Inside Content Marketing

This is where my Inside Content Marketing journey begins. Only I can’t start typing. I’ve been staring at this dashboard for two weeks. Typing a line or two then deleting it. A constant cycle of doubt. Everything I have read on content marketing says that your content must not only be great but unique as well, and that is proving harder than I thought.

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What is “Inside Content Marketing”?

My Idea for Inside Content Marketing is to provide a free source of relevant information to help small businesses and bloggers succeed online. I want to explore different aspects of inbound marketing and show you, easy to follow guides that will increase your website or blog traffic.

The image visualizes some of the relationships I want to explore. The important thing to take from this is all aspects of your online marketing efforts are linked.

Relationships with Content Marketing

Great content is only great if it can be found. The philosophical saying “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” springs to mind. You’re wasting your time if you are creating amazing content that is lost in the sea of www. You need to know about optimizing it for search engines.

Two key areas of SEO

1. On-Page – Refers to your website page. Your URL, post title, headings, content, meta descriptions and meta keywords.
2. Off-Page -Refers to links back to your site. A link on a website with a higher rank than yours will pass more “juice” to your site. The more appropriate links you have back to your site the more authority your site will gain.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is any tactic employed to increase your visibility in search engines like Google. It is extremely important to optimize your content so search engines can rank your pages higher. The higher your page the more traffic you get. Traffic is the boss, if it is carefully targeted.

Content Marketing and Keywords

Before you optimize your content for search engines, you must do research. You need to ask yourself what problems do my site solve? What questions do my site answer? This will be the beginning of your keyword research.

A keyword is a word or phrase that somebody might search on Google. I wouldn’t search for “green wooly hat” if I was looking for new leather shoes. You need to consider relevance when deciding on your keywords.

There is strong competition for certain keywords, that is why it is easier to target longer phrases. Using a tool like Google Keywords you can see an estimation of the numbers of searches for your chosen keyword per month. Find a phrase that relates to your content that has some healthy monthly traffic.

Google or any search engine is a program that answers questions. What questions does your blog or website answer? A blog about music production maybe already producing great content. Things like how-to tutorials or complicated software walk-throughs. If keyword research has not been conducted you are throwing your hook into the sea with no bait. Nobody will be able to seek out your content.

Spend some time doing keyword research. It arguably one the most important stage in your online marketing strategy. If you don’t know what people are looking for then how can you provide the answer?

The Content Marketing Iceberg

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Over the next few months I hope to be able to provide you with an inside look at content marketing. I want to explore SEO and other strategies. I want to show you how to start implementing easy to follow actions that will help you increase traffic to your blog.

If the idea of content marketing or SEO makes your skin crawl your not alone!

If you are interested in learning more please comment below with the topics you find most troubling.  I would love to help in anyway I can.