What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing means different things to different online marketers. In my opinion how people define content marketing comes down to the level of effort that they feel they need to put into, or what to put into, producing content to get the ROI they are striving to achieve.
- Content marketing is about creating high quality content, which can be in the form of videos, audio, white papers, images, or just plain text. (Post: what it takes to create high quality content)
- Content marketing is about creating high value, high quality articles and research papers that live solely on your website.
- Content marketing is giving the user a valuable resource they fosters social sharing and deserves to be linked to and blogged about.
- Content marketing is an internet marketing strategy inclusive of a content audit, content research, content strategy, competitive analysis, keyword research, and finally creating high value content.
There is a level of effort that it takes and a general theory as to how long it should take to write a “quality article”. Below is a graph illustrates how long it should take and how much time you should spend writing your articles. When you actually take into account how much effort it takes to do content marketing, I personally can’t fathom taking an article you put so much effort into, and putting it on a bunch of low quality web article directories.
Image courtesy of seomoz.org
What Is Content Strategy?
Content marketing strategy starts with a complete website and competitive audit to uncover content gabs that exist in the user and search engine funnels. This should then be followed by a complete keyword analysis to uncover new valuable keyword sets that are valued by the user, and which align with the brand’s values and goals. Only after these steps are taken should quality content and research papers be written. There are many content tools that can help create great content, but we would never advise someone to use tools that generate mass amounts of low quality content. Read more about our content strategy.
What Content Marketing Is Not
Content marketing is not submitting your content to tons of low quality article directories who have no regard for quality, and are simply publishing thin, low quality, articles. What are some of these low quality free article directories we are writing about? Below you will find a few.
Additional Resources about Content Marketing
Fixing Content Affected by Panda
Using Google Suggest to Generate Content Ideas
Possible Video Content Ranking Signals
Content Creation Techniques
Using Talk Shows To Create Timely Content. This is more important with the current Google Freshness Update
Content Marketing Stats
- Average daily videos watched on YouTube: 2 Billion
- Average daily videos uploaded to YouTube: 100,000
- Total posts on Tumblr: 807,916,624
- Total post on WordPress: 200,000,000
- Total blogs hosted on WordPress: 1.4 Million
- Total number of tweets per day on Twitter: over 50 million
- Small companies spend twice as much on content marketing as large companies.
Taking these stats into account, means there is alot of content out there on the web, so creating average content does not cut it anymore. The content needs to be valuable, research based, and satisfy and delight the user.
Bill is the Lead Linchpin at the company and focuses on SEO and content strategy. Bill’s ten-year background in digital marketing, SEO, and building online companies has helped him rise to strategic lead for some of the largest online brands and content websites in the world. Bill believes that at the core of a website's success sits the value that website provides it users.
Click here to learn more about LinchpinSEO's Lead Linchpin.
