Social media is, of course, an essential part of any content marketing strategy.
But what’s the best way to use it in your content marketing to get the optimal results?
What exactly are the best practices you should be aiming to follow?
This post gives you five social media best practices to start using today, starting with a key question …
There are a couple things about a content calendar I believed before I actually created and started using my own.
Firstly, I thought it sounded really complicated. Secondly, it sounded overly ‘corporate’. Weren’t content calendars just for large brands?
Both assumptions I found to be untrue.
In addition, I was unsure if one was really necessary.
How would it really benefit my business? Was it worth the effort to create one?
However, as I’ll show you, I not only found creating a content calendar far easier than I thought, but it also has big benefits for content creation and marketing as a whole.
This post gives you the following:
Content marketing consistently delivers high returns. For example, I’ll show you how it’s increased my own search traffic by 66% in just twelve months.
I’m not alone. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers have planned to create more content this year than last. That’s for good reason. In fact, about 70% of businesses now use some form of content marketing.
“If you’re not creating content on the web, you don’t exist.”
Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing
Strange then, that only around a third (35%) of content creators do so with a documented content marketing strategy.
As I’ll show you, having a written strategy can make a huge difference to the results you achieve.
But how do you create one?
In this post you’ll discover:
Are you struggling to produce enough content for your website, blog, or social media channels? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.
The not-so-secret key to a successful content marketing strategy is creating high-quality and in-depth content. However, this takes a good deal of time, effort, and often money, all of which can discourage many businesses from taking full advantage.
In fact, research shows that producing enough content is one of the top three challenges that businesses pursuing content marketing face.
However, there are strategies you can adopt to ease the process and make it a whole lot easier.
As I frequently cover on this blog, one such strategy is to repurpose your existing content as new content you can then publish, share and distribute. Repurposing content saves you time and money, while extending your reach.
Simply put, repurposing your content and sharing it in different ways via different channels allows you to reach (and attract) a much wider proportion of your marketplace. The larger the audience you develop across multiple content platforms, the more influence you have. This increases engagement, boosting your reach significantly through sharing and inbound linking.
In other words, the more content you repurpose and share, the greater the long-term benefits for your business.
In addition, it’s no longer enough to just publish content to your own site. As I advise frequently, you need to be where your marketplace is, not where you want them to be.
Repurposing existing content for other platforms allows you to achieve it relatively easily.
We previously covered a broader set of 50+ killer ways to repurpose your content. However, in this post we go into more detail and dig down into the main social channels to help you determine:
Social media continues to evolve. Increasing numbers of businesses are investing in paid social media advertising for both increasing the reach of their content, and for targeting their specific market on a granular level.
Research shows that over half of B2B businesses, and three quarters of B2C businesses, are using paid social media advertising as part of their content marketing activities.
But just look at how it’s grown in the space of a year. As the following charts illustrate, paid advertising usage on social media has shot up sharply for both B2B and B2C.
But with so many social networks available, it’s confusing where to start. There’s no one-size-fits-all social advertising solution. Different networks will suit different businesses and advertising approaches.
This post reviews 10 different social networks that provide paid advertising opportunities. I share the demographics of each network (including network size) and the advertising options available.
Plus, so you can see what can be achieved, I share successful case studies for each platform, along with real data wherever possible.
Want to get on the first page of Google?
Let me guess…
You’re desperately seeking that elusive top ten listing for your site’s front page. You’re focused on one or two main keywords. It seems an endless uphill struggle.
Or maybe you made it. If so, congratulations!
But then, heart thumping, you notice you’ve been knocked down again. And so the cycle continues…
If so, you’re not alone. It’s common practice.
The only problem is, this type of old-style SEO is dead. Ineffective. A waste of resources. And an endless cycle of defeat, disillusionment and, if you’re lucky, occasional elation… but then back to the defeat and disillusionment.
The good news is there’s a better strategy that:
(And if you do SEO work for clients, leaves them far happier).
[…]
Quora is not far off becoming one of the top 100 most visited sites in the world (Alexa), with roughly 100 million monthly unique visitors, half of which are from the US.
It’s based on a simple question-and-answer format, and incorporates elements of social media to help generate interactivity and wide exposure of content.
It has far more authority than other question-and-answer sites, attracting the regular involvement of authority figures and genuine experts, from industry leaders and CEOs to influencers and even presidents.
As such it attracts increasing amounts high quality traffic.
When approached in the right way, business owners can ride on the back of their success, and siphon often significant levels of traffic back to their own sites (as I show below, to the tune of several thousand visitors a month).
[…]
There is ongoing confusion around the issue of duplicate content, and how it affects search engine listings. The issue has been around for years.
In fact, I first started writing and talking to businesses about it nearly a decade ago.
While it’s fallen off the radar a little over the past few years, the issue has regained prominence again recently with increasing numbers of businesses pursuing multi-channel publishing to effectively reach their marketplace.
For example, are there duplicate content penalties if you cross-post content between different platforms?
Duplicate content myths – and bad advice based on them – abound.
So this post gives you the lowdown, with answers on important duplicate content questions, including the implications for publishing content across multiple content platforms.
Are you creating content that you’re either not repurposing, or that isn’t itself repurposed?
If so, you are probably leaving 90% or more of the potential benefits of the content untapped.
What’s more, research shows that producing enough content is one of the top three challenges faced by businesses that pursue content marketing.
The good news is that repurposing existing content:
When I first started online in the early 2000s, if you wanted to communicate (digitally) with your prospects and customers en masse, it was either email, or… well, email.
Facebook wasn’t yet a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye; Twitter was even further beyond the digital horizon. WordPress didn’t yet exist – if you wanted to blog, you headed to LiveJournal.
Publishing content on a website often involved a well-worn copy of How to Use HTML (or similar!), and late nights spent figuring out <head> and <body> tags, and everything in between.
Oh yes! I’m almost forgetting the painfully slow dial-up Internet connection that made publishing even the most basic bit of content painfully slow. (Not to mention hogging the phone line while you did it. Fun times!)
Zoom forward to the current day and you can communicate with (and build up tribes of) thousands of people in your market on multiple platforms, and across a multitude of devices. And do so quickly and easily.
Email marketing remains vitally important of course. Through communicating one-to-one directly with a subscriber, it’s one of the most powerful ways to build trust, credibility and a sense of relationship.
Yet many businesses still approach email marketing without any thought to an integrated strategy that more effectively reaches and communicates with their marketplace across multiple platforms, and at the same time creates long-term content assets for their business.
Instead, their approach is disjointed. Each platform, including email, is treated as a completely separate entity, demanding completely different content.
The resulting and unsurprising sense of overwhelm gives way to an either-or mentality that restricts their reach, and even leads to a gradual decline of online visibility.
It’s not their fault. They just emulate what most other businesses seem to be doing. They follow incorrect, or at best incomplete, advice that hasn’t quite caught up with present-day reality.
In this post, I’ll share with you:
Steve Shaw has spent two decades helping thousands of businesses worldwide unlock business growth and success via his info and software.
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