3 Tips for Creating a Great Content Marketing Strategy to Help Your Business

Part of content marketing is finding the right places to post. The benefit of a content marketing plan is that you build credibility so the places you post at need to help with that. You have different options available and each offer pros and cons.

A popular option is to create your own blog. This could be attached to the website or on a separate domain. When opting for blogging, you will need to follow a blogging style. This means short paragraphs and sentences, using first and second person more and making the posts more personal and friendly. Opt for paragraphs with just two or three sentences – or one where possible! – to make them easy to read and follow.

If you enjoy blogging, look out for other people’s blogs that you can guest post on. You will need to find people already working within your niche so you continue to build authority. Check out the following and quality of the blog to make sure it is worth your time – you can get an idea by checking out the comments sections to see how many people reply and whether they find the blog helpful. You should follow the blog for some time and check out the previous posts before pitching – and always read the guidelines. This helps to make sure your pitch is accepted.

When blogging isn’t your thing and you’d prefer to write articles or how-to posts, you could consider posting on article directories and revenue share sites (making your content pay you as well as build traffic). There are many popular ones but you will need to check the guidelines. Most of the sites prefer that you offer constructive and informational posts and not spammy content, which you shouldn’t do anyway! Not all will allow a link back to your own website, apart from in your author bio, which could limit your ability to promote and use the content marketing strategy to your advantage.

Content marketing is all about SEO. You will need to find the keywords that people are searching for and have some, but not too much, competition. This will help you rank at the top of the search results so people find you – after all, if they can’t find you then everything else will be in vain. This requires work as you learn about keyword research and how to implement that into your content marketing plan.

When picking keywords, you also need to find ones that will help to answer a question and are relevant to your content. Opt for the longer keyword phrases as they are better for ranking and create a more detailed piece – shorter one are much harder to rank for. This may seem like harder work, since you have less freedom over the topic of your post, but is worth it in the long run when you gain more traffic and potential sales.

Having a good content marketing strategy is essential if you want to succeed. You need to think about where you post and the type of topics you are going to cover. The whole point is to build credibility and a following, which requires valuable content that is easy to find. By offering something your readers like and is useful, they will check out your website and the products on offer and it increases the chances of sales – or at least more on your email list.