Content Marketing – What is it and How Does it Work for Business?

Content marketing includes writing articles, blog posts, guest posts on other blogs, articles and content for your website, creating videos, creating podcasts, press releases … anywhere you can create and publish content online.

The benefit of content marketing is you can incorporate keywords relevant to what you want to be known for on the web into the content you create. Once the content is written, you then begin to utilize it to link to your website or blog.  This tells the search engines you are relevant for those keywords and topics (helping to improve your searchability online), and you’ll see new potential clients attracted to your website as a result.

Does this sound daunting? Perhaps, but it doesn’t need to be. The trick is to get maximum mileage from every piece of content you write or create.

Let’s start with writing a blog post of between 300-500 words on an upcoming presentation you will be doing.  You can create a post about the preparation for your presentation, and another post about the actual delivery of your presentation and the feedback you received.

When you play your cards correctly, those same blog posts will automatically feed into Facebook as a post and can be reworded and used on other sites, such as HubPages or Posterous, as complete posts as well.

Next, include those posts in your newsletter. Not by rewriting the posts into the newsletter, simply do a 2-3 sentence introduction to the article, and then link to the posts on your blog.

Three months later, using this same blog post, re-word it again and beef it up to 800-1000 words and it is ready to be presented to one of the online article directories, such as ezinearticles.com.

Using content marketing in a strategic way will increase your rankings with the search engines, position you as an expert in your field and give you an edge over your competitors.

Published on: August 9, 2011