What Is Content Marketing? How You Can Get Started Today

Almost every successful website has one thing in common: Great content. You can have an extremely beautiful website with all the bells and whistles, but if you don’t have content, your web presence is woefully incomplete. You must learn how to start content marketing the proper way.

There are no shortcuts: You need good content. And you need to market that content if you want to grow the size of your audience.

In today’s post, we’re going to discuss how easy it is to get started content marketing, and how you can use content to catapult your business to the top of your industry.

Create Great Content

Yes, it should be a given that you need great content, but it’s something that many brands tend to overlook. Creating great content for content marketing is far from difficult, but you need to follow these pillars if you want to get the most out of your marketing strategy:

Know your audience. What does your audience want to see? If you don’t know, do some market research. Ideally, you want to create the content that tailored to your audience. If your audience likes to consume video content, don’t give them long-form blog posts.

Be authentic. Is your content coming from a place of authenticity? When you know your market inside-out, it shouldn’t be a problem to create authentic content that your audience can identify with. Give real value, display your knowledge and experience, and speak directly to the wants and needs of your audience.

Determine Your Method of Distribution

Great content won’t go far if people don’t see it. You need to determine how you’re going to push your content. Essentially, you’re looking to get valuable traffic from your content. Let’s look at a few ways you can do this:

SEO. For example, high-value blog posts that target relevant keywords can get ranked by Google.  Over time, rankings can improve, and your blog post can become a powerful conduit for valuable traffic to your website.

Social Media. Create content, post it on social media, share it on your network of followers. The goal is for your content to get shared virally. This expands your network and you can see an influx of targeted traffic to your website.

Public Relations. This is an overlooked method of gaining traffic through content. Leverage online PR to gain brand recognition. By getting your content featured on authoritative websites, you boost your brand while gaining quality traffic.

Create a Schedule

A sporadic content schedule will put you on a train to nowhere. Get consistent, and the simplest way to do this is to stick to a content posting schedule. Momentum is powerful, and the more content you release, the faster your audience can grow. We recommend using marketing automation software to schedule your content releases.

For example, if you send out email newsletters, email autoresponders like Aweber and MailChimp allow you to schedule your emails.

Conclusion

A website without content is merely a skeleton. You need content if you want an audience. With content marketing, you increase your following and grow your brand. By following the tips in this blog post, you can launch a successful content marketing strategy.