The internet has become a massive black hole of content. Here are some content marketing tips that can help you execute a smart content strategy in spite of it.
Beautifully created content is getting lost in cyberspace. It’s dropped off on the side of the road in the most remote areas of the information superhighway, with no one around for light years. If you’re developing content without promoting it, you’re dumping your content straight into a black hole. But there’s hope–here are some content marketing tips that can help you shine a light on your content.
1. Wave to the Bots!
Give yourself a shot with the search engine bots by investing in SEO. Conduct keyword research to understand what your audience is searching for. Set up on-page SEO with the appropriate title tags, headings, meta descriptions, and image alt attributes for your content. While there are a lot of factors that play into effective, modern SEO, it is still important to have a solid foundation of basic metadata for your content to help you get discovered online.
2. Sell it in the SERPs.
Create compelling, creative, and inviting page titles and meta descriptions to maximize your click-through rate on the search engine results page (SERPs). This is the copy that will show up when the user is trying to decide which search result to click on. Think of the meta description as the ad copy for your page. Describe your page in a way that sells the content to the “customer.” In this case, the customer is the search engine user that is looking for information related to your content topic.
3. Don’t be afraid to repeat your tweet.
If you are posting a link to your content via Twitter, you will want to schedule multiple tweets to promote your content since all of your followers will not be online at the same time. You can vary these posts with a different focus featuring a key quote, statistic, or question addressed in the content. No time to manage your social media? A social media marketing company can help.
4. Pay to play.
Unfortunately, the social media landscape is quickly becoming a pay-to-play venue. As algorithms continue to evolve, it is increasingly difficult to get a lot of eyeballs on your info without paying to promote a post (even if you have a large following). Invest in boosted posts in a way that will get people to your content AND will also increase your future organic power. In other words, use boosted posts on Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter to drive people to your content, as well as increase followers and email subscribers. This is a marathon, not a sprint, but with consistent contributions you can continue to build a following and leverage their individual networks to expand your organic reach.
5. Images = Everything.
To increase the “shareability” of your content, be sure to include engaging visual elements. Use quality custom images both in the content pieces as well as the social media posts promoting that content. To overcome the noise in social feeds, consider what type of images will catch your audience’s eye.
6. Use network multipliers.
Expand your reach by encouraging team members to share your content via social media. This is especially applicable if part of their network would fall into your target audience. Also, using hashtags in social posts will help mark the content by relevant topic. This will help expand your audience reach beyond your existing followers.
7. Go serial.
Leverage the power of “To Be Continued” and create episodic, multi-part content to get return visits. Combine these parts and pieces to build powerful long-form content that will promote referral links from 3rd party sites.
8. Click-to-Tweet.
Make your share-worthy content easier to share. Include appropriate/relevant social share buttons on your blog post page. This will make it easy for those who want to share tasty bites of content, like a key quote or statistic from your article with in-context click-to-tweet buttons. You can find a number of “Click-to-Tweet” plug-ins available to make this easy to setup.
9. Keep your troops in the loop.
One of the most overlooked content marketing tips: Make sure you keep your loyal email subscribers up-to-date with your latest content. This is a group that raised their hand to say they are interested in what you have to say, so don’t leave them hanging. This may seem obvious, but it can get overlooked.
10. Captivate your captive audience.
In addition to your email audience, keep your current website audience engaged by cross-linking between related content on your site. Feature new content with links on your home page, and provide cross-links to new content from related blogs and pages. Make this new content easy to discover for your website visitors. Connecting the content dots across your site will help get more views and shares on the new stuff. It will also provide an SEO boost with increased engagement on your site overall.
If you create beautiful, valuable content, these content marketing tips will give it a chance to survive out in cyberspace.
Strap some jetpacks on those blog posts, infographics, and videos to make sure you get that valuable content in front of the audiences that need it. If you need more content marketing tips, give us a shout. We keep rocket fuel in the office.
