Included in article marketing should be useful, informative content, created with its online audience in mind. When a specific topic in the article is searched for in a search engine, such as Google, it shows in the web pages, along with blog posts and other sources related to that topic that it is listed in.
Article marketing is a content marketing technique that combines writing and posting articles across different platforms, with the aim to promote the desired business or website through its backlinks included in the article.
The highest-ranking pages are bought to the top of a search engine, this means they have good SEO. So, when an article is being written you can adapt the content and optimise it to help you reach the top of the search engine. Optimising your content can be a very important aspect of your marketing as it can lead to a huge increase in traffic to your website and business.
Article marketing is not only a strategy to improve your SEO; it can also generate traffic through many different channels, such as social media. With businesses growing their reach across different audiences, they can adapt their content with their posts to suit the platform. Here are some of the platforms listed below:
LinkedIn
Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
Other blogs
Guest posts
Email campaigns
When starting your article marketing it can be easier to create bitesize steps to establish what best fits your business and the users you are trying to reach. These are some of our recommended, simple steps for you to get your content exactly how you would like:
1. Choosing Your Topic
Firstly, you will need to choose a topic that you know will be of interest to your audience. Create a list of these areas which you think will be the most effective whilst thinking about the key parts to your business that are most enquired about e.g. cost, designs, content, service?
2. Research Your Keywords
Now you have your topic and aspects that are going to be included, you will need to plan the keywords that are relevant and will be most searched for in a search engine. There is no use including words that are not used in your field or are never searched for.
To help with this step, there are many tools like Semrush that will be useful in this stage of the process. By doing some research into specific words and if they will be effective to your SEO.
3. Writing Your Content
With your research done, you can now start taking on board what you have learnt so far and begin writing your content. This is also a good time to analyse your content and make sure it has great SEO, helping it to rank higher in the search engine. Some of the aspects include the following features:
An interesting title and clear headings throughout your text.
Ensure your content is interesting.
Adding internal and external links.
Using a good URL structure.
Another feature that would be beneficial to add at this time would be different types of media. Add some creativity into your article with images, videos, digital tools and PDF’s which will attract a larger audience and improve your SEO!
4. Publishing Your Content
Now your content is ready to go you will need to find a platform that will publish your work. It is important to find a platform that has the right audience for your content, and provide the best results. There are many platforms and blogs, that will host your article on their site and include a link back to your website to drive more traffic. Look at useful platforms like AI Guest Posts and FAT JOE, that will publish you articles for a small fee and you will benefit from their large audiences and reach across popular industries.
Now the hard work is done, watch the results of your article marketing and see how successful it will be to your SEO and bringing traffic to your website.
Content marketing is the creation of information and content and how this can be shared across different materials and formats, such as videos, blog and social media. The main idea is to entertain or inform the audience, whilst delivering a business goal. Here is an example of some of the variety of content marketing that is used across different businesses:
Blogging
Video
Podcasting
Infographics
Email
Visual content
E-books
Newspapers
Presentations
Quizzes’/tools
Checklists
Courses
Webinars
Free apps
Social media posts
When thinking of content marketing, the two most popular ways, which have grown hugely, are blogging and podcasts. The statistics for blogging have increased globally, but in the U.S. the number of bloggers between 2014-2020 increased by 10 million!! Similarly, the global growth for podcasting is expected to increase by 31% for 2028. With huge markets like these, is it understandable how content marketing has become so varied and can appeal to larger audiences.
Here is a more in depth look at some of the most popular types of content marketing:
Blogging
After being around for such a long time, blogging still accounts for a large percentage of the content marketing that is out there. With most blogs being written about products or services relating to a business, it is easy to see the results made from creating the blog and why they are so popular. Alongside this, blogs also carry a non-expensive price tag – ideal for small businesses or those on a tight budget. You can find free options or choose platforms to post your blog that you know will reach a much larger audience.
Blogs are also a great form of content marketing to use whether your business is small or large. If you have a small business and you begin posting a blog, this will entice the following you are looking for or alternatively, if you are an established business, the personal touch of a blog will add a genuine nature to your business and show your audience you are a trustworthy brand.
Social Media
Like blogging, social media is also huge in the content marketing industry. There are now so many different channels to engage with your audience, and this element does set social media apart from other types of marketing. By creating a social media post, the ideal result is to be seen and engage with your audience with an almost instant reaction or feedback from them.
Like blogging, this is also does not take much funding, unless you are looking to push this further and track your results and analytics. By tracking the results on your social media content, you will be able to see what is working and generating the most traffic to your site.
Podcasts
With podcasts, the initial cost of equipment and set up is a little more to take on than blogging but the potential audience for this could be huge. It is important to plan what you are going to say in your podcast to make sure it is not just ‘off the cuff’ and meets the reason of why you are doing the podcast. After all, the main aim of the podcast is to raise awareness of your brand and target those areas that are harder to reach with other types of content marketing.
Like with social media, there are lots of celebrities who have also joined the world of podcasting as a way of creating a relationship with their fan, just like businesses can do with clients. Podcasts can be found on many popular apps like iTunes, Spotify, and many radios stations and websites. They are convenient for people to listen to on the move, and they can do this at any time.
Conclusion
Whichever type of content marketing you choose for your business, remember you need to create a clear and well-documented plan. When creating your content marketing strategy, you should:
Consider who your target audience is
Define your brands identity
Understand your buyers’ journey
Know the benefits of your products and services
Identify measurable goals
Create an action plan
Creating a content marketing strategy sounds like a daunting task, however if it’s done right, there is no reason why you shouldn’t start seeing some immediate results!
One of the most common goals within marketing is to rise through the ranks and be on page one of Google, Bing or Ask.com, but how is this achieved? With so many processes involved in bringing your content to the forefront of search results, it is understandable that stealing that prime position on page one is difficult!
There are certainly more than four stages to this process but breaking it down makes is easier to understand and implement into your own content marketing. Here are our 4 easy steps to understanding how your website gets ranked:
Crawling
Rendering
Indexing
Ranking
Crawling
When a search engine requests webpages from websites’ servers, this is called crawling. For example, if Google itself was searching through their own web browser typing in or clicking on a link to a webpage. Search engine machines all visit webpages similarly to how we do – when a search engine visits a webpage, it complies notes on the webpage of the content and the links. It will make sure to visit all of the links on that webpage and make a copy of them.
Most of the major search engines have their own technology to do the ‘crawling’ for them, and they are called ‘Googlebot’ for Google and ‘Bingbot’ for Bing. These search engine ‘bots’ can discover webpages’ links in some of the ways listed below:
When links are created back to their page
Through backlinks
Social media posts
Documentation including links
URLs found in written text and not hyperlinked.
In some instances, it will depend on how accessible the links and other information is to the bot, and it can affect how the search engine interprets the webpage. Therefore, showing the importance of creating strong backlinks and doing this in different and creative ways, such as guest posting.
Rendering
Once the search engine crawls a webpage, it will then ‘render’ the page. Rendering involves taking the HTML, JavaScript and cascading stylesheet (CSS) information to generate how the page will appear to the user on a desktop or mobile.
Search engines will store compressed files of how these pages will appear. Some will only keep a shorthand version of the webpages in a much more simplified formatting, i.e. just the text.
Indexing
The next step in this process, is to determine what the content of the page is about and whether it will be stored in the index. Similar to an index of words found at the end of a book, the search engine index works in the same format.
A search engine index contains many keywords and keyword sequences that are featured on the webpage, and it then associates them with a list including where the keywords are situated.
Indexing is also like a master database look up table, allowing to easily find exactly what you are looking. Of course, this is now much more advanced – when you type in your keyword to google it lists all of the URL’s that would be of interest to you based on the keywords across a huge scale. Search engines like Google are keen to keep this search engine as effective as possible so there is a chance that any content that is of low quality, will not become indexed and make it high in the ranks!
Ranking
The most popular step in this process, ranking. Once a search engine has a list of all the webpages associated with a particular keyword or keyword phrase, it must decide an order that all of the pages relating to those words will appear. Ranking is a very complex step which so much time and investigation has been spent on because getting it right is the difference between success for some businesses.
Most people who work within the SEO industry will know or have heard of the ranking process and the ‘algorithm’ in how it works. Different algorithms can include number of pages, views, clicks, comments, likes, shares. With new pages and links added every day, Google’s method to rank these is done quite quickly allowing an opinion to be made about the authority and usefulness of the page with its hundreds of factors included in the algorithm.
Simply understanding these stages to a search engine ranking, can help your content marketing preparation by including some of these points to achieve that no.1 spot!
Article creation is the process of how articles are started, titled, written and developed, and is a key component to any content marketing. Planning an article before it is written helps decide whether the content you are about to write is going to be beneficial to your readers. It needs to be relevant to its audience and grab their attention from the masses of other sources now online. Article creation gives you the opportunity to attract new customers seeking information on a particular topic relating to your work or business, or alternatively help you know how to reach out to those new customers.
All successful marketing strategies include good content marketing which is reflected in their article creation. By doing this regularly enables you to connect with exactly what your readers are looking for at every stage in the engagement process. If you can capture their attention throughout, it will build a strong relationship between you and your audience, and they will trust your content or business above your competitors.
The great thing about article creation is that whatever you put into it, you should get out. If you have taken the right steps in your planning this will show in your results. By regularly creating content you are ensuring that you are staying ahead of any competitors, but the main online benefits of doing this are ultimately to:
Both attract new audiences and maintain your current reach
Increase traffic to your website
Improve SEO and your website rankings
Learn more about the type of content you are providing and develop your work
To achieve the above benefits, try to keep in mind your target audience whilst working on each aspect of your marketing. As we know, marketing is not just about written articles, it can be across social media, website advertising, paid posts and much more. These types of platforms are continually growing to be successful with the amount of people who use social media that is only makes sense to spread the marketing across these areas too. When doing your content marketing is it equally important to include Regular article creation on these platforms too. It is all about being seen on social media so scheduling good content ready to post on a regular basis is a good step to keep your audience engaged.
Whilst writing across this range of media, try and use specific keywords in each article to keep your targeted topics similar. In turn this will improve your SEO and maximise your exposure in organic search results. This content you put out to your audience could be the first stage of them buying into your product. It is a good ideal to monitor these keywords and trial them for an amount of time before replacing them with some other keywords and seeing which is most effective with your audience.
If you are struggling with this aspect there are many useful online tools that can assist you in everything from your article creation to complete marketing strategy. Sites like SEMrush have many useful templates and tools to get all of your ideas together and help with article creation.
From past success of guest blogging, we are aware that there are lots of benefits to it and as there are so many different aspects that can help you improve your content, to assess where to publish your posts, and increase your traffic through backlinks, it is a good idea to collate these together and develop a strategy to do this easily and effectively.
It is not easy to acquire guest blogging opportunities, especially as more and more professionals and companies are entering the world of content. So how can we navigate this crowded field more effectively? Look at the following steps and see if you can implement these into your own guest blogging strategy:
Market Research
Content marketing research is the best place to start. Identify your audience you are aiming for and spend time learning what content they are most interested in. You can do this via multiple sources from; articles, reports and surveys to social media and what posts they are engaging with and sharing. This is the time to establish exactly what your audience will want from reading your content and will allow yourself to ask questions like, which topics concern them the most? What are they looking for? This will in turn help you to understand what content to include in your own work going forward.
Set your goals for your guest blogging
Once your market research is finished, you can then begin to set goals such as:
Raise awareness and recognition of your work
Improve SEO through connections you have made
Building quality backlinks to your websites
Drive more traffic to your site and get more leads and then sales
Become one of the leaders in your industry with brand authority
Increase the number of newsletter subscribers or social media followers
Find opportunities
With your research done and your goals set, you now need a platform to publish your content. It is important to find the right platform for this and think about relevancy, is your content going to be relevant to the website, and generate the right kind of traffic? The engagement of the site, you don’t want to put your content on a site with a low domain authority. There are many platforms that you can find which host multiple brands to make it easy to find a website relevant to your content and good DA’s. If you find a good site but it isn’t relevant to your content right now, create yourself a database of sites and take a note of it – it could be useful for future content.
Write your guest blog
Now you are ready to write your blog. Think about all the research you have done to get to this point and zone into this when writing your title and the keywords to include. Keywords are an important part of your content as this is what will make the difference between good and bad SEO. Good SEO will lead to a positive result in SERP. For your piece to generate traffic and be at the top of the search engine results you will need to include those keywords!
A good way to also boost your SEO is also through link building. Carefully choose the links that you are linking to and ensure they are valid and relevant sites. By adding these links, it will boost your SEO and the brand you link to.
Share and track your content
Once your content is complete and you are happy with the following aspects:
keywords
links
the style of your piece
uploaded to your chosen site
you can track this progress
It is then time to watch your results happen. Keep records of your traffic and leads and see how effective everything you have done up until this point has been. One of the main aims of guest blogging is to reach new audiences and expand your audience, so keep an eye on if this is working!
There are many different PR processes that can help you monitor and oversee simple communications, but it doesn’t need to be made difficult. If you plan and maintain the basic idea that PR is about keeping a healthy relationship between the clients and the business they are involved with, then it should run smoothly. The main aim being to a hold a mutually beneficial relationship, opening business opportunities to each other.
Social media communications are now a huge topic to include in your PR strategy, and using socials correctly can promote a business’s reputation. Gaining positive outreaching via social media is an easy result but how far can this be pushed? According to ‘Digital Marketing Institute’ there are now 4.2 billion people across the globe who use social media. So, companies are of course delving into all aspects of social media to see how this communication can be pushed further and reach this potentially vast audience. There is a lot to think about, like how social media strongly connects with certain industries and markets, to how many people can be reached and to what countries around the world? The potential is clearly huge!
There are now many tactics across social media to generate interest and keep the communication piece going. Connecting with competitors, clients and subscribers is a good method to build your network. However, another way to do this is by collaborating with social media influencers. Many of these influencers tend to have a massive following and are not called influencers for no reason. Consumers are now more influenced to buy a product if it’s recommended or used by a popular social media influencer, making for a great way to market your product.
But of course, it is not always easy to gain the following of a celebrity and create this relationship. Other ways to push this communication and connection to an audience is guest posting. This is an effective way you can reach varied new audiences that you would not normally connect with. Guest posting is also a two-way collaboration aiding both parties to create strong backlinks and to generate more traffic to their website, but also your content. The website you choose to house your content should be relevant to your work, business or audience to ensure you gain the most effective results. By choosing a trustworthy platform to upload your content, you can research their audience and statistics to make sure your guest posting will be reaching your desired audience. Find the right platform to collaborate with isn’t too difficult with sites like Ai Guest Posts who provide a platform with the choice of 12 brands to choose from so you are sure to find a suitable website for your content.
Social media communication is just one tiny section of what you can include in your PR strategy, but with 4.2 billion people all having access to social media, it seems like a pretty good place to start. Start making those social media connections and uploading your guest posts and watch your web traffic rise!
Would you like to write the most engaging and gripping content? As the internet grows, it seems so does the amount of competition. We are all looking for ways to stand out from the rest of the internet and grab the attention of our desired audience. Although it is not the easiest task to achieve great, quality content, it will be the best way to grab the right attention! With the growth of the internet and accessible online sources, this can be used to our advantage and help find ways to use and implement features into own our content. Quality is not about how many posts are shared, but the characteristics and style of your content.
Target Audience
When trying to achieve quality content, an important thing to consider is to make sure to write for your readers. Make sure the vocabulary you are using, and style of the piece is meant for your desired audience. Keep in mind that the readers will be using your article to find out information, so be educational but try to keep it simple so the piece is useful for them. If you were the audience, how effective would you find it?
Market Research
Doing some content marketing research before you begin writing could help stay true to the intended readers and find out specifically what they are looking for. This will not only help initially, with aiming your content in the right direction but to use the content marketing research continuously will really be key to the success. Make a habit of returning to the key points and ensure it contains all the aspects you think are essential for the readers to take away from your content.
Social Media
Another thing to consider is the way you connect with the audience, be trustworthy. By creating a relationship with your audience, they are more likely to gain trust in what you are saying and source your content in the future. Gaining this audience is very important but again, it is keeping them interested. Your audience will value your content if it is accurate and up to date. No one wants to read old or fake information and become confused from what they are reading. This could have a negative result in loosing the attention of the audience you have worked hard to create. Be transparent and this will maintain customer loyalty and you will be able to determine how good your content is by the reactions to it. Look out for the following type of activity:
Is it being shared on social media?
Has it generated more sales?
Is your web traffic higher?
Is your Google rank higher?
Monitoring these can also work well as a useful tool alongside social media. It can be effective to continue creating strong bonds with your audience and is a fantastic way of connecting to new people who you would not usually be in your reach. Different social media platforms are increasing the type of content you can now post. Being able to upload screenshots, charts, images, and videos gives a large diversity to your posts and enhancing the element of engagement to your audience. It also shows that you are giving value by looking at lots of different sources to present your information. There are many different marketing techniques, including guest posting, that can also aid this progress within your work.
By joining all the aspects we have discussed to create good quality content, will hopefully cement your authority within your niche and boost your content in exactly the direction you would like.
Retail is always one step ahead and that doesn’t just the physical stores – planning for peaks is at the front of every online retailer’s mind too. Whether that’s strengthening your ad strategies, preparing for product launches or being smart about inventory.
It all comes down to staying productive and preparing for the upcoming busy season. Tech plays a vital role in this, ensuring you can offer the best service for customers – from their first website visit, right down to last mile delivery.
In stores this is obviously key but online it is so much more competitive. The competition online starts with exposure to your business and making sure you are the first they have seen! It is important to make sure you are seen before the rest of your competitiors and expanding your online exposure as much as possible. With shoppers becoming less brand loyal online and opting for retailers that can offer the smoothest service and best delivery options, it’s more important than ever to plan out and anticipate customer journey from the very beginning and getting your products out there.
The beauty of being online is that there are many ways you can market and advertise your product to your audience. Things like Google Ads, Social Media campaigns and Guest posts can all help to gain the all important exposure before the crowds, or clicks rush in.
Amazon Prime Day
Amazon Prime Day is taking place as we speak, so although you might be prepared in terms of the stock, if you’re a seller in this space, there are still a few marketing tactics you can use to boost sales.
One of the best ways to encourage purchases is to educate your customers and provide tips around shopping for the two-day extravaganza. Many customers are not aware that they can create personalised deal updates on Amazon – they simply go onto the Prime Day 2022 page and create deal updates for the items they want to follow on there.
On top of summer, sales are bound to be better when this annual event rolls around at the same time for sellers. One of the most common complaints from stockists is having to manually look through full lists of orders to determine what’s on back order and what stock availability looks like. Having somewhere to digitally store this information and create a centralised list can really help with prioritising inventory levels. Here’s where tech, once again, can literally save the day!
Christmas in July!
One of the scary thoughts of peak season for many online retailers is the reminder that Christmas prep needs to start as early as July in order to keep up with an influx of sales. This is almost always a less daunting thought when there is a streamlined fulfilment process in place.
Many retailers opt for an Order Management System , allowing for the continuous tracking and active monitoring of purchases and inventory levels. This ensures the fulfilment process runs smoothly and in turn, so does the customer journey. Not only does this allow you to process orders faster during the busiest periods, but it also removes the risk of the sometimes costly human admin errors that can come naturally when there’s high demand.
Opening up conversations around Christmas can also be helpful, especially if you have larger recurring customers and contracts. Discussing the peak season allows you to plot and plan, formulating your distribution strategy ahead of schedule.
This, along with having the right tech in place for when one of the busiest periods of the year hits, allows you to streamline orders and reduce errors. Most importantly, tech enables you to maximise the opportunity that surrounds this peak period, so you don’t end up with dead stock or the inability to fulfil orders.
Summer sales strategy
Summer is in full swing, and things are already hotting up for many online retailers. Consider packaging up products with summer in mind when thinking about your strategy plan. Certain products such as sunglasses, fans and sportswear, naturally seem more appealing in the hotter months. Put these particular items at the front and centre of your marketing efforts and across your website. It can help to list items under certain themes such as summer, much like Amazon does when it comes to peak periods.
Thinking about your customer journey is also key throughout the summer months. Shopping experiences should be hassle-free and so should getting in touch with retailers. Research suggests that 40% of survey respondents said that they are happy to be contacted by chatbots when seeking help online. Deploying a chatbot strategy could be key to maximising your time when it comes to responding to common questions, where customers are also looking for efficiency so they can enjoy the great outdoors!
Following this, it’s the picking, packing and shipping processes involved in summer fulfilment that should be handled with care. Technologies available such as order management software, ensures users are alerted in real-time when a new order comes in and, information will automatically be sent to warehouse operatives – allowing them to pick and pack the order as quickly and as accurately as possible.
Black Friday
Black Friday, also known as Cyber Week, is one of the most anticipated sales periods for online retailers. Having your ecommerce store set up for an influx of sales this November should be a top priority that you’re already starting to think about.
One of the things that is helpful to do early on, is getting as many customer reviews and testimonials on site by the time this busy period rolls around. Purchase decisions are often made by reading through other user experiences. Customers have lots of sites to choose from when it comes to Black Friday sales and this is a great way to educate them and support them with purchase decisions.
Another top tip is to always have a range of payment methods available on site, so that you can reach a wider range of people when it comes to potential sales. You should also have strong delivery options and an easy returns policy, so that customers can purchase with ease.
Implementing a multi-courier strategy, rather than working with a sole courier will allow eCommerce businesses to offer more flexibility and options. Using more than one dedicated courier will also help to keep costs down.
If you opt to implement an order management system with pre-built courier integrations, then working with multiple couriers won’t even add to your admin burden. These pre-built integrations seamlessly connect with all the data within your platform, allowing it to automatically select the best courier for the job, based on rules you define (delivery date, product value, delivery location etc.)
Post-Covid service levels in peak seasons
Covid-19 had big impacts on order management, fulfilment and delivery processes across the world but now customers are no longer accepting Covid-19 as an excuse for late delivery. Poor customer service and a general lack of efficiency in the order process are not so widely tolerated. Post-Covid-19, shoppers are now spending less online but demanding better service when they do. According to a new study, two-thirds said they had noticed an increase in customer service problems at point of purchase and/or delivery since the pandemic began.
Peak sale periods are a real test on how effective a retailer’s order management and warehouse management systems are in meeting the high demands of customers. This is something that is crucial for retailers to get right, with 63% of customers stating poor delivery would stop them returning to a company.
Implementing technology such as a consolidated order management system can help retailers handle an increase in order demand, whether that’s supporting warehouse employees, or customer service teams during seasonal peaks. A sound order management system provides real-time data and displays achievable KPI’s, therefore reducing any errors and miscommunication in times where demand is high and retailers have to act quickly.
Take a look at our 5 tips that are sure to help grow the amount of traffic coming to your site and elevate your blog to where you want it to be!
Content Marketing Research –
Starting with some quality content marketing research, that is relevant to the current market will be helpful to all aspects of your work. With so many tools readily available at our fingertips, doing some content marketing has never been more accessible. This type of research is all about what audience your content is aimed at, and if this is relevant to them. Tools like social media insights, Google Analytics, and the social media pages themselves are all extremely helpful in finding out more information about your audience. By doing this you will know if your content is aimed in the right direction and includes topics that will keep them interested and engaged.
Link Building –
Link building is a great way to naturally add content which will boost the value of the article and prove to readers the authenticity of the brand. There are many ways to insert links into your content. You can put other people’s links into your work and yours in theirs, known as a link exchange. This method of using links is a way to widen your exposure to different industries and platforms you would not usually reach. There are also do-follow and no-follow links which can work in a similar and effective way to boost your content. A do-follow link is wherever you decide to place that link, it will go back to your site, meaning that you build a stronger presence on search engines. Alternatively, a no-follow link is something that links to a page relevant to the article but does not count towards rankings and SERP’s.
Build a Relationship with Your Readers –
Building rapport with your readers is a great way to keep them interested. If you can accumulate a loyal audience base who are genuinely interested in your work, they can ultimately be the key to help promote your work and elevate it to the next level. By giving your audience things like polls and surveys to complete will give you a better understanding of what they are looking for. Listening to their feedback will help you enhance and develop your work for success in the future. You can also try and create off-site relationships with other bloggers and businesses, through channels like social media.
Share Your Blog on Social Media –
Being in 2022, we are at an all-time high on social media, so why not use this to help you? Sharing your blogs and different kinds of work on social media is a great way to gain exposure quickly. Especially when using some of the tools previously mentioned, like strong backlinks and content marketing research. Simple things like sharing articles that interest you and using relevant hashtags can also be a big factor in promoting your content. Try and take some time to engage in other competitiors work and social media and share theirs too – they are then more than likely to return the favour.
Guest post on blogs –
Guest posts and blogging are another a way to increase traffic to your content and place higher in the ranks. Guest posts are a beneficial exchange for those who are supplying either the article or the site. It is a great way to introduce new content to your existing blog, or if you are supplying the article then it is very effective for expanding your exposure and reaching new audiences. Doing this will validate the nature of your content and give you authority across your industry. If you need help to find sites which allow guest posts, there are many platforms like AI Guest Posts that have lots of brand sites to choose from. There is usually a good range of coverage across different industries and regions, so you are sure to find something which suits your content.
Content marketing research is an essential marketing technique, specifically looking into what should be involved in the content. Without doing this research, it is difficult to know whether your audience will be interested in your content or not. It is all about creating valuable and consistent content to attract your audience and ensure your brand visibility, web traffic and leads all grow in the right direction.
Content is key to engaging with the audience as much as possible and after all, this is the main aim of your work. By investing time in researching the audience you are trying to reach will give a better understanding of what content most resonates with them. This process will help to create a voice for your brand and mixing this with your topic should naturally develop a narrative for your audience. The idea of content marketing research is to analyse information from industry sources like reports, articles, surveys, and studies but to also gather an insight into your audience through more personal, online sources. Ways to do this can be via social media, simply take a note of what your audience are sharing and engaging with. Gather some of these examples and it will help you develop your own individual content library of good sources that you can use and look to for inspiration in the future.
Other sources to research for content marketing could be podcasts, infographic, videos, and blogs. Blogs have become an increasingly popular way to validate your brand and attract an audience. Businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than other companies. You can create your own blog and write posts about your work to help generate exposure. It is a great way to creatively add value to your content by adding internal or external links to relevant content. There are so many sites that accept guest posts from other sources, allowing you to add your own content and backlinks to their site and gain that all important exposure whilst growing traffic. Sites like AI Guest Posts, Outreach Mama and Fat Joe all accept this kind of content and are very useful tools.
Looking at direct competitors is also a great research approach – see what they are doing, and how they are doing it? What seems to work well? Notify any trends you can see happening across the market, and if there are any gaps where you can see for opportunities. If there are many competitiors, do not take this as a negative sign – at least it assures you there is a market for your niche. This will be valuable information to take forward.
Taking all of this into consideration and implementing with your ideas, along with the other research you have completed will be a great base for your plan and strategy. Creating a plan of resources, timings and how you are going to execute your new research will also form an important part of your content market research. Depending on how you like to organise your work, creating a schedule will be a vital to implementing your findings. To help manage this there are tools like Asana that can help you set up timelines of tasks, different aspects of your workload and reports to track how it has been going. Once you feel happy you have integrated this into your work, to keep relevant and fresh against the competition, try and build this into your weekly routine.
