You've probably heard this phrase beaten like a dead horse – “Content is king.”
While it may be overused, the phrase really holds true in today's landscape. In the past content didn't really matter because you could just fire up spam tools like Xrumer or Scrapebox and hammer links to your website and rank.
Thanks to efforts by search engines, this is no longer the case.
Genuine content creation is now more important than ever and if you truly want to build a real brand online, you're going to need high quality, authoritative content. You want your content to be what people link to when they’re researching a topic or looking to buy something.
What is content?
Most people think that content is just words. Content goes much beyond putting words onto a website. In fact, content can be in the form of:
- Regular web content
- Blog posts
- Social media posts and updates
- E-Books
- PowerPoint presentations
- Brochures, product FAQs, tips sheets
- Sales copy
- Videos
- Pictures
- Infographics
Finding which type of content fits your audience will depend on your niche and demographic of your audience. The only real thing you can do is to experiment which forms of content are best suited for your audience.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is the newest outbound content trend in 2014. Outbound content refers to content that is posted about your brand or website on another website. While this strategy has proved successful for many, it has been overused and abused by others. Therefore, you need to be sure that you’re using outbound content on high quality websites.
Likewise, when guest blogging the idea shouldn’t be to obtain a link for SEO purposes. Instead, look for other blogs or websites in your niche that you can post on that will drive traffic to your website and help solidify yourself as a real brand. Sure the link doesn’t hurt but if you’re just looking for links, you’re going to put yourself in a poor position.
Promoting Your Content
Let’s say you created an amazing piece of content on widgets. Now what? You need to promote your content so that your readers can see it. Content promotion will not only bring your website and brand visitors but it will also help increase the natural amount of links and social shares you obtain.
There are three main ways to promote your content which include:
Social media promotion: Posting your new piece of content on your brand’s Facebook page or tweeting out content to your followers is a great way to get social engagement to begin. Make sure to add social share buttons and a solid call to action so your readers know to share your content.
Through an email newsletter: If you have a newsletter for your brand, make sure to utilize it. Every so often, send out a round up of content from your brand and other content you’ve curated to gain extra exposure for your brand.
Reach out to influential people: One celebrity tweet or comment from an influential comment can cause your website to go viral. If your content is truly valuable, reach out and send a personal email to someone influential in your industry to promote it to your audience. If they follow through, you can potentially gain thousands of followers.
or go back to last chapter:
