There are several components to an effective content marketing strategy. And you’ll need to take them all into consideration when laying out your plan, as well as a variety of online resources that can help you follow through with your strategy. See below to learn about a few important factors that can help with your content marketing.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the process of determining which keywords and keyword phrases will create the most significant impact on your content. Keywords are words or phrases that people commonly use to search for the content you’re creating. Including the right keywords and phrases in your content will generate traffic from search engines like Google.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO encompasses many different things, including the use of keywords, headers, categories, and content. In the beginning, content creators would post articles or blog posts that made little sense; they were just loaded down with keywords in an attempt to get traffic. Google eventually created algorithms that ensured the traffic was sent to the websites that were providing useful content instead, which was focused on the topic or keywords being used.
Social media
Social media is an important way to get your content shared and potentially go viral. Making your content easy to share and with catchy titles and photos will increase your Google ranking. There are several different social media channels you may choose to work with, depending on the type of content you are creating.
For example, Twitter and Facebook are ideal for sharing links to online articles. Pinterest and Instagram are image-driven, so you can still share articles links, but they must be links through meaningful, catchy, or amazing images.
Link building
Building links is when you link your website to valuable information on other websites, which are outbound links. It also includes inbound links, which is when other sites link to information on your website.
Link building is probably the hardest aspect of your content marketing strategy because it involves an entirely separate strategy of its own. If you’re not already deeply familiar with link building and how it works, you are better off utilizing a service like LinkGraph, which can help you build and tracks inbound and outbound links.
Content creation
The content you create is vitally important to your overall content marketing strategy for two reasons. First, the better your content is, the more likely you’ll be to get traffic from search engines. Secondly, if the content is valuable to the reader, they might read your other content and start following you. If they go to your website and see that it’s all fluff trying to sell something, they’re more likely to leave.
Creating an effective strategy needs to encompass each of these components. A successful way to create and follow a content marketing strategy is to create an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is a calendar that details the days you’ll need to execute specific tasks. For example, you’ll lay out what articles you will post on which days. You need to decide how frequently you’ll post articles and then be prepared on those days with written content.
You can also plan out your social media posts and then use a service like Hootsuite to schedule out your social media posts across all of your social media channels. Other online resources can help you build links to and from your website in addition to social media that will also actively increase your Google ranking.
You can make your editorial calendar a month out or more. The more you can plan, the better prepared you’ll be for new content. The key is the follow-through: you can have the best strategy in the world, but if you don’t follow through, it won’t matter.
