With the constant barrage of Google updates always around the corner, one thing is certain, having a good content marketing strategy is now more important than ever. Google is starting to rank mainly sites that have high amounts of relevant content, and small sites are getting left in the dust. It’s becoming apparent that if you want to rank in Google you need content, and a lot of it.
Good content marketing will get you immediate traffic, it will allow you to go viral and will drive targeted visitors to your website. It will also gain links over time and start to rank for various keywords. This means that a good content strategy could drive continuous sales to your website over a long period of time.
Bad content marketing strategies will do the exact opposite. They will not drive any immediate traffic and won’t get noticed by Google at all. I’ve had to work with clients like this in the past and it’s a waste of money, if you’re going to spend money on content marketing make sure that it is done right.
So how do you create a good content marketing strategy? Today we are going to go through and show you how we create a good content marketing strategy that will be the basis of a long lasting website. We will not go into any gray hat or black hat techniques since I personally believe most of those don’t work with content marketing, and are a waste of time to try.
Find Keywords
This is the first step, and one of the most important ones. The keywords that you find will determine how much traffic you will gain both in the short run, and in the long run. We are going to go over two techniques to find exactly what you should be writing your keywords about, and why.
The first one is a simple one and there are many different articles already written about the . subject. This is keyword research; keyword research is probably one of the most important skills that you can gain as an internet marketer.
Keyword research is relatively easy, the Google Keyword tool is a great tool for almost any marketer to use in order to find nice long-tail keywords If you are looking for anything more powerful I would recommend Long Tail Pro, which I will do a review on later.
Type your general keyword into the Google Keyword Tool and try to find keywords with 3 or more words. Type them in quotes “keyword” into Google and then take a look at the last results page, it will show you how many sites are truly targeting this keyword. I usually try to stick with anything below 200 search results but in the end it is really up to you.
That is the poor man’s way of doing keyword research, stay tuned for a more in depth guide that will be coming live next week. I personally prefer to use Moz’s keyword difficulty tool but I understand that most people don’t have access to it.
Another cool strategy that doesn’t involve the keyword tool is using import.io to find your keywords. Import.io is a cool software that lets you scrape any site that you want information from. I scrape all of my biggest competitors for all of their blog posts and URLs, then I feed that through google refine in order to find out which posts have been shared more than others. I organize by the most popular posts and suddenly I have a great idea of what my niche is really looking for. This is an easy way to come up with truly viral and powerful content.
Slate out a content calendar
This is super important, you need to slate out a calendar of which pieces of content are going to go live and when they are going to go live. I like to schedule for at least 2 or 3 months out for each of my clients. This way I have a good idea when pieces are going to go live and when I’m going to promote them. It also allows you to do all of your content ahead of time as well, so you can just focus on the promotion aspect of your work.
Write the content –
Things can get tricky at this point, writing the content is usually what takes the most amount of time and effort. Right now thanks to the latest panda updates I am going to go ahead and recommend that you write as long of pieces of content as possible. I know that people claim that panda targets only bad content and that you just need to write as much content as your market needs, but so far my data doesn’t say that this is true.
It’s really hard for a machine to tell good content from bad content. One of the methods that Google seems to rely on is the length of the content. I’ve pulled a lot of data from the serps and consistently it’s the pieces of content that contain 1,000 or more word posts that are ranking for different keywords. In fact SEroundtable is a little worried that they may have been hit by panda, many people are theorizing that it is because their posts while super informative, are extremely short.
Please remember that this is just my opinion on the matter, I know it’s not a popular one right now but it is what I have observed, when you can always aim for longer content. In fact if you have shorter pieces of content on your website try consolidating them into one post and see what happens, your rankings and traffic will almost always improve.
Start promoting!
This is the fun part, get your social media marketing up and running, and start promoting your content. Use all of your most powerful twitter marketing strategies, as well as Google+ and Linkedin. Pushing this content outright when it is hot off the press will get lots of traffic, and may even gain you a few nice natural links.
I also like to do some email outreach at this point and let any partnerships that I have; know that I have a new juicy piece of content live. This can sometimes quickly net me a few links if they like the content, and will really bring on the long term traffic.
Conclusion
Having a strong content marketing strategy is key to gaining a lot of traction online. If you really want to go from receiving a few hundred visitors a day to receiving thousands you need to start pumping out good content, and promoting it through different channels of social media.
