If you’re starting a small business and need an online presence, then you can’t ignore content marketing. After you determine who your audience, and you align your content topics with your search engine optimization strategy, you need to produce and publish the content.
Businesses that find success with content marketing all have one thing in common — they’re consistent. It doesn’t matter in the event that you publish monthly, weekly or daily blog posts; you have to remain consistent and not skip a beat. Listed here are six ways to help you source content for your website, allowing you to publish content that meets your marketing needs.
1. Outsource your content needs.
Not every business owner will probably have the full time or experience to produce high-quality content on a typical basis. Hiring an inside writer isn’t always a choice due to the cost, but there are lots of qualified freelancers out there as a possible hire to take care of your entire content needs.
It usually takes some searching — and sifting through some marginal content — before you find an ideal writer who has knowledge of your industry and a voice that matches your brand. Herbert Wright, CEO of Great Paper, features a great tip for finding qualified writers: “There are a large amount of freelancers out there that may simply find an article online that is comparable to your requested topic, and re-write it slightly, in an attempt to pass it off as original content. When trying out new freelancers, let them have obscure topics linked to your company, even if you don’t anticipate utilizing the content in your website. This will give you a good example of their true writing capabilities and style.”
2. Allow guest posts from within your industry.
Everyone really wants to guest post these days. We receive a large number of requests every week on my company’s contact page, though it specifically states that people don’t accept guest post submissions. Should you open your blog up to guest post submissions you are likely to be flooded with requests, and most won’t be strongly related to your audience.
Here really are a few suggestions to remember if you choose to try this:
Only publish content from contributors which can be actively involved in your industry and have sizeable social media followings, as this will allow you to drive more traffic to your website via their social shares.
Make sure any links in contributor bios are to quality relevant websites.
Hire a freelancer to proofread and edit your entire submissions — remember Buy content for websites, anything you publish is really a direct reflection of your business.
3. Conduct interviews using Help a Reporter Out (HARO).
When you have an audience that would be thinking about reading expert-level interviews, then you would want to develop a HARO account. This is a good choice for businesses that already possess some content marketing traction, as your website and blog needs to be high-quality and already receiving decent traffic numbers to be able to submit queries.
You are able to submit queries on any topic and then sort through the replies to get subject matters that will make a great interview. I personally use HARO on a typical basis — just anticipate to receive plenty of unrelated replies.
4. Create your content internally.
Some businesses prefer to produce their content internally, and when you have the resources to do that, it’s a great option. “Our blog content is actually dedicated to news and topics linked to the solar industry, specifically in California. We found that creating our content in-house resulted in a lot more locally-focused solar articles,” explain Kelly Shawhan, co-founder of Semper Solaris.
Turn to your employees for content — you never know when you have a good writer on staff if you ask. You can even create fun contests, awarding something special card to the employee who publishes the post with views and social shares each month. Also, content that comes from your team features a more authentic feel, helping consumers connect with your brand.
5. Open a community to start discussions.
There is a large amount of industries which have a massive followings and endless levels of topic possibilities. Including a community on your website sparks discussion — allowing your website visitors to start new topics and become associated with current discussions.
This is a good option when you have a big audience since you will have new content posted round the clock. So long as your forum is optimized and set to be indexed in the search results, you can attract plenty of organic traffic. I’ve personally seen businesses increase their organic traffic tenfold by launching a forum.
6. Rewrite old content.
Removing old website content can aid in increasing your website traffic, but rather by removing it entirely, you can re-write it. Years back, it absolutely was standard practice to throw up 500-word blog posts that have been heavily keyword optimized. The quality of the content wasn’t considered — such things as keyword density were the key focus.
When you have old content in your blog that isn’t up to today’s standards, you should think about re-writing it. You already have the topic and main focus of the content, so it can take less effort than it would if you had been starting a brand new post from scratch. If you re-work your entire older sub-par content it’ll greatly improve your content marketing results.
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