through content marketing is to have an email marketing strategy that allows you to:
Grow a targeted and responsive email list of subscribers,
Turn subscribers into prospective clients and customers, and
Train/Upsell existing customers.
Building and managing lists with emails using email services and autoresponders allow you to keep in touch with your subscribers and deliver timely or scheduled email messages, training content, and information of value on a regular basis and at the click of a button.
If you’ve ever filled out an opt-in form online to get more information about a product or service, or signed up for an email newsletter and received an instant response in your e-mail inbox, your email reply was most likely sent via an autoresponder program.
Simply put, autoresponders are email programs that send out pre-written messages. These emails can be in response to trigger requests sent to a specific email address or scheduled to be sent out sequentially whenever a new subscriber opts into your service.
An email marketing and autoresponder service can help your business automate your communications with your target audience.
Autoresponders are one of the most powerful online marketing tools you have available for growing your business online. They are easy to use and once you have set things up, your entire marketing can be automated to keep your business growing 24 hours a day on auto-pilot.
When new subscribers sign up, they are instantly added to an automated sales, training, and/or customer relationship system, and remain on your list until they decide to unsubscribe.
Autoresponders can be used in a variety of ways, from sending welcome emails to building customer lists, following up with prospects, and tracking leads through a sales pipeline.
Some autoresponders, like signup services for e-groups and forums, are one-time deals. They provide a single response for every message received (e.g. email a specific address and you get back email instructions on how to join or access the group).
Depending on your email marketing strategy, you could set up multiple autoresponders to target different groups of users or address different needs.
For example, you may want to set up an autoresponder to send out only important product updates to premium-level clients and another autoresponder to grow and nurture leads (and eventually turn these subscribers into premium clients).
Email Drip Feeding And Broadcasting Messages
Email Drip Feeding
With an autoresponder, you can bulk-write your email messages and then drip-feed emails to your subscribers at regular intervals that you specify.
Drip-feed emails to your subscribers using autoresponders and automate your communications.
If you are setting up a series of training emails or an email course, for example, you would create the content of those emails, add these to your autoresponder, and then set up a predetermined schedule to drip-feed your emails and send out messages to your subscriber email addresses.
For instance, you can set up an autoresponder to send subscribers an instant response when they sign up (e.g. a welcome email), then a follow-up message 2-3 days later, then another message 5-7 days after the previous email has been sent, and so on.
You can also program your autoresponder to send one message every day (e.g. an inspirational quote or daily reflection), 2-3 emails per week (e.g. product training or an email course), twice monthly (e.g. a newsletter), once a year (e.g. a subscription renewal reminder), or any interval that works for your audience and keeps them interested and engaged with our email series (and subscribed).
In addition to drip feeding, you can also create a single email message and broadcast it to your list on specific days, times, and intervals of your choice.
Email broadcasting is great for sending out special offers, time-sensitive announcements, product updates, event reminders, breaking news, etc.
Email Marketing Services
Ideally, your business should be capturing visitor details from your website or blog and adding them to your mailing list or newsletter.
There are many self-hosting scripts available, including plugins and add-ons that you can use to send out newsletters and autoresponder messages via your own website or CMS platform.
However, we recommend choosing a reliable third-party (i.e. hosted) service provider to handle your email marketing activities, such as your list-building campaigns, autoresponder setups, subscriber list segmentation, reporting, statistics, etc.
Well-known providers are recognized by Internet Service Providers (ISP) and have higher email deliverability rates. They also provide regular technical support.
We recommend using a reliable email marketing service instead of hosting your own!
With a self-hosted script or plugin, you have to manage all of the technical aspects yourself. While this option may seem sensible while your list is small, as soon as your subscriber base starts to become significant in terms of size and potential value, you run the risk of losing everything if anything happens to your service.
Using a well-known professional autoresponder service ensures reliable email deliverability. The services we recommend using are affordable, provide responsive customer support, and have the infrastructure to keep your data secure. These services also integrate with WordPress, allowing you to build your subscriber list directly from your website or blog.
For example, here’s an email marketing service we use and recommend:
Aweber
You can use a service like Aweber to set up email capture forms for your website and automate your email marketing campaigns.
Aweber is one of the world’s most reliable and popular email delivery services and offers a professional and affordable list-building, autoresponder, and email marketing automation solution with many extensive features like:
Send Email Newsletters – Aweber lets you send engaging email newsletters to your opt-in subscribers.
Publish A Signup Form To Your Website Or Blog – Publish a signup form to your site using a simple and intuitive point-and-click Web Form wizard.
Create Autoresponders – Autoresponders allow you to build relationships with your subscribers. Autoresponders can welcome new subscribers, educate them about your products and services and drive your email readers back to your website, all on auto-pilot.
Manage Unlimited Email Campaigns – With Aweber, you can not only create unlimited sequential email newsletters for your subscribers and set the frequency for each message, but you can also create unlimited lists (e.g. for building lists on different niche markets, segmenting different types of users, etc …), send email messages as often as you want and manage all of your lists and messages from one account.
Email Templates – If you want to send colorful, image-rich newsletters, Aweber offers over one hundred HTML email templates that have been tested for readability in all popular email clients, or you can paste in your own template, or create one from scratch using their point-and-click message editor.
Email Deliverability – Aweber has one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry and has built relationships with most of the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This means that while many small businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to get their email delivered with all the spam blocking and filtering in place, your emails are almost guaranteed to get through just about every time.
Free Expert Customer Support – Apart from the fact that AWeber is extremely easy to use and offers excellent educational materials such as a blog, knowledge base, and video tutorials, they also provide access to free customer support staffed by real people via phone, email, and live text chat.
In addition to the above services, Aweber also offers advanced email marketing tools such as:
Send Blog Newsletters (RSS to Email) – The Blog Broadcaster feature automatically turns your RSS feed into emails that you can send to readers daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you publish something new on your website or blog.
Email Web Analytics – You can easily see what’s working and what isn’t in your email campaigns with Aweber’s powerful testing tools and easy-to-read reports.
Easy Shopping Cart Integration – You can integrate e-commerce with email marketing into your business.
To test drive Aweber for free, enter your details into the form below, or click here to sign up for an account:
To learn more about autoresponder services, go here:
Additionally, see this section for more information on email marketing services and tools, including tools for building lists of email addresses for your marketing campaigns: Content Promotion Tools & Resources
Email Marketing And WordPress
If you use WordPress, you can easily add opt-in forms to your site to capture visitor details and turn them into subscribers for your newsletters and email marketing campaigns.
For plugins that can help you integrate email marketing with your WordPress site and add opt-in forms linked to your autoresponder service, go here: WordPress Engagement Plugins
Additional Email Marketing Resources & Information
These useful resources cover areas like creating autoresponders and opt-in forms, and managing your subscriber lists and will help you become a better email marketer:
Write Better Emails
How To Craft The Perfect Email – Free Guide
A FREE, 7-day email course on how to write welcome emails and autoresponder series, plus fill-in-the-blank email templates that will help make sending emails easier.
Promote Your Podcast With Email Marketing – Free Guide
If your content marketing strategy includes podcasting, this FREE guide will help you master easy email marketing strategies to turn listeners into subscribers, build your brand, and grow your podcast.
Learn how to use Aweber to set up autoresponders, newsletters, and subscriber opt-in forms that can be integrated with WordPress for lead generation, user engagement, training customers, and more.
This video course covers essential areas of list-building, from planning, building, and automating your list-building strategy, to methods for turning online users into loyal subscribers.
Here are frequently asked questions about email marketing:
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves sending emails to a list of contacts to promote products, share news, or provide customer support.
Is email marketing still effective?
Yes, email marketing remains highly effective due to its direct reach and ability to personalize content to diverse audience segments.
How do I build an email list?
Build an email list by offering value through content, using sign-up forms on your website, and encouraging subscriptions through social media and other channels.
What are the best practices for email design?
Keep emails responsive, use eye-catching subject lines, maintain a balance between images and text, and ensure clear call-to-action buttons.
How often should I send emails?
The frequency should be based on your audience’s preferences and the purpose of your emails. Regular testing and feedback can help determine the optimal frequency.
What metrics should I track in email marketing?
Key metrics include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates. These indicators help measure engagement and effectiveness.
Why is segmentation important in email marketing?
Segmentation allows you to tailor your messaging to different parts of your audience based on their behavior, demographics, or engagement levels, enhancing relevance and effectiveness.
How can I improve my email open rates?
Improve open rates by crafting compelling subject lines, personalizing emails, optimizing send times, and maintaining a clean email list.
What is A/B testing in email marketing?
A/B testing involves sending two variations of an email to a small portion of your audience to determine which version performs better before sending the more successful version to the rest of your list.
How do I know if my email marketing is successful?
Success can be measured by looking at analytics to track opens, clicks, conversions, and how these impact your overall marketing goals.
Can email marketing help in customer retention?
Yes, regular and personalized email communication can strengthen relationships with customers, keep them informed, and encourage loyalty.
What are the legal requirements for email marketing?
Compliance with laws like GDPR in Europe and CAN-SPAM in the U.S. is crucial. These laws mandate permissions for email collection and provide guidelines on opt-outs and data protection.
Summary
Launching an effective email marketing campaign with high-converting opt-in forms and autoresponder messages that deliver value to subscribers can mean the difference between struggling online and building a successful and profitable digital business presence.
Build a strong relationship with your subscribers and nurture them by providing content of value at optimal intervals, and the people on your email list may never want to unsubscribe.
Action Steps
If email marketing is important to your business, you can’t afford to risk having disruptions and experiencing regular problems with your email service.
Make sure that you have signed up with a reliable, professional, and well-known email service provider…it will save you time, money, and headaches in the long run!
Resources
Email Marketing Planning Template – Use this free template to organize emails you will send to different segments of your database, track A/B tests, summarize results, gather data on email performance, compile data on Excel or Google Sheets, and automatically calculate delivery, open, and click through rates.
Learn about ways to manage your organization’s content distribution strategy for shared and promoted content.
Content Distribution
Learn about ways to manage your organization’s content distribution strategy for shared and promoted content.
Your business has to share and promote its content using various channels to reach as many people in its target audience as it can.
In this lesson, we cover the following areas:
What Is Content Distribution?
Your Content Distribution Strategy
Content Distribution Channels
Managing Your Content Distribution
What Is Content Distribution?
“Content distribution is the process of sharing, publishing, and promoting your content. It’s how you provide your content to your audience members for their consumption through various channels and media formats.”
One of the challenges of promoting content successfully is that businesses today have many different options to get their content in front of people but limited time to manage the process and limited resources to engage in a truly effective multichannel or omnichannel marketing strategy.
For example, you can promote your blog posts and other resources via organic and paid channels, using email marketing, video marketing, press releases, pay-per-click advertising, social media, influencer outreach, content syndication, etc.
Some of these methods can also deliver better results if distributed in conjunction with one another, such as posting blogs, videos, social media updates, and email newsletters.
Distributing content in conjunction with other methods can deliver better results.
If we look at the above, for instance:
You can include a video in a blog post and links to your post in a social media post (for free or using paid methods) and an email newsletter.
You can also promote your video on social media (for free or using paid methods) and in your email newsletter, in addition to including it in your blog post.
You can promote your email newsletter on your blog and social media and encourage new subscribers to signup while asking existing subscribers to share your emails on their social platforms with their friends and followers.
You can promote your latest blog posts, videos, or newsletter issues on various social media platforms (for free or using paid methods) and invite them to share these, engage with them, subscribe to them, etc.
To coordinate all of the above content distribution, however, you need a plan.
Your Content Distribution Strategy
Having a plan helps to ensure that your content reaches the right audience, via the right channels, at the right time.
If you haven’t got a content distribution strategy in place, here’s one from HubSpot that you can use.
If you need a content distribution strategy, use this one. Source: HubSpot
Let’s take a brief look at this plan and what you need to do to implement it:
Research your target audience – This should be included in your content strategy. If not, speak to your marketing team.
Choose your content distribution channels – See the section below.
Decide on your content types – See this lesson: Content Types
Set your content distribution KPIs and goals – These should be included in your content strategy. If not, speak to your marketing team and see this lesson: Content Metrics
Your content distribution channels are the channels through which the content you create gets shared and promoted.
Choosing the right distribution channels helps to ensure that your content reaches as many target audience members as possible.
Content distribution channels overlap and can be combined to maximize their impact and reach. Source: Kurve
Your target audience and resources will determine which channels you use to distribute your content.
Traditionally, there are three main types of content distribution channels:
Owned Media
Owned media is any type of content that you create, own, and have full control over.
This content normally resides on your own website (e.g. your blog), your social media accounts, and any additional locations where you store assets that you own.
Owned media can include:
Your website and company blog
Self-hosted videos and podcasts
Images and infographics
E-books and guides
Whitepapers and reports
Recorded webinars
Courses
Email marketing campaigns
Essentially, any content that you create in-house or outsource by hiring people to create or produce it for you where you have an agreement to own the finished content is considered to be owned media.
Paid Media
Paid media is where you pay to promote your content. Paid distribution channels can expose your content to your target audience quickly and more easily than using owned methods, but it costs money and it’s only effective as long as you are paying. If you stop paying, it stops showing.
Paid media should be worked alongside other channels. For example, you can use data collected from successful paid campaigns to drive content creation for owned and earned channels.
Earned Media
Earned media is content that someone else creates, which you haven’t paid for but it benefits your business.
Essentially, this is where someone who is not a part of your organization is giving your organization promotion or coverage.
Earned media can include:
Customer reviews and testimonials
Positive feedback on review sites
Backlinks
Having your products or services featured, included, or mentioned in externally-hosted or published media (e.g. listicles, roundups, newsletters, etc.)
Press/news coverage
Awards and public events
Earned media can be considered as being “organic’ media and can often be generated using owned and paid media, or a combination of these.
For example, if you publish a high-quality content item on your website (owned media) that gains high-ranking authority, share it on your social media channels, and/or promote it using paid channels (paid media), and other companies then link to it or promote it, that’s using owned and paid media to gain earned media.
Shared Media
With recent development in social media, marketers like PR professionals have been asked to embrace a new distribution channel, where the content is partially owned and partially earned, called shared media.
“Shared media is content that is shared across social media or shared between multiple owners. It doesn’t have a concrete, explicit definition, because as social media evolves, shared media changes too.”
An example of shared media is someone liking or commenting on a post on your organization’s Facebook page. This action is recorded on your company’s social media page and the user’s profile but neither your company nor the user owns that content.
The PESO Model – Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media. Source: SpinSucks.com. Click on the above image to enlarge it.
Reciprocal Linking
Although Google disapproves of any form of link spam, reciprocal linking is a widely-used practice on the web.
Typically, this will involve another website offering to link to your site from an existing article on their site if you agree to add a link to their site from an existing article on your site.
Essentially, this is an “I’ll link to your site if you link to my site” arrangement between websites, and it happens all the time.
So, if you plan to engage in reciprocal linking activities with other sites despite what Google says, it’s best to have a set of guidelines that you can supply to anyone who contacts you with an offer to exchange links, especially if the other party is offering to provide you with ready-made content containing a link to your site that you can simply paste into your site as a new post or add to an existing post.
Reciprocal Linking Guidelines
Developing a set of guidelines for how other sites should supply content to you and what you will accept (or reject) will help to reduce time-wasting (e.g. by sending you unacceptable content or content that needs to be completely reworked) and dealing with content that is totally off-brand or that doesn’t match your tone and voice, quality standards, etc.
Here are some things to consider when creating guidelines for accepting reciprocal link exchanges:
Backlinks and anchor texts should match the content and style of your blog posts.
Copy supplied must be in the same format, style, and tone of voice as your blog posts.
Images supplied must meet your minimum image dimensions (to avoid pixelation).
Copy or anchor text must not be hypey or salesy –it should be informative and provide value to your audience.
No links in the introduction or conclusion (this will just send visitors away from your site).
Only add links to relevant articles that provide value to the post & reader (avoid home page, product page, etc links)
Ensure that the link isn’t too close to other links (i.e. not in the same sentence or paragraph as another link)
Anchor text should not exceed four words
Links supplied must be clickable (so you can check where these are pointing to).
As you can see, this is quite a lot of work. however, it’s your credibility and reputation on the line, so you should do your best to protect it.
Balancing Content Quality & Quantity
An additional consideration in your content distribution strategy is the “frequency” of your distribution.
If you post content too often, your audience can become fatigued and start ignoring your content or your new content notifications. If you post too little or too infrequently, your content may not build enough traction for people to engage meaningfully with it.
Your content distribution strategy, therefore, needs to be balanced so that you are not only distributing the right content to the right audience via the right channels but also at the right frequency.
Managing Your Content Distribution
Managing published and distributed content can be challenging. It not only requires managing the content in the channels but the channels themselves.
Knowing which type of channel you use to distribute your content, therefore, can help you to better manage your content.
For example:
Owned Media – This content is completely under your control. So, as long as you have good content management systems and processes in place, you should be able to effectively manage all content in your owned channels.
Owned media pros: You have complete control, you can publish content directly on your site, social networks, etc. and it can cost less overall.
Owned media cons: Your audience can be limited and all your owned channels require maintenance.
Paid Media – Although you have influence over the content in paid media channels, often your control will be limited either by someone else’s rules (e.g. an external webmaster or publication), or by a lack of systems, transparency, or the willingness of 3rd parties to share, divulge, or provide you with full information or access to the management of the content.
For example, if you employ an agency to manage and distribute your content on paid distribution channels, they may have proprietary systems, knowledge, or methods for obtaining results that they may not be willing to divulge, disclose, or share with you.
Paid media pros: Instant results, easier to target your audience, easier to track and measure, and having control over the message and the copy.
Paid media cons: It can be expensive and create a dependency on channels that may not scale as you spend more money.
Earned/Shared Media – One of the main difficulties when managing earned or shared media content is that it’s almost always outside of your control.
Tracking earned or shared content metrics from shares, likes, and followers, for example, doesn’t necessarily give you the ability to manage the content being generated by users or followers. This challenge has even led to the development and adoption of earned media management strategies by communications professionals.
Earned/Shared media pros: Boosts trust and credibility, and increases brand awareness and reach.
Earned/Shared media cons: Can be difficult as it takes time and effort to earn, and can generate negative publicity (e.g. someone could create a meme ridiculing your brand or product and it then gets shared virally online).
It’s important to note that as more cross-channel marketing opportunities arise, what distinguishes one type of distribution channel from another can become a little blurred. This seems to be especially true with social media.
For example, social media is technically earned media, but it also allows for paid media content placements through advertising, “boosted” posts, etc., and owned media (e.g. when you post content on your own social channels via Facebook, X[formerly Twitter], LinkedIn, etc.)
Content Distribution Tools
Here are some popular tools you can use for efficient content distribution.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule Content Distribution Software
CoSchedule is a tool that lets you organize all your marketing activities in one place.
This software includes:
Social Calendar: Manage your social media with a comprehensive social calendar, designed to help you create, schedule, publish, and measure your social media strategy effectively.
Agency Calendar: Designed for agencies and consultants, this calendar software allows you to manage multiple client calendars seamlessly.
Content Calendar: Gain full control over your marketing tasks, projects, and campaigns with a customizable content calendar that offers complete visibility and flexibility.
Marketing Suite: Coordinate your marketing efforts with a suite of products designed to enhance your process, manage projects, and streamline team collaboration.
Hire Mia: Boost your marketing creativity and scale your marketing efforts and productivity with Hire Mia, the world’s first Collaborative AI-editor.
Headline Studio: Leverage the power of AI with a headline analyzer that uses data-driven feedback to generate headlines optimized for engagement and SEO.
Actionable Marketing Institute: Enhance your marketing skills with an on-demand course library, offering expert-led training to boost your confidence and capabilities.
Outbrain is a premier advertising platform that lets global and emerging brands to connect with consumers using engaging ad formats on the Open Web.
Benefits for Advertisers:
Attention Optimized: Enhance your brand impact in premium, viewable environments that capture and retain consumer attention.
Performance Driven: Increase your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with efficient bidding tools that maximize results at scale.
Data & Prediction: Leverage over 17 years of consumer interest and intent data to fuel unmatched outcome predictions.
Formats for Every Goal: Use context-powered video, high-impact display, or seamless native ads to achieve your marketing objectives.
Benefits for Publishers:
Sustainable Monetization: Secure revenue with a direct demand suite that caters to branding and performance budgets using their award-winning Smartlogic technology.
Audience Development: Use publisher tools to foster deeper audience engagement, enhance content recirculation, and build loyalty.
Total Revenue: Maximize your site’s revenue with comprehensive tools for ad sales, eCommerce, and more.
Privacy & Data Led: Adopt a context-first approach that optimizes relevance and impact while respecting user privacy.
Taboola is a content distribution platform that lets you reach your customers on trusted websites.
Benefits:
Expand Your Reach: Engage with over one billion relevant users through premium publishers on the world’s leading native advertising platform, ensuring massive scale and targeted reach.
Create Meaningful Engagements: Use Taboola’s user behavior data and flexible creative formats to design unique, relevant ad experiences that resonate with your audience.
Creating valuable content is only half the battle. Effectively distributing that content is equally vital for success. Content distribution ensures your carefully crafted pieces reach the right audience, maximizing their impact.
Use the following comprehensive checklist to streamline your content distribution efforts:
Channel Selection: Identify relevant channels such as social media, email, and third-party platforms.
Audience Segmentation: Tailor content distribution strategies based on your target audience.
Optimized Titles: Craft catchy and SEO-friendly titles to boost click-through rates. These headline generating tools can help.
Performance Metrics: Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure content metrics and gauge the success of your distribution efforts.
Leverage Influencers: Collaborate with influencers to expand your content’s reach and credibility. Use these social media tools to help you find influencers.
Repurposing Content: Repurpose content for various channels and formats to maximize its utility.
Email Newsletters: Incorporate content into regular email newsletters for consistent engagement.
Monitoring Trends: Stay updated on industry trends to align content distribution strategies accordingly.
User-generated Content: Encourage and amplify user-generated content for authentic engagement.
Content Distribution – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content distribution:
What is content distribution?
Content distribution refers to the process of sharing, publishing, and promoting content across various platforms and media channels to reach a target audience. This can include blogs, social media, email newsletters, and more.
Why is content distribution important?
Content distribution is crucial for maximizing the visibility and impact of your content, helping to attract, engage, and retain your target audience.
What are the main channels for content distribution?
The primary channels for content distribution include owned media (such as websites and blogs), paid media (such as PPC advertising and sponsored posts), earned media (such as press coverage and guest posting), and social media.
How can I develop an effective content distribution strategy?
To develop an effective content distribution strategy, consider the following steps: identify your target audience, select the right channels based on where your audience is active, create high-quality, engaging content tailored for each channel, and use analytics to monitor and optimize your strategy’s performance.
What are some best practices for content distribution?
Best practices include understanding your audience’s preferences, repurposing content for different platforms, maintaining consistency in posting schedules, engaging with your audience, and continually refining your strategy based on analytics.
What are the benefits of a content distribution strategy?
A well-planned content distribution strategy helps increase brand visibility, drives traffic to your website, engages your target audience, and ultimately contributes to lead generation and sales. It ensures your content reaches the right people at the right time through the right channels.
How often should I distribute content?
The frequency of content distribution depends on your specific audience, the nature of the content, and the platforms you are using. It’s important to maintain a balance between keeping your audience engaged and avoiding content overload. Regular analysis and feedback can help refine your content calendar.
Can automation help with content distribution?
Yes, automation tools can significantly aid in scheduling and distributing content across multiple channels, ensuring consistent presence and allowing you to focus on creating quality content and analyzing performance.
Summary
Content distribution is vital to the success of your organization’s content strategy.
What type of content you publish, how you publish it, where you publish it, and how often you publish it can all have a significant impact on your audience’s engagement with your brand.
Content is normally distributed through owned, paid, and/or earned media. Recent developments in social media have seen the emergence of a new distribution channel called shared media.
Make sure that you and your content team clearly understand the different types of distribution channels and the challenges of managing not only the content distributed via those channels but also the channels themselves.
Resources
Content Promotion Kit – Includes a content promotion checklist (PDF), an editable checklist to customize for your business, templates for sharing content with leads, customers, and influencers, and templates for promoting content on social media.
Learn how to develop an effective content marketing management plan to manage your content marketing activities and expenses.
Content Marketing
Learn how to develop an effective content marketing management plan to manage your content marketing activities and expenses.
Content marketing can help to create more exposure for your business online and drive more traffic to your website.
Content marketing, however, also requires having a content marketing management plan in place to ensure that your marketing activities are effective.
In this lesson, we cover the following:
What is Content Marketing?
Defining Your Content Marketing Strategy
What Content Will You Use To Market Your Business?
Documenting Your Content Marketing Strategy
Developing A Content Marketing Management Plan
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is using content to communicate the value of your business to your target audience.
The essence of content marketing is:
Creating valuable and relevant content that builds trust, credibility, and authority with your visitors and customers and makes them want to continue doing business with you.
Using media to increase exposure and sales for your company or organization. This media can be anything you create: blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, images, infographics, special reports, e-books … even software!
Whether you create content items like a blog post, video, e-book, or a forum signature, it’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of your content is to make a compelling statement that engages your target audience.
This is important because the goal of your content marketing strategy is not to “sell” people a long or short advertisement about your business, but to educate them on how to become your best customers or clients.
Our Free Content Ideas Generation Course shows you how to create content that will get attention, gain your reader’s interest, help build desire for your offer, and encourage them to take the action you want them to take, i.e. click on a link, fill in a form, call to make an appointment, subscribe to your newsletter, share the information on social media, etc.
Content Marketing: Not Talking AT, But WITH Your Visitors
Content marketing is a dynamic process for communicating and engaging with other users online. It is more than just communicating AT visitors and customers. It’s communicating WITH them.
You are not using content to blatantly advertise your business – you are sharing information that will benefit and add value to your target audience.
If you’re using your website to post mostly self-promotional content, there may not be room for dialogue or any type of meaningful engagement with your audience.
In today’s socially interconnected digital world, this type of communication is no longer as effective as it may have been once. Online users quickly become blind to advertising and self-promotion and start tuning these out.
On the other hand, it’s hard to tune out information that benefits you.
Imagine for a moment that your business genuinely helps people to save money and that every time you put out a new piece of content, your readers end up saving money.
Soon, you will have a crowd of people who are paying attention to your content, wanting to hear from you, and sharing your great money-saving tips with others.
People are consuming large amounts of digital information. Look at cable TV and 24-hour news channels. Imagine how much content is required to keep these wheels turning. These networks wouldn’t be thriving if people weren’t hungry for information.
Your business is no different. Your job is to define what type of information your target audience finds meaningful and then provide them with this information.
Define Your Content Marketing Strategy
Your content marketing strategy differs from your overall content strategy in that your overall content strategy looks at the flow of content through your entire organization, while your content marketing strategy is the part of your content strategy that helps your organization meet its strategic marketing objectives.
Fortunately, many of these areas overlap. So, if your organization has already invested the time and effort to create an overall content strategy, you should be able to use many of its components in your content marketing strategy.
If you need help creating an overall content strategy for your organization, see this lesson.
If you need help creating a content marketing strategy, you can use the one below from HubSpot.
Use this list as a guide to help create your content marketing strategy. Source: HubSpot
Let’s go briefly through each of these components:
Define your goal – Your content marketing goals should be aligned with your organization’s overall content strategy and your marketing plan. Additionally, as explained further below, it’s important to understand which type of content marketing strategy your business should engage in (i.e. B2B, B2C, etc.)
Conduct persona research – Your marketing team should be able to supply you with this information. If you need help with this, go here.
Choose a content management system – This is covered in this lesson.
Determine which type of content you want to create – See the section below or see this lesson.
Brainstorm content ideas – subscribe to our Free Content Ideas Generation Course – you will learn how to never run out of content ideas for your blog, newsletter, or content marketing activities.
Publish and manage your content – Managing your content is covered in the lessons in our content management training module.
Which Content Marketing Strategy Is Right For Your Business?
It’s not only important to develop a content marketing strategy but also to have a clear idea of which type of content marketing strategy your business will engage in.
The type of content marketing strategy you should focus on is determined by the buyer’s reason for purchasing your products or services.
For example…
B2C Content Marketing
If your business promotes products and services to consumers, then your focus should be on developing a B2C content marketing strategy.
A B2C content marketing strategy focuses on creating content that is all about improving the consumer’s life or eliminating personal pain points.
The aim of your content marketing strategy, then, is to not only deliver content that provides value to buyers but also strikes an emotional chord with consumers by appealing to their interests and motivations.
As most consumers tend to make impulsive, emotional, or logical buying decisions either on their own or through the opinions of their friends and family, a B2C content marketing strategy should be focused on generating leads and driving sales based on short sales cycles.
A B2B content marketing strategy focuses mostly on business needs, not personal needs. It also typically involves winning over multiple decision makers, which can mean a longer sales cycle and delivering content that provides a lot more statistical data, proof of effectiveness, and information about ROI.
Understanding which type of content strategy to use (i.e. B2C or B2B) has a significant impact not only on the buyer persona that your content will need to address but also on the type of content, the content formats, and the distribution channels your business will use to make the strategy effective.
A content marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan for creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a specific target audience, with the goal of driving profitable customer action.
It outlines the overall goals and objectives for the content, your target audience, the channels through which your content will be distributed, and the metrics by which success will be measured.
A content strategy, on the other hand, is a plan for managing the creation, delivery, and governance of content. It focuses on the long-term vision and direction for the content, the processes and governance that will be used to ensure quality and consistency, and the technologies and platforms that will be used to create, store, and distribute your content.
While a content marketing strategy is a subset of a content strategy, the focus and approach of each are different.
A content marketing strategy is geared towards generating revenue and reaching business objectives, while a content strategy focuses on the overall content lifecycle and management.
A content marketing strategy is mostly focused on the external aspects of the content, how the content will be distributed, and how it will help your business, while a content strategy is more focused on the internal aspects of your content, how it will be created, managed, and governed.
Content Marketing Plan
Creating a content marketing plan typically involves the following steps:
Define your content marketing goals and objectives: Start by identifying what you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts. Examples of goals include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving sales.
Understand your target audience: Conduct research to learn more about your target audience, including demographics, pain points, and buying behavior. This will help you create content that is relevant and valuable to them.
Develop buyer personas: Use the information you’ve gathered about your target audience to create detailed buyer personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal customers that help you understand their needs and behaviors.
Identify your content pillars: Choose the main topics or themes that you want to focus on in your content. These should align with your goals and objectives and resonate with your target audience.
Determine your content mix: Decide what types of content you want to create and how you will distribute them. Examples include blog posts, ebooks, infographics, videos, social media updates, etc.
Create an editorial calendar: Plan out the specific pieces of content you will create and when they will be published. This will help you stay organized and ensure that your content is consistent.
Measure and optimize: Set up a system for tracking your content marketing performance and use the data to optimize your content and strategy. This will help you understand what’s working and what’s not, and make adjustments as needed.
Review and adjust: Review your content marketing plan regularly, and make changes as needed. Keep your goals and target audience in mind and be prepared to adjust your plan as you learn more about what works and what doesn’t.
It’s important to remember that creating a content marketing plan is an iterative process. While the above steps provide a general framework, you’ll most likely need to make adjustments as you go based on your findings and results.
Content Marketing Plan vs Content Plan
A content marketing plan is a strategy for creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a specific target audience, with the goal of driving profitable customer action.
A content plan, on the other hand, is a document that outlines the specific pieces of content that will be created and distributed, as well as the schedule for when they will be published.
While a content plan is a component of a content marketing plan, it is not the same thing. A content marketing plan takes a more holistic approach and focuses on the overall goals and objectives for the content, while a content plan is more focused on the nitty-gritty details of what content will be produced and when.
Your Content Marketing Funnel
The key to creating an effective content marketing strategy is to focus on providing value and using information to help your potential and existing customers understand how your business, company, or organization can add value to their lives.
Essentially, you are using an indirect sales method to create a content pipeline that will enhance the lives of your prospects in a beneficial way.
Like any sales pipeline, the goal of your content marketing strategy is to help turn your visitors into prospects, your prospects into customers or clients, and your clients into your champions.
Content Marketing Sales Funnel
To achieve this goal, you need loyal customers and an active community of users that consume and recommend your products and services to others on a regular basis.
Your content, then, needs to educate, inform, train, engage, empower, and motivate your audience to act and share your information with others.
Your content also needs to be part of a content marketing funnel system that will help you attract prospects and potential clients and guide them from their first interaction with your business through to converting them into paying customers.
TOFU, MOFU & BOFU
There are 3 main stages of the content marketing funnel you need to pay special attention to:
TOFU(top of the funnel) – This content is purely educational and not designed to promote or sell your business. TOFU content aims to attract attention and help your target audience focus on common issues faced by your buyer persona. Examples of TOFU content include eBooks, guides, and checklists.
MOFU(middle of the funnel) – This content is about showing why your business, your solution, and your brand is the best choice. The aim of using MOFU content is to generate leads. A good example of MOFU content is a blog article offering a side-by-side comparison of your products with those of your leading competitors.
BOFU(bottom of the funnel) – This content is about driving purchases and payments by addressing how your product or solution meets your buyer’s specific needs. BOFU content can include free consultations and demos to ask questions and gain a deeper insight into your buyers’ needs and their unique situations.
User intent is different depending on which stage of the funnel they are in and requires setting different goals and measuring different results.
Your content marketing funnel includes TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content. Source: Semrush. Click on the above image to enlarge the image.
What Type Of Content Will You Use To Market Your Business?
Once you have worked out which type of content strategy best suits your business, you need to decide which content types and formats you will create for your target audience and which content distribution channels will be most effective.
This will allow you to produce the right type of content for the right audience, delivered at the right buying stage, through the right distribution channels.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular content types and formats for your content marketing mix.
Blog Posts & Articles
While blog posts and articles are ideally suited for both B2C and B2B content strategies, they differ greatly depending on which audience you are writing these for.
For example, if you are writing for a B2C audience, your articles should focus on storytelling and making the content engaging, relatable, and emotionally appealing, whereas a B2B article or blog post could be a long-form evergreen piece where the content is written in a first-person voice offering an authoritative point of view and focused on problem-solving for key buying-cycle stages and audience segments.
For more information on using blog posts and articles in your content, see the articles and tutorials below:
Images, infographics, charts, and diagrams that summarize complex information such as processes or data are very useful and effective for a B2B audience.
On the other hand, memes, cartoons, comics, user-generated images (eg. someone modeling a product or showing a new item they have purchased), funny animated gifs, etc. can go a long way with B2C readers.
For example, here’s one way a gardening services company could communicate the importance of hiring professionals to mow lawns using images…
Source: giphy.com
For more information on using images and infographics in your content, see the articles and tutorials below:
Videos and webinars work well for both B2B and B2C audiences.
With videos, make sure to match the video content, duration, and quality to suit the right audience type.
For example, video tutorials (and webinars) with product walkthroughs allow users to better understand a product or service. Depending on the intended audience, however, the video content (or recorded webinar) will either emphasize benefits over features (or vice-versa), be of a longer or shorter duration, use a more entertaining or educational voice, be shot and edited professionally or captured using a phone camera, use different font styles, titles, annotations, timestamps, etc.
For more information on using videos and webinars in your content, go here:
Social media content is very effective with B2C audiences.
However, you can also help B2B audiences influence other decision-makers and shorten the sales cycle process by sharing time-saving bite-sized content on social media about complex aspects of your product or industry, useful statistics, sound or video bites, and compelling testimonials or reviews that can be quickly and easily forwarded or shared.
Social Media Networks
Make sure to set up social media accounts for all the social media platforms that you plan to post content to, e.g.:
Sending out regular email newsletters allows you to stay top of mind with existing and potential customers or clients.
Just make sure to plan your content appropriately for your audience. Educational emails or relevant industry news and events can help to establish yourself as an active, informed, and authoritative member of your professional community or industry for B2B clients, whereas B2C emails may be more emotionally charged to try and get readers to click on a “buy now” link.
Additionally, using email for outreach campaigns to increase backlinks and forge new partnerships with other businesses can be an effective B2B use of email content marketing.
For more information about using emails in your content marketing mix, go here:
A B2B content marketing mix typically includes the production of eBooks, Guides, and Whitepapers with content aimed at showing users how to solve business problems or increase ROI, profitability, efficiency, etc.
eBooks and guides that help users solve their personal needs work well for B2C audiences. Examples of this include ebooks and guides on health, fitness, beauty, cooking recipes, personal care tips, tips for dieting and weight management, travel, etc.
Depending on the audience your content is aimed at, different decisions will need to be made about areas like content design, layout, navigation, use of different embedded media, etc.
For more information about using eBooks in your content marketing mix, go here:
Podcasts with regular or episodic content like opinions, commentary, or interviews with industry thought leaders built around a consistent theme or framework are a great way to establish a personal connection, trust, authority, and credibility, build a dedicated and loyal following and get potential customers or clients coming back for more.
Providing links to downloadable templates, free calculators, checklists, etc. in your content where appropriate is an excellent way to attract B2B prospects.
Companies that market to B2B audiences like HubSpot use this method very effectively.
Hubspot offers many free downloadable templates to generate leads, such as this free email marketing planning template. Source: Hubspot.
Templates, checklists, and calculators also make great lead magnets.
Lead Magnets
A sound content marketing strategy involves creating valuable content that will not only drive traffic to your site and keep readers engaged but also help move your prospects forward through the traffic generation, lead generation, and sales conversion phases of your online sales funnel.
If you plan to grow a list of subscribers, then, in addition to producing great content for your articles and posts, you will also need to create valuable ‘lead magnets.’
A lead magnet is a compelling incentive or ‘ethical bribe’ that you offer to visitors in exchange for getting them to opt into your list and give you their email address or other contact information.
Examples of free lead magnets you can offer to attract subscribers include:
Access to a coaching or support group
Apps / software
Audios
Cheat sheets
Checklists
Contest entries
Coupons
Ebooks and PDF guides/reports
Gear/resource lists
Infographics
Licensing
Membership sites
Mind maps
Planners
Process maps
Services
Swipe files
Templates
Videos
Webinars
Developing A Content Marketing Management Plan
Having a clear and well-defined content marketing strategy is important.
However, without a content marketing management plan, how can you ensure that your efforts and spending on content marketing activities are delivering results and a positive return on your investment?
A content marketing management plan involves:
Documenting your content marketing strategy
Tracking your content marketing performance
Managing your content marketing expenses
Let’s take a brief look at each of these areas.
Document Your Content Marketing Strategy
According to research, 60% of the most successful B2B businesses that use content marketing have a documented content marketing strategy, while only 21% of the least successful ones have one.
The companies that are most successful with content marketing have a documented content marketing strategy. Source CMI
Having a documented content marketing strategy helps you justify your content marketing efforts, tactics, channels, and budget, and ensures consistency in your organization’s content marketing activities.
It’s important to track the performance of all your content marketing activities, as there are typically so many different options and opportunities to promote your content but only limited time and resources to pursue all these different options (and not all of these may be opportunities worth pursuing).
Measuring your content marketing performance can help you answer questions like:
Which content type delivers the best ROI?
Which is a better investment of your time and resources: producing video content, running webinars, or writing ebooks?
Which article topics and other characteristics (e.g. word count) deliver the highest engagement, leads, and sales conversions?
Which social media platform should you focus most of your advertising efforts on?
etc.
For more information on tracking your content marketing performance, see these sections:
More companies today aim to build their business with the goal of generating monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Your business probably does too.
While this is a smart goal, the flip side of this is that more businesses today have to sustain monthly or annual subscriptions for all kinds of sales, advertising, marketing, and management services, tools and software, memberships, support, maintenance, and upgrade plans, in addition to web hosting, domain renewals, etc.
Needless to say, your content marketing efforts and activities must be able to justify the content marketing expenditure involved and hopefully still produce a positive ROI.
Doing this, however, requires documentation (e.g. a spreadsheet where all regular expenses and subscriptions are logged) and the ability to effectively track and analyze your content marketing performance so you can determine which methods, activities, and services are assets vs liabilities.
This will help you answer questions like:
Which paid services, tools, etc. are worth keeping?
Which subscriptions are not delivering a sustainable ROI?
Are there any non-essential paid services that can be dropped or swapped for similar free services?
Are there any essential services that are costing money but need to remain active? Can these costs be reduced or can the service be transferred to another provider that costs less?
Etc.
Content Marketing – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content marketing:
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Why is content marketing important?
It helps businesses build trust with their audience, improve conversions, connect with customers, and generate leads. In today’s age, transparency and trust are key to consumer retention.
How do I start with content marketing?
Begin by identifying your audience, understanding their needs, and defining your content marketing goals. Then create a content strategy that addresses these needs through various forms of content like blogs, videos, and social media posts.
What types of content should be included in a content marketing strategy?
It should include a variety of content types such as blog posts, infographics, podcasts, videos, and social media content to engage different segments of your audience.
How do I measure the success of my content marketing efforts?
Measure success through metrics like website traffic, lead generation, sales linked to content efforts, social media engagement, and SEO performance. Tools and analytics platforms can provide insights into how well your content is performing.
What are the best practices for content marketing?
Focus on quality over quantity, understand your audience, use SEO to enhance online visibility, be consistent in your posting schedule, and always evaluate and adapt your strategy based on performance data.
How often should I publish new content?
The frequency of publishing depends on your team’s capabilities and the preferences of your audience. Analyze your traffic and engagement to determine the right balance, but consistency is key for building an audience.
Can small businesses benefit from content marketing?
Absolutely, small businesses can build brand awareness and attract more customers without needing large advertising budgets by focusing on creating high-quality content that resonates with their target audience.
Is content marketing expensive?
It can be cost-effective compared to traditional marketing techniques. While it does require investment in time and resources, the long-term benefits often outweigh the costs if executed well.
How does content marketing fit into an overall digital marketing strategy?
It plays a central role, complementing and enhancing other marketing efforts such as SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing. Content is the backbone of these strategies, driving engagement and offering value to users.
Summary
Having a clear and well-defined content marketing strategy is very important, as is having a content marketing management plan to ensure that your efforts and spending on various methods, services, and tools are consistently delivering results and a positive return on investment.
Action Steps
In addition to creating and implementing a content marketing strategy, make sure that your business also has an effective content marketing management plan for documenting and tracking performance, results, and associated expenses.
Resources
Content Marketing Masterclass – Master content marketing to grow your business: content creation, promotion, copywriting, SEO, email marketing, & more!
Content Marketing Workbook – Use this free downloadable workbook to develop a content marketing strategy for your business.
Content Troubleshooting Guide -Use this guide to help you troubleshoot issues with your content marketing strategy and improve your content management practices.
Learn how to manage your content SEO to help improve your website’s search engine results.
Content SEO
Learn how to manage your content SEO to help improve your website’s search engine results.
Google defines Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the process of making your site better for search engines.
If your business depends on managing, monetizing, or promoting online content using Google Search, then it’s important to learn about SEO best practices to ensure that your content can be made easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand, resulting in improved rankings, more traffic to your website, and a better user experience overall.
As more companies compete for search engine results dominance and supremacy, it’s important to make every advantage count, however slight.
In this lesson, we focus on strategies and methods you can apply to your content to help improve your ranking.
As stated in this module’s overview section, the purpose of this lesson is not to provide a course on search engine optimization, but to help you understand the role of content management as it relates to using SEO in content promotion.
There are many great resources online to help you learn SEO. We list a number of these resources at the end of this lesson in the ‘Resources’ and ‘References’ section.
The Role Of Content Management In SEO
Search engines help online users discover your content.
As Google states in its official documentation,
“SEO is about helping search engines understand and present content.”
Essentially, what Google is telling us is that your website content should be geared towards helping people understand your content better.
In other words, focus on creating quality content for real users, not search engine robots.
The role of content management in SEO, then, can be boiled down to this single principle: “create quality content”.
As this is what Google’s search engine algorithms seek to reward, let’s start this lesson by looking at exactly what constitutes “quality content” as Google sees it.
Quality Content Is SEO Content
Let’s face it…although Google is not the only search engine in town, it is the search engine that matters the most, so if you focus on developing quality content that meets Google’s guidelines and specifications, you will pretty much guarantee your content’s chance of succeeding on all other search engines.
Fortunately, Google provides extensive documentation on how to meet its quality guidelines.
For example, here is a section of their blog offering excellent advice on how to self-assess the quality of your content to make sure that you are offering the best content you can. Ask yourself these questions:
Content and quality questions
Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?
Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature?
Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book?
Expertise questions
Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?
If you researched the site producing the content, would you come away with an impression that it is well-trusted or widely recognized as an authority on its topic?
Is this content written by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?
Does the content have any easily-verified factual errors?
Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to your money or your life?
Presentation and production questions
Does the content have any spelling or stylistic issues?
Was the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them?
Comparative questions
Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors to the site or does it seem to exist solely by someone attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
For additional questions that will help you determine whether your content meets Google quality standards, see this section of their blog: What Counts As A High-Quality Site?
If you are tracking your content’s performance and notice a significant drop in page rankings, use the above questions to perform a content audit and assess whether quality may be a factor in the search drops.
Improve Content SEO With User Feedback
In addition to self-assessing your content using the above questions, Google suggests getting feedback from unaffiliated users of your site who can provide an honest assessment of your site and content quality.
This can either take the form of user studies or simply trusting Google’s processes for determining what constitutes “quality” content.
User Studies
Running user studies can help you understand how real people feel about your site and your content. For example, a platform like UserTesting.com can help you gain insights and feedback about your site’s usability and the quality of your content from real human users.
You can then use this feedback to improve your content’s SEO.
Search Quality Raters
Google contracts thousands of people (called “search quality raters”) to provide insights aimed at improving its algorithm for ranking quality content in the search results.
The video below provides an overview of how Google uses raters to improve its search results…
Search Quality Raters follow specific guidelines designed to assess whether Google’s algorithm is indeed ranking quality content in accordance with its own guidelines.
Use Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines to help improve your content quality.
These guidelines are explained in a comprehensive document that is made available to everyone for free and can be downloaded here: Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines
Additional Tips For Improving Content SEO
E-E-A-T
An important part of Google’s algorithm for ranking quality content is E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust.
E-E-A-T is one of many guidelines Google uses to determine whether the content is high-quality, valuable to readers and if it should rank well. While it’s not a ranking factor in itself, it can have an indirect impact on your content’s overall search rankings.
Making your site more authoritative and trustworthy includes making sure your site has an About Us page that tells visitors who you are, Author Pages (whether your site has one or multiple article contributors), content written with expertise, a clear purpose that is regularly updated, and more.
On August 2022, Google launched the “helpful content update” as part of their broader effort to provide search engine users with original, helpful content written by people, for people.
Essentially, the update is aimed at rewarding content creators who focus on “people-first” content, instead of a “search engine-first” approach.
Content that Google deems to provide visitors with a satisfying experience will perform better than content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations.
The “helpful content update” is simply an extension of Google’s long-standing advice and guidelines to create content for people, not for search engines. The content can still utilize SEO best practices but it should primarily focus on creating satisfying content for users,
The post on Google’s blog provides a list of questions you should ask to make sure that the content you are creating for your organization aligns with a people-first approach
For example:
Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
The post also provides questions to ask that will raise warning signs if answered “yes” and help you reevaluate how you’re creating content across your site.
For example:
Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?
Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (Google doesn’t).
Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?
The “helpful content update” introduces a new site-wide signal that will run continuously and be considered among Google’s many other signals for ranking web pages. It will automatically identify content that appears to have little value, low-added value, or is otherwise not particularly helpful to people searching for information online.
In addition to focusing on “people-first” content, Google suggests removing unhelpful content from your site, as it could help improve the rankings of your other content.
Google’s approach to ranking high-quality content in search results prioritizes quality over the production method, whether it is human-generated or AI-generated.
Google advises publishers to focus on producing people-first content that demonstrates expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) and that using automation or AI solely to manipulate rankings is considered a violation of Google’s spam policies.
Google’s focus on rewarding quality content, regardless of production method, continues to this day through its ranking systems and helpful content system introduced last year. It will continue to combat the use of automation and AI-generated content for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings.
Google realizes, however, that not all use of automation and AI-generated content is spam. For example, many publishers provide automated helpful content such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts. Google, therefore, aims to take a measured and responsible approach toward AI-generated content while maintaining its standards for information quality and helpfulness in search results.
Publishers should make it clear who created the content and provide background information about the author. It is helpful to disclose whether automation or AI was involved in the content production process and explain why it was used.
Finally, the purpose of creating content should be to help people rather than to manipulate search rankings. By following these guidelines, publishers can stay in line with what Google’s systems reward, regardless of whether the content is human-generated or AI-generated.
Google Search Visual Elements Guide
If you need help understanding the terminology used by Google to improve your content, page, or website SEO, use the illustrations and definitions in Google’s Visual Elements Guide to identify common search features in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Use Google’s Visual Elements guide to identify over 20 elements of a search result page. Source: Google.
A Google SERP includes key elements such as Attribution, Text results, Rich results, Video & image results, and Exploration features (e.g. “People Also Ask.”
Each of these elements is explained visually with illustrations showing you how these might look in search results and depictions of the different features included in each of these main search elements.
Learn about search features of key elements, such as “attribution” in Google’s Visual Guide. Source: Google.
Google’s Visual Guide To Search Elements includes information on over 20 search features with more to be added over time.
Publish Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is search-optimized content that remains relevant and “fresh” long after it has been published and continues to grow traffic over time.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to think about ways to make your content as “evergreen” as possible during your content planning phase, especially when creating cornerstone content, as these will be the most important articles that you will want to rank highest in the search engines.
Here are some simple ways to move toward ensuring that your content stays “evergreen”:
First, make sure that your post slug (i.e. the words in your URL) DO NOT contain dates, numbers, or words like “new,” “launch”, “special-offer”, etc.
For example, avoid creating URLs like:
7-top-job-quoting-sites-2022 – Drop the date from the slug. Also, you may need to add more job sites later or one or more of those sites may go out of business. Evergreen URL suggestion: top-job-quoting-sites
Making your post slug evergreen doesn’t affect your Post Title in terms of SEO.
For example, the site shown below features an article with the URL: international-dot-day-get-involved and the post title International Dot Day: Get Involved!.
International Dot Day happens every year, but this article’s URL doesn’t need to be updated. Source: TheEdublogger.com
You can leave the URL and the content as is to keep this post evergreen and simply do the following as shown below to improve its SEO:
Change the post title each year (e.g. 2022, 2023, 2024, etc.)
Update the post publishing date when you republish.
You can, however, change the Post title to improve the article’s SEO. Note: If the rest of the content is evergreen, you can leave it alone.
You may still need to do some editing to keep the content current, but you won’t need to change the post URL or create a new article (and redirect the old post to the new one).
Anchor Text
What Is An Anchor Text?
An anchor text (or link text) is the visible, clickable text in an HTML hyperlink that allows users to navigate from one webpage to another.
Anchor text helps users and search engines understand what the destination webpage is all about and is often given a different look than the rest of the text on a page (e.g. it can be blue, bold, and underlined, like this link to our homepage.)
If we examine the structure of an anchor text, here are its most basic components:
Anatomy of a basic anchor text link.
In the above example of the link code, the domain URL inside the HTML tags is the link target (i.e. the destination URL where visitors clicking on the link will be sent to) and ‘Tawny Frogmouth’ is the visible anchor text for the link.
Anchor Text Types
There are different types of anchor text for internal and external link types:
Exact-match – Including an “exact match” of the page being linked to in the anchor text. For example, linking content promotion to the Content Promotion course lesson page of this site.
Partial-match – Using anchor text that includes a variation of the keyword on the linked-to page. For example, learn how to perform a content audit in our Content Audit lesson.
Branded – Using a brand name as anchor text. For example: ‘Google’ linking to an article on Google’s help site.
Generic – Using generic words or phrases as anchor text. Common examples are “click here”, “read this article”, “visit this page”, “read more”, etc.
Images – When images are linked, Google will use the image’s alt attribute text as the anchor text.
How To Optimize Anchor Text
Search engines consider anchor text to be a reflection of how people view your page and use it to try and understand what your pages are about.
If many sites think that a specific page is relevant for a set of terms, that page can often rank well even if the terms don’t appear in the text of the page itself.
Ensure that your anchor text is relevant to the page you are linking to. The anchor text should accurately describe the page or the topic you are linking to and make it clear to users what information they can expect to find when they click on the link.
Keep your anchor text concise, descriptive, and succinct. Don’t use unnatural-looking long sentences as your anchor text.
Keep anchor text natural and informative and use keyword-rich anchor text sparingly.
Format links to make them stand out from your regular text and make them easier for users to spot. You can change your website’s link colors and anchor text styles using HTML or CSS.
While you typically can’t control how other sites link to your, “you can make sure that anchor text you use within your own site is useful, descriptive, and relevant.” Irrelevant anchor text can confuse both users and search engines.
Using the same anchor text repeatedly can come across as being spammy (to users and search engines) especially exact-match anchor text, so vary the anchor text used throughout your content (i.e. use relevant partial-match variations).
Avoid using generic anchor text whenever possible, as these provide no context, information, or help to users about the topic they will see if they click on the link.
Avoid using naked links as anchor text whenever possible, except when quoting these for reference.
Avoid over-optimizing anchor text, as this can lead to SEO penalties from Google.
Do not use excessive cross-linking, as users and search engines view too many links going to and from the same pages as suspicious.
Internal linking is a proven way to boost your SEO.
When you interlink your articles, you give search engines like Google an opportunity to crawl through your site to discover and index new pages and new content.
When other websites link to your site using a dofollow backlink, that website passes “SEO link juice” (i.e. authority) to your page.
If your pages follow a good internal linking strategy, this authority can spread to all of the other pages that you are linking to.
A content audit can tell you which pages or posts on your site are most important. These are the pages or posts you should be linking to more frequently from your other articles.
See what we’ve just done in the paragraph above? We created an internal link to our content audit lesson.
To find content on your site that you can link to internally, use the following search string on Google:
site:yourwebsite.com topic
This will bring up all the articles you have published on your site for that keyword or keyword phrase.
You can find all topic-related articles on your site using the ‘site:’ search operator.
You can also use other linking methods like automatic keyword linking to boost the effectiveness of internal linking as an SEO strategy.
Learn more about using hyperlinks in your content in our Link Management lesson.
Speaking of links…
Check For Broken Links
Broken links not only deter visitors from staying on and returning to your site, but they can also negatively impact your search engine rankings.
Broken links in your content can impact your search results. Use broken link-checking tools to help you fix this.
We recommend checking for broken links as part of your site’s maintenance, content reviews, etc.
For tools that can help you check and fix broken links, go here:
It’s a good idea to let search engines know when you change or redirect the URL of a post or page on your website to another page or website.
If your site uses WordPress, for example, then you can easily do this using a plugin like Redirection.
Use a plugin like Redirection to let search engines know when you redirect URLs on your site.
Simply enter the old URL (i.e. the Source URL) and the new URL (the Target URL), click a button, and the plugin will add the necessary code to your site to inform search engines that the page with your content has moved to a new location.
It’s also a good idea to trash the old post from your site if it’s no longer needed. This helps to keep your content organized and reduces the size of your site’s database.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags help both users and search engines better understand your content. They tell search engines what your page is about, how to read it, and who should see it.
Although meta tags do not influence search engine rankings as such, they can help with SEO indirectly by improving areas like content engagement (e.g. making content more compelling to readers and boosting click-through rates) and content organization.
Some common meta tags where you can use custom content to improve on-page SEO include:
Meta Title – The version of the post/article title you want to present to search engines.
Meta Description – Provides a descriptive summary of your page’s content.
Post Slug – The section of the URL (web address) that shows after the domain name (and other classification elements like ‘categories’, ‘publish dates’, etc. if configured in your website’s settings).
Heading Tags (H1-H6) – These help to identify headings and subheadings in your content from other types of text (e.g. paragraph text), and are important for organizing your content (e.g. they help break your content into different sections for your readers).
Image Alt Tags – These describe images used in your content to search engines and people who may not be able to see your content, like visually impaired users (see ‘Alt Tags’ section below).
Social Media Meta Tags – These let you control how your page will look when shared on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
Let’s look at a practical example of using meta tags to improve your content for readers and search engines.
As shown in the screenshot below, you can publish an article on your blog with a “catchy” Post Title to engage readers while using a different Meta Title to display the article in the search engines using the keywords you would like to rank for.
In the screenshot below, we have also crafted a better post slug (using more concise and relevant words), and a more enticing and compelling meta description.
Use Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Post Slugs to improve user engagement and search engine rankings.
Meta Tags like meta descriptions display as snippets of text in the search engine results under your headline.
You can control how your meta descriptions appear in search engine listings, although sometimes, search engines will choose a snippet of text from your page’s content instead if it deems it to be a more relevant match to what users are searching for.
Meta titles and descriptions help users and search engines to better understand your content.
If your website runs on WordPress, you can use an SEO plugin to customize the meta tags for your blog posts.
Improve your content SEO with WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO.
Some SEO plugins like SmartCrawl, for example, not only let you control how your meta descriptions will display in the search results but they also provide built-in visual guides and best practice character limit counters to help you optimize your SEO titles and descriptions.
SmartCrawl’s meta descriptions tool lets you control how your articles will display on Google’s search result listings.
You can view the meta tags section of any web page by loading the page into your web browser, right-clicking on the page, and then selecting either ‘view source’ or ‘view page source’ depending on which browser you use.
Right-click on a web page and select ‘View Page Source’.
The page code will load into your browser and display your meta tags section.
The meta tags section of your web page contains your meta description and other important information for search engines, social media, etc.
To view your meta description tag, look for a section like this:
This is the snippet of text that should display in the search results when users search for keywords that your page ranks for.
Google recommends using quality descriptions in your meta descriptions and provides examples of good and bad descriptions in its guidelines for search snippets.
Make sure to create quality meta descriptions for your content.
To learn more about using meta tags and optimizing these to improve your content’s SEO, see the ‘Resources’ and ‘References’ section at the end of this lesson.
Image Alt Tags & Captions
An alt tag (also called an alt attribute) is the text used to describe an image if, for some reason, the image doesn’t load in the user’s browser.
For example, hopefully, the image below is displayed on this page…
Feel free to express yourself with image captions but be more descriptive when using alt tags. Source: WPMU DEV
However, if it wasn’t, this is what you would see…
If an image doesn’t display, users will see the alternative text instead.
You can view an image’s alt tag by inspecting the source code of the web page.
This image has an alt tag, as you can see in the page’s source code.
Adding descriptive alt tags and captions to your images not only helps your site meet web content accessibility guidelines but is also good for SEO, as these help search engines figure out the context of your page content and better index your images.
See the ‘References’ section for tutorials on using alt tags and optimizing your images for SEO.
Schema Markup
Search engines want to make it easier for people to find relevant information on the web.
Schema markup is a form of microdata that helps search engines better understand the information on web pages and return more informative results for users.
As explained on Schema.org…
“Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means—”Avatar” could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.”
Adding schema markup code to web pages creates an enhanced description that search engines use to provide users with richer search results (also known as rich snippets).
Rich snippets added with schema markup tell search engines what the content means.
There are hundreds of different schema types covering things, people, places, actions, relationships, and more, and each of these different types includes many associated properties.
Rich snippets generated using schema markup can be used to display all kinds of useful information, including product images, prices, and stock levels, star ratings for reviews, store operating hours, events and dates, and a whole lot of other data.
Rich snippets provide additional useful information to users on search results.
Structured data markup like schema, then, helps to organize the data on your web pages. This not only helps search engines understand your content but also the context of certain words in it.
While there is no evidence that adding structured schema markup to your web pages has a direct effect on your organic search rankings and how Google ranks your content, rich snippets can have a positive SEO impact by improving your content’s visibility and making your web pages display more prominently in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
This can lead to better click-through and lower bounce rates, resulting in more traffic to your website and better engagement with users. Schema, then, should be considered an important aspect of your overall content’s SEO strategy.
For example, instead of having to generate, copy, and paste code into your website, an SEO plugin like SmartCrawl lets you easily select and configure different schema types and rules using wizards and menus.
Using an SEO plugin like SmartCrawl for WordPress sites makes it easier to add schema markups to your web pages…
Each time you create a new article for your blog that matches the rules you have specified, your site will automatically output the schema markup code required for the search engines.
… and output the schema markup code search engines need to display rich results to users.
Build Topical Authority
Topical Authority is where you increase the ranking of existing articles on your site by publishing more articles related to that topic.
To do this, find posts or pages on your site that are already ranking highly (e.g. in positions 2-3) and then create more articles on that topic.
Google will then assume that you are an expert on that topic even if your new articles don’t bring in that much traffic. This can sometimes help your site outrank larger and more authoritative sites.
See the Search Optimization Tools section for tools you can use to identify articles on your site that could benefit from this strategy.
Use Sitemaps
Is your content easy to reach? Can users get to any page on your site in three clicks or less?
You can improve your content’s SEO by making it easier for search engine spiders (i.e. search bots) to crawl your website and discover all of your site’s content using sitemaps.
Make sure to add your site’s XML sitemap and RSS feed to your Google Search Console account.
Adding your XML sitemap and RSS feeds to Google Search Console helps Google find and index your content faster.
Search Intent
As explained further below, there has been a shift in content creation strategy in recent years away from keyword-driven SEO to a search intent-driven and “topic cluster” approach in order to better align with Google’s algorithm changes.
Search intent is the reason why someone would write a query and submit it to search engines. It represents an objective that the searcher is trying to accomplish through their online journey.
These are by no means all the types available. New search intent types (as well as micro intents) can be found when niches exhibit new identifiable search patterns and clusters.
Let’s take a brief look at each of these types:
Informational
These searches have a recognized need with no clear solution. The searcher’s intention is simply to seek information, locate a particular topic or informational snippet, and ask general questions to learn about something they may be struggling with or better understand potential pathways to a solution.
Informational searches typically contain words like: what, why, how, when, who, which, does, learn, tips, ideas, tutorial, guide, examples, resource, etc.
Navigational
These searches indicate brand awareness and a desire to locate information or pages related to an institution or organization they are already brand-aware of.
The searcher is interested in navigating to a specific destination, e.g. a brand website, a product page, or a solutions landing page.
Navigational searches typically include brand names, product names, service names, locations, or keywords such as: near me, directions to, prices, cost of, etc.
Commercial
Commercial search intent combines characteristics of informational, navigational, and transactional types. The searcher’s intent is to compare, evaluate and analyze organizations, vendors, and solutions they are already aware of (and possibly discover new ones in the process), and consider their options.
Commercial searches typically contain words like: buy, price, cheap, cheapest, expensive, coupon, price, pricing, order, purchase, recommendation, recommended, etc.
Transactional
There is a recognized need or desire to obtain something other than information. For example, the searcher may be looking to perform a web-mediated transaction of a recognized product, service, or solution. In other words, the user’s search intent is purchase-oriented.
Transactional searches typically contain words like: top, best, review, cheap, cheapest, vs, compare, comparison, etc.
Local
This type of search intent is characterized by a desire to find a solution or complete a transaction to a recognized need that is located in close physical and geographical proximity to the user.
Here, the user’s intent is to perform an information and transactional search with the goal of then making a physical (or web-mediated) purchase nearby.
Local searches typically contain words like: near me
***
The types listed above also correspond to the different parts of the marketing funnel (i.e. the buyer’s journey toward purchasing).
In simple terms, the lower down the search intent funnel, the higher the likelihood of conversion.
The lower down the search intent funnel, the higher the likelihood of conversion. Source: Lazarina Stoy
Search Intent And Content Creation
Understanding search intent and where this places the user in your marketing funnel plays a significant part in the type of content you create.
“Understanding the query is the first step in evaluating the task.”
The more you know about your industry and your target audience, the better you will understand search intent. You can then use this knowledge and understanding to create content better targeted to your audience’s search needs and to optimize your existing pages based on the intent they ultimately serve.
For example:
Resource pages (Informational intent) – Blog posts, guides, listicles, resources
Company pages (Navigational intent) – Home Page, About us, Contact us, Company Values, Careers Page, Request a quote, etc.
Product Pages (Transactional intent) – Product pages, service pages, solutions pages, portfolio/what we do, etc.
Keyword Density
Keyword Density refers to the number of times a specific keyword appears on a web page as a percentage or ratio of the total word count.
The higher the ratio, the more the selected keyword appears on your page. If this ratio is too high, Google may perceive this as “keyword stuffing“.
General guidelines for acceptable keyword density levels suggest using the keyword 1-2 times per 100 words (less than 2.5% of the total word count.)
Use LSI and Long-Tail Keywords
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) are search terms or words related to the keyword that you’re targeting.
Long-tail keywords are search queries that tend to be longer and more specific than “broad” keywords. For example, “how to meditate” is a broad keyword search, but “can meditation slow down heart rate” is a long tail keyword. Long-tail keywords typically get a smaller number of searches per month than broad keywords but they are more targeted and often signify buyer’s intent (e.g. if someone is searching for ausclimate cool seasons premium 10L desiccant dehumidifier review, they are probably already close to making a buying decision).
Both LSI terms and long-tail keywords provide search engines with context that help them determine what your page is about.
Google is continually improving its algorithm to better understand the search intent behind a user’s search query.
In other words, Google is getting better at knowing what users are searching for and no longer needs to try and match exact keywords to rank and display content, so it can show pages that are relevant to user searches even if those pages are not optimized for the specific keywords being searched.
For example, you can use Google autocomplete tool to find LSI and long-tail keywords (or use some of the tools listed in the SEO Tools section).
To find LSI keywords, search for a generic keyword related to your topic…
Searching for generic terms in Google brings up related keywords in the autocomplete tool.
And to find long-tail keywords search for a more specific keyword…
Use Google’s autocomplete tool to find long-tail keywords by digging a little deeper.
You can also use Google Search Console to see what keywords you may be already ranking for but not using on the page or content that’s ranked.
Use Google Search Console to find related keywords to improve your content SEO.
Use “People Also Ask” and Related Search Phrases
Google monitors user behavior on websites and uses behavior signals to determine whether your content is helpful to users or not.
For example, if users click from Google’s search results to your website and stay on your site, that’s good. If they land on your site and click the back button or go to a different site, that’s bad.
Google wants to present users with sites that deliver what they are looking for and help solve their problems. You can make it easier for Google to rank your pages higher by not only covering your topic well but also by including related subtopics that will make your content more complete and authoritative and turn your site into the “go-to” resource for users looking for information in your niche.
In addition to the tools we have covered earlier, you can use tools like ‘People also ask’ and ‘Related Searches’.
Google lists questions that previous users have searched for in the ‘People also ask’ section. Use this tool to identify problems that users are searching for and help them solve these with your content.
Use Google’s ‘People also ask tool’ to make your content more complete and authoritative.
Google’s ‘Related Searches’ section at the bottom of its results pages is a goldmine of useful information. Use this tool to identify additional long-tail keywords that your competitors might be ignoring and use these in your content to improve your rankings.
Use Google’s Related Searches to improve your rankings.
You can boost content SEO effectiveness further by combining search intent knowledge with long-tail and LSI keywords (or replacing certain words with their synonyms) in your content.
International Keyword Research
Performing international keyword research for SEO purposes has its own complexities and challenges.
As sophisticated as tools like Google Translate are becoming, it’s still very difficult to overcome translational hurdles such as the same words meaning different things in different languages, semantic, cultural, or regional differences, idioms, dialects, homonyms (words that are spelled the same, and sound the same but have different meanings), homographs (words that are spelled the same but sound different and have different meanings), etc.
For this reason, depending on the type of content you are creating and your SEO goals, you may want to employ an expert, specialist, or native translator instead of relying on machine translation tools.
Create An Outreach Email Template
Backlinks are an important factor for getting your pages ranked and building domain authority but building backlinks is difficult if your company is not proactively engaged in doing SEO marketing.
Although email outreach has a low success rate, having an outreach email template you can use after publishing new content to contact other companies and ask them to link to your site can be a tremendous help to your content promotion efforts.
One additional backlink from an authority site can do wonders to boost your site’s ranking on Google.
Google detects policy-violating content through automated systems and human reviews. If your content violates any of Google’s spam policies, it can lead to your page(s) or website ranking lower in results or not appearing in the results at all (i.e. being de-indexed from Google Search).
For this reason, your content management practices should include reviewing your content regularly to make sure it’s not violating Google Search’s overall policies or any of the spam policies listed below:
The traditional content model consists of a website with a blog and articles or blog posts published under different blog categories.
This is fine. If you are writing articles or blog posts based on the keywords you want to rank for, however, your blog can become quickly filled with repetitive, bloated, and disorganized content, making the information harder to manage.
Focusing on keywords can lead to disorganized content that’s harder to manage.
Over the past several years, content creation strategy based on Google search ranking has been shifting away from keyword-centric SEO to topic-focused SEO and ranking content based on search intent-driven topics, not keywords.
So, while traditional keyword research based on criteria like keyword volume and keyword competition is still useful for content planning, it’s important to understand the concept of Topic Clusters and how to implement this model if you want to rank for multiple keywords on different topics.
Topic Clusters
A topic encompasses a collection of keywords that explain your subject matter.
A topic cluster is a group of related content covering a broad theme, where each cluster covers a single topic.
This content can consist of detailed in-depth articles or blog posts, which then become the subtopics of your main topic cluster.
Once you have worked out your buyer personas (so you can understand who you are creating content for, their needs and pain points, etc.), you can use content idea generation tools like AnswerThePublic.com to create content clusters around a central topic.
Use tools like AnswerThePublic.com to generate ideas for topic clusters.
A topic cluster, then, is an SEO strategy that focuses on topics, not keywords, and informs Google that there is a semantic relationship between your content
This relationship is formed by linking your topic clusters to and from a pillar page.
Pillar Pages
A pillar page is a web page that provides a high-level overview of a topic on a single page and hyperlinks to clusters of related content, or subtopics.
“Pillar pages broadly cover a particular topic, and cluster content should address a specific keyword related to that topic in-depth.
Pillar pages are longer than typical blog posts because they cover all aspects of the topic you’re trying to rank for but they aren’t as in-depth. That’s what cluster content is for.
You want to create a pillar page that answers questions about a particular topic, but leaves room for more detail in subsequent, related cluster content.”
Your Pillar page should link to each cluster page via the keyword that best represents the focus of that cluster and each cluster page should link back to the pillar page using the same keyword that represents the focus of the pillar page.
This way, when one page in the cluster performs well, the entire topic cluster gets a boost.
Articles and blog posts covering subtopics can link to additional subtopics via other articles and posts to expand further on the content and create a comprehensive, detailed, and authoritative topic cluster.
With the Topic Cluster model, then, your content SEO strategy should be to link your website to the pillar page(s) of your topic clusters, allowing users and search engines access to an organized structure of interlinked related content.
Focusing your content strategy on topic clusters instead of individual keywords can help your site rank higher on search engines.
The video below provides a very brief overview of topic clusters:
The video below provides a practical tutorial on how to create effective topic clusters and pillar pages.
This video provides great examples of creating pillar pages and keyword content clusters:
And, if you want to get more in-depth into the topic, this hour-long video shows you how to group keywords and build topic clusters at scale:
For more information on creating pillar pages (with examples and templates), see the “References” section of this lesson.
Silos
It’s worth noting that many experts advocate using SEO siloing over topic clustering for your content SEO, while other experts say that siloing makes no sense.
While both SEO Siloing and Cluster Content architecture have a similar aim to organize your site and make it easier for visitors and search engines to understand your content by following a central theme from a higher-level topic overview down to ever more in-depth related topics and subtopics, there are some key differences.
In silo architecture, for example, content is organized into a hierarchy where the content is divided into clear, distinct categories that flow from top to bottom (i.e., from general information pages to specific information pages) much like a chapter in a book, where the silo represents a group of themed or subject-specific content on your site and it doesn’t cross-link to other silos.
Silo architecture also requires a lot more planning in advance of building a website than cluster content architecture.
It requires a multistep process of planning and implementation where the website theme first has to be clearly determined, then the theme is built using either physical or virtual silos, and then expert-quality content is created for each of the theme’s silos using relevant, targeted keyword-rich phrases.
While this lesson focuses on how to improve your content’s SEO, it’s important not to ignore the technical aspects of SEO, as these can hurt your rankings even if your content is perfectly optimized.
For this reason, we recommend making sure that all areas of SEO are covered.
SEO Site Audit
Google provides a whole range of tools and reports to help you fix technical SEO issues. Learn more about Google’s Tools and Reports.
Follow the recommended steps below to run an SEO audit and ensure that your rankings will not be affected by technical SEO problems:
Google Search Console. Check the Index Coverage report and fix any errors that are causing indexing issues. Also, check for Manual Actions that need addressing, Security Issues that need fixing, or pages that are not passing Google’s Core Web Vitals. Look for opportunities to improve these pages.
Check Your Site’s Mobile Friendliness. Google uses the mobile version of your website to determine where to rank you (mobile-first indexing). If using WordPress, make sure to use a mobile-responsive theme and that all plugins load and display correctly on mobile devices. Use Google’s Mobile Usability Tools And Reports.
XML sitemap – Make sure your sitemap is configured correctly and can be found in Google Search Console.
Check your site’s page loading speed. Use a tool like GTMetrix to analyze your page loading speed and detect issues. Remove any unnecessary scripts or plugins that are slowing down your website. If your site runs on WordPress, use a free speed optimization and caching plugin like Hummingbird and an image compression plugin like Smush to further reduce your site’s page loading speed and serve pages faster.
HTTPS – Make sure you have set up https:// correctly. If required, set up redirects to ensure that all http:// pages redirect to their https:// equivalent.
robots.txt file – Check to ensure that crawlers aren’t blocked from accessing any pages by mistake.
Identify and remove thin or duplicate content. If your site contains multiple versions of a page, use canonical tags to specify which page should be prioritized.
Run regular site audits (e.g. 2-4 times per year) to check for issues that can affect your rankings.
Content SEO – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content SEO:
What is Content SEO?
Content SEO refers to the process of optimizing web content so that it ranks highly in search engine results. It involves using techniques like keyword research, content creation, and content optimization to improve visibility.
Why is Content SEO important?
Content SEO is vital as it helps improve website visibility, drives organic traffic, and enhances user experience, leading to higher conversions.
Why is keyword research important for content SEO?
Keyword research helps identify the terms and phrases that potential customers are searching for. By integrating these keywords into your content, you can make your web pages more relevant and visible to those users.
How can I optimize content for SEO?
Optimize content by conducting keyword research, creating high-quality, relevant content, optimizing meta tags, headers, and images, and focusing on user intent.
What are some SEO best practices for content creation?
SEO best practices include using relevant keywords appropriately, creating high-quality and engaging content, optimizing meta tags and descriptions, and ensuring your website has a responsive design and fast loading times.
How does Google rank content?
Google ranks content based on factors such as relevance to the search query, the quality of the content, user engagement with the site, and how well the website performs technically (like page speed and mobile-friendliness).
What are some common mistakes in content SEO?
Common mistakes include keyword stuffing, ignoring user intent, neglecting mobile optimization, and neglecting to update and repurpose content.
How long does it take to see results from content SEO efforts?
Results vary based on factors like competition, keyword difficulty, and content quality. Generally, significant improvements may take several weeks to months.
Is it necessary to update content regularly for SEO?
Yes, updating content regularly signals freshness to search engines, improves relevance, and can positively impact rankings.
Can FAQs be used to improve my website’s SEO ranking?
Yes, incorporating a well-structured FAQ section can help improve SEO rankings by providing targeted content that answers specific questions. This can increase the likelihood of appearing in featured snippets and directly addressing user queries.
How can I use FAQs for SEO and content marketing?
FAQs can be used to directly address common questions your audience may have. By incorporating relevant keywords and providing valuable answers, FAQs can enhance your site’s SEO, attract more traffic, and demonstrate your expertise.
Summary
Content management plays an important role in search engine optimization.
Understanding SEO best practices and adhering to Google’s content quality guidelines will ensure that your content is made easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand, resulting in improved rankings, more web traffic, and a better user experience overall.
It’s also important to have an overall content SEO strategy in place and a plan to follow. Different SEO models include keyword-based content writing, cluster content architecture, and SEO siloing.
Action Steps
Familiarize yourself with general SEO guidelines for creating quality content and pay careful attention to areas that can impact your content’s SEO like E-A-T, meta tags, and schema markups.
Chose an SEO blueprint for your content strategy. With this site, for example, we use a model for creating our training modules and lessons that more closely resembles using topic clusters than keyword-based articles or silos.
Use the tools referred to in this lesson to find additional ways to make your content more authoritative and appealing to search engines, such as using sitemaps, improving your internal linking, and using LSI and long-tail keywords to help rank your content higher.
Be proactive with your SEO. For example, ask other websites to link to your content using an email outreach template.
Resources
Google
Refer to the sections below for information on how to create better-quality content as per Google’s content quality guidelines and documentation
Search Console User Guide & Training – Learn how to use Google’s SEO tool to better understand how your website is performing on Google Search and to learn ways to improve your search performance to drive more relevant traffic to your business.
Focus on content – Advice from Google on how to ensure that your site is offering the best content it can.
General Guidelines -Helpful guidelines and best practices for getting the best results in Google. Although this section is not specifically content-related, it includes useful information like avoiding duplicate content.
Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines – This comprehensive downloadable PDF guide provides the criteria used by raters (i.e. people who provide Google with insights on whether its algorithms are working to rank quality content in the search results).
Google’s Visual Elements Guide – Learn about the most common types of search result visual elements found on Google Search results pages.
Spam Policies For Google Web Search – A useful guide to spam policies that Google implements to help protect users and improve the quality of its search results.
Learn everything you need to know about SEO – for beginners to advanced users:
Beginner’s Guide To SEO – This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site.
SEO Learning Center – A self-paced learning center about search engine optimization.
SEO Resources – Use this extensive database of free whitepapers, reports, guides, webinars, and case studies to take your SEO strategy to the next level.
Schema.org
Schema.org is a joint effort supported by top search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex to improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema. Schema.org provides a single place to learn about schema markup and defines hundreds of item types and properties that are most valuable to search engines.
Also:
SEO for Beginners – SEO training for profitable SEO traffic: WordPress SEO, Yoast SEO, keyword research, on-page SEO, link-building SEO
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Content promotion is the process of distributing content through different channels to reach its intended audience.
Research from leading online sources shows that people are watching more videos online than ever before.
A successful email marketing strategy will help you grow a targeted and responsive email list of subscribers.
Your business has to share and promote its content using various channels to reach as many people in its target audience as it can.
Content marketing can help to create more exposure for your business online and drive more traffic to your website.
Google defines Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the process of making your site better for search engines.
