Am I marketing the quality content I created?
You spent hours (or a good chunk of change) creating content that answers your customers’ questions and solves their problems.
Your customer wanted to know the best way to train their dog so you went beyond the call of duty and collected resources on how to actually make their dog smarter. Then, you put it all together in some easy-to-read, 100% accessible, problem-solving, smart, snappy blog that would make your customers so happy they’d convert on the spot and share your blog with their dog-loving friends.
Job well done.
(Well, maybe it was your copywriter but we’ll give you the credit).
But hang on, what are you doing with it? Is it just sitting there, all dressed up with no place to go, and no one to hang out with?
Why isn’t anyone reading your fantastic stuff?
You didn’t create swipe files and outlines and sweat over the perfect headers and paragraph structures and learn everything there is to know about how to avoid raising a dumb dog just to sit back and watch your awesome copy call in the crickets and collect digital dust, did you?
Of course not.
You might recall from Step 9 to SEO that writing for a person and writing for SEO are different.
On the one hand, you’re speaking directly to your potential customer in order to give her something she needs, to solve her problem, to provide her with answers. It’s a tall order but you did it.
One the other hand, you’re structuring your copy to speak directly to Google, to say, “hey G-dawg, check out my keyword-optimized headers, my high-quality backlinks, my relevant, user-friendly content rich with answers to people’s questions. Please give me a front-row seat in the SERP so everyone knows where to find me.”
The goal of marketing your content is two-fold:
First––get people to your site, reading your content and buying your product or service.
Second––gain authority in your niche, which happens when you start ranking for a target keyword in Google’s SERPs.
How do you do both?
There are several ways to get the right traffic to your site, but the best ones are here:
Email List
The obvious way to get what you want is to ask for it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but you have to try.
Ask your readers to subscribe to your site. Once you’ve got their email keep them engaged with regular, useful information to get them back to your site again and again and to build their interest and trust in your product or service.
Pay the most attention to your email subject line. Make it short, relevant, intriguing, and urgent when necessary. In the body, include a short story or anecdote, dropping in buzz words like yummy snacks. Hint at how you’re going to solve their pain point and include your simple, direct call-to-action with a link to juicy new content on your site.
Then, your clever silo structure takes them on a delicious journey through your site. (Keep reading to find out what I mean).
But don’t miss the following stuff––unless you enjoy watching your ROIs plummet like a suicidal emu from a high rise building.
Link Building
Inbound links from authority sites are one of the number one ways to get people reading your content. Link building isn’t the most fun activity you’ll ever engage in but it’s necessary for building relationships and proving to Google that you are worth a mention and a visit.
Now don’t get the idea that you can approach link building passively because it makes you want to jam toothpicks in your nose. Hire someone. There are tons of people out there who can take over the task of reaching out to different sites once your strategy is in place. We’ll get more into this in Step 12 so stay tuned.
I came across a clever strategy one of my clients was using to get links to his site. As a database for ESL teachers searching for work, he knew that universities were high authority sites so he contacted schools across the US and Canada offering their students the chance to win a scholarship. All they had to do was write an essay about why they want to be a teacher and send it to him through their newly created profile on his site. See? It attracted thousands of soon-to-be-teachers to his site, massively increasing his database
Social Media Sharing
Get on Twitter, FB, LI, Instagram, and whatever else floats your boat, and engage. Connect with as many people as you can, especially your competitors. Comments on posts. Set up staggered scheduling so you’re not posting the same thing on every platform. Consult a social media expert, or check out this guide from Buffer: How to Schedule Social Media Content for Next Week, Next Month, and Next Year.
A final and absolutely necessary step in marketing your content
One of the most clever strategies I’ve come across is interlinking. Not only does this appeal to Google, it takes your customer on a little journey through your site, providing him with resources like a trail of cinnamon-raisin bread crumbs.
Check it out:
Your home page should link to your product pages, which should link to your content where your customer can get all the information they need to build trust in your offering.
Or more likely, they come at it the other way, from a link in an email you sent to a content page, perhaps an interesting blog or something about the awesome benefits of that dog harness you’re selling. From there, they can navigate through to your product page where they can buy said dog harness.
Or, if they’re not yet sold, you’ve left some yummy snacks throughout that content that leads them to more useful content, which also leads them to your product page so when they’re ready to buy, it’s an easy hop over.
Here’s a key takeaway:
- Parent links to child and child links to parent.
- Child links to siblings and uncle if useful, but not to cousins.
- If child must link to cousins for UX, make it no-follow to avoid confusing relevance.
I can’t stress enough how absolutely critical this structure is on your site. This is your marketing, nicely structured on your site, doing all the work for you.
Don’t forget to check out our next Step––Internet Partners. Until then, get writing, emailing, building, sharing, and structuring.
Logging out,
Logical Mix
