This blog post is extracted by Neha Jain from our new eBook, "The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing".
“Content is the king” as rightly said by Bill Gates and it is increasingly working its way to the forefront of all digital marketing strategies.
Content is the fuel that should drive your Internet marketing strategy. By creating valuable, high-quality content that’s targeted at specific, well-defined audiences, you’ll do more than attracting visitors to your website: You’ll attract the right visitors, who are likely to convert into leads (and customers).
What’s more?
Content will help considerably with your website’s SEO. Creating and distributing content is the best way to earn those valuable inbound links that can boost your search rankings and help improve your website’s discoverability.
So, why is CONTENT King?
- It’s great for SEO
- Encourages engagement
- Generates new leads and sales
- Adds value to your product/service
- Increases traffic
Let’s start with blogging:
A blog makes your website more dynamic by automatically injecting new content every time an article is published. Search engines reward higher rankings to websites that consistently add fresh content, and these higher rankings translate into new visitors and leads for your business. When blogging, take off your hat as a business owner or marketing manager and try to think like a magazine publisher.
The goal of your business blog should be to publish valuable, non-promotional posts, much in the way a column or an article in an industry magazine would. Also, think about the words you are using. Avoid industry jargons that only your employees would understand. Instead, think of the words your customers use to describe your business and apply those phrases to your blogging language.
However, what do you write about?
- Blogs must start with a purpose.
- Try to educate your industry and potential customers.
- This education is not about your product. It’s about common industry issues, the problems your potential customers face and, sometimes, the solutions your product or service offer to tackle these challenges.
A great way to start blogging is to answer the ten most common questions you get asked by prospective new customers. Do this once a week for ten weeks and you have the foundations of a successful blog. Once those first ten weeks are over, check out your blogging analytics to see which articles resonated the most with your audience. If two or three of the posts received a significantly higher number of views and inbound links, try to expand on the topics at hand.
Key Components of a Great Blog Post
- A compelling title - A blog post’s title is the first thing people will see, so it should clearly indicate what the article is about. Clarity and specificity attract readers and prompt them to share the post with their networks.
- Well-written and formatted text - The body of your post should be well-written and formatted in a way that makes it easy to read. Consider using header tags and bullet points to break up the content into sections. Ask a co-worker or a friend to review the post before you publish it.
- Multimedia content - Relevant multimedia content can make a blog post more memorable and fun to read. It also helps to break up the text to make it more pleasing to the eye. Aim to add at least one relevant image per blog post. Slideshow presentations, video, and infographics are examples of other multimedia content you can feature.
- Links - Include in-text links to relevant content, thus helping readers dig deeper into the resources they are most interested in. Your links can, naturally, point to your own internal pages and landing pages to help you generate more leads from your content.
- Call-to-Action (CTA) - Each and every blog post you publish should include a relevant call-to-action in the article to help boost lead generation.
Other types of Content for Generating Leads:
While it’s a great place to start, blog content isn’t the only type of content you can be creating to be successful with Internet marketing. You need to produce longer-form content items like:
- eBooks
- Whitepapers
- Research reports
- Videos
- Webinars
- Slideshows
These content “offers” will feed your business conversions.
Remember: Content will continue to be one of the most effective marketing tools for sales lead generation. It’s important to think through your strategy before starting a new campaign. The offers you produce shouldn’t be randomly selected. On the contrary, there is some precise math behind that decision: the math from your marketing analytics.
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