Content Publishing

Does your content engage your readers?

The most important job of your content strategy is to engage your readers in a continuous manner. This is how they remember you. This is how they become familiar with you, and what you can offer them.

In order to engage your readers, you need to talk and listen and respond, instead of just talking at them from your lonely, isolated part of the universe. Ask them questions, and give them answers, or even probable answers, when they ask questions. Don’t just focus on establishing your authority — although that is important if you want people to listen to you — but along with that also talk in their language and be approachable.

In order to engage your readers in conversations,

Encourage them to interact on the comment section of your blog

The best way of letting people interact on your comment section is to let them share their thoughts. If you have, say, 10 points to discuss on a particular topic, publish just 7 and let the remaining 3 come from your readers. Does this leave your post unfinished? Wait for a couple of weeks, and if nobody talks about the points that can make your post complete, you can always update it.

Publish sometimes things that are relevant to your users even if they’re not directly related to your product or service

Is there some public debate going on on your part of the world and you would like to know what your readers think about it and how it impacts them? Take for instance global warming and rapidly melting polar ice caps. It may not help you sell more network security devices or get you more web hosting customers immediately but it will certainly provide you with an opportunity to reach out to your readers and convey to them that you are not merely interested in promoting your business. Varied topics also encourages those people to come forward and express themselves that are though interested in your field but have got nothing much to say.

Highlight suggestions made by your readers

Sometimes readers/visitors raise very important issues and they need to be highlighted. Talk about them by updating your existing blog post or writing a new one. Give full credit to the reader who gave you the idea and if he or she has a website, link to it. This will give an incentive to your other readers too.

Make good use of social media

Some of your readers may be active social media users. They may like to share their thoughts on Twitter and FaceBook rather than posting them on your blog. If you find it difficult to express what you have to say in the limited number of characters, write a small post on your blog and then just mention the link on your stream.

What more can you suggest?

How to use your business blog content to promote your business

The greatest benefit of your business blog is that it increases repeat traffic to your website — that’s why I advise my clients to host their business blogs under their main domain rather than using a separate, dedicated domain (even if the dedicated domain contains their keywords). If you regularly update your business blog with useful and relevant content you automatically cover the keywords you require to get targeted traffic from major search engines.

The key to turning your casual visitors into loyal customers and clients is, make them familiar with you, your product or service, and provide them all the information they require in order to want to do business with you, and you can easily achieve this through your blog. Although there is nothing particularly wrong or offensive if you occasionally publish your marketing or promotional messages on your blog (after all it’s a business blog), restrict them to one or two in a month. Don’t also make it highly personal unless people have become familiar with you and respect your knowledge and play close attention to your thoughts.

The basic purpose of your business blog content is to inform your visitors what you can do, convey to them how much you know about the product or service you are offering, and create a comfort level. Your business blog also creates opportunities for you on social media websites. If you want people from these websites (Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit…) to visit your website on a regular basis, you can’t just go on posting the same old links again and again; your followers and friends will grow tired of them and start ignoring if in the interesting stuff you may post occasionally. Post something fresh on your blog regularly, and then promote those new links using social media and social networking websites.

Engaging business blog content also encourages conversation and herein lies the true power of your content. If people talk about what you publish on your blog and share your links with each other, your business blog has crossed a major milestone. After this you simply have to maintain the momentum and keep feeding them with new thoughts. That’s the human side.

On the search engine side, maintain a certain frequency so that the search engine crawlers know when your blog should be crawled and new content indexed. I’ve personally observed that your website or blog gets crawled and indexed depending upon your frequency. When I publish on a particular blog multiple times a day for a couple of weeks the blog posts begin to appear in search engine results within 40-50 minutes of posting.

Quality business blog content encourages other bloggers, social bookmarkers and online publishers to link to your blog if they find something worth linking to. This doesn’t happen the moment you start publishing your business blog; it takes time because you need a certain level of presence for topics concerning your field. People in the first place should know that they can find good, reliable content on your blog if they want to link to it. If they are looking on the search engines they should be able to find your relevant blog posts for the related search terms. If they are sifting through social media and networking websites then your links should be present under appropriate categories.

Maintaining a business blog and generating quality content for it on an ongoing basis of course takes up lots of time. But when you see the results, it’s worth the effort.

Content strategy before social media strategy

A major part of social media interactions involves promoting interesting and valuable content. Whether it’s blogging, Twittering, Facebook updates, Digging, Stumbling or simply forwarding email messages with engaging links, people are basically promoting content. That content can be in any format: videos, images, animations or text. If it’s interesting and useful, it is valuable.

In this post titled Social media starts with a content strategy the author has rightly stated that on social media nobody cares about you; they care about the content you can provide. People will promote your content if they find it interesting, relevant, topical or useful. So if you thinking about launching your social media campaign you better have some solid content production and content marketing strategy in place.

How do you formulate an advantageous content generation and marketing strategy?

Identify your market and recognize what it is exactly looking for. Does you content meet their requirement? Does it convey the right message? Do you promote your content in front of the right audience? Selling combs to bald people may be an accomplishment but in the long run it neither benefits your customers or clients nor it benefits you.

A successful content generation and marketing strategy involves three fundamental questions:

What?
Why?
Where?
How?

What sort of content should your website or blog have? What purpose does it solve and why you should publish it? Where should you promote your content – in front of whom? And what strategy and methodology you should follow in order to promote your content in front of the right audience.

Once you’ve answered these question, you can kick start your social media strategy.

What does content marketing actually mean?

Content marketing is one of the most popular buzz words these days on the Internet and surprisingly, it gets more traction than content creation, without which content marketing has no purpose to exist.

So what is content marketing?

It basically means promoting the right kind of content in front of the right kind of audience. Content is king is a clichéd expression but it has never been truer. Whether it’s the search engines or the social media websites, they survive and thrive on content: whatever format the content has. But is content marketing as easy as this?

Hardly. To create a solid content marketing strategy, you need to clearly define your audience, and have a lucid perception of what sort of content would tickle their buying buds. Whom do you want to target? Customers, clients, subscribers, advertisers or visitors who devote a fair amount of their attention upon your advertisers? Then you start creating content accordingly. If you are a web design company you want to attract prospective clients who would be interested in buying your services. If you are a content writer or an online copywriter (like yours truly) you would like to attract people who would want to hire you as a freelance writer.

In the early 2000s for nearly two years my website came on the first spot on Google for the word "web designing" because I had generated lots of content around this phrase. The problem was, my website mostly attracted people who wanted to learn web designing rather than hire me for their web design projects. The targeting was all wrong.

So when I started creating content for this website it was constantly on my mind that I shouldn’t end up attracting just "aspiring" content writers and work-at-home people who wanted to do something in their spare time. My content should attract prospective clients. Well-orchestrated content marketing can achieve this for you.

Once you have identified your audience and have created a significant number of blog posts or web pages, you must start promoting and marketing your content using the following methods:

Opt-in email marketing: This is one of the oldest, and still one of the best ways of getting your word around. When people are on your website or blog encourage them to subscribe to your email updates so that they can receive the content you publish without interruption.
RSS feeds: Encourage people to subscribe to your RSS feed by prominently displaying the RSS button on your website or blog.
Social media, networking and bookmarking websites: Such websites can bring you tons of traffic. These websites include FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. They may seem to be bringing lots of random traffic (and increasing your bandwidth costs in the process) without generating much business but they certainly increase your visibility and help you strengthen your brand presence.
Online forums: Yes, they’re still popular and get lots of traffic from search engines.
Guest posting and commenting on other blogs: Find blogs in your niche. Write guest blog posts for them (something I have never been able to do actually) and participate in their comments section. Again, this may not bring you direct customers but it does generate buzz and this leads to customers and clients.
Search engine optimization: Some people believe in SEO and some don’t. The most logical thing to do is, produce highly relevant content using keywords your prospective customers and clients would use as search terms on search engines. This can draw lots of relevant traffic to your blog or website.

Content marketing is an ongoing process simply because there are always people competing with you. Ignore it for a few months and you’ll realize you almost have to start it from the beginning, unless you’re a celebrity.

When do you need content writing services?

When exactly do you need content writing services? When you need professional results out of professional writing. Websites no longer remain the way they used to be a few years ago. With the onslaught of blogging and social media websites, those 12-page websites are no longer viable. You constantly need to publish high-quality content on your website as well as your blog to give enough fodder to search engines and social media enthusiasts. No website can dream of succeeding today without publishing good content persistently.

A content writing service can provide you quality content on an ongoing basis at a great rate. Is it expensive? Depends on what sort of service you are looking for. Most content writing services — especially the ones operating from India, the Philippines, China, etc. — come quite cheap and they even provide great content, but I don’t promote myself as a provider of "cheap content writing services" per se.

I do provide bulk content writing at quite low rates but the quality is not good. It goes without saying that even low-rate content comes with spelling and grammatical errors. I do understand that the real benefit of hiring a content writing service is that you can get good-quality content continuously without feeling the pinch and that is why I’m constantly trying to find out ways to provide bulk content writing services at highly competitive rates. This involves closely working with writers that can write a lot in less time because the faster you can write, the more you can earn without charging much. Working on that.

OK, so coming back to the main question:

Why do you need content writing services?

Here are a few reasons:

You need good-quality content on an ongoing basis. As I said, it does you no good to just have 12-20 pages on your website and then wait for the business to pour in. A lot of search engine traffic is lapped up by websites that constantly publish new content, because basically that is what the search engines are looking for. They crawl and index millions of pages on daily basis to make sure their users don’t get stale content every time they search for a particular topic.
You want to improve your search engine rankings. Suppose you are a professional content writer working alone or running a service. With thousand of websites providing the same service, how do the search engines know that your website must be highlighted when people are looking for a good content writing service? They go through your various pages and then evaluate your significance both according to quantity as well as quality. Lots of content definitely improves your keyword density and also increases long tail traffic to your website.
You want to run a successful blog. Your blog not only improves your search engine rankings it also helps you establish your authority. If you continuously publish useful posts (related to the theme of your business or passion, of course) you develop a dedicated fan base that eventually gives you loyal customers and clients. Some also prefer to sell advertising once their blog traffic picks up.
You want to increase traffic from social media and social bookmarking websites. Content thrives a lot on social media and social networking websites. If people find your links useful they love to promote it and bookmark it.

Well-written content is the backbone of the entire Internet activity. May it be videos, images or text, it’s basically content that gets promoted and consumed. As a writer, for me what matters is the written content, and fortunately for me and other content writing services providers, it’s the written content that rules the roost.

Is your content a noise or a voice

There is content, and there is content. In the conversation economy (fueled by social media and social networking websites) the content you publish on your website can make or break your business. It depends on what direction you want to take, whether you want to be a noise, or a voice.

Low-quality content turns your content into noise. What are the traits that tell you that you’ve got low-quality content?

Your search engine traffic doesn’t increase.
Even if your search engine traffic increases, your conversion rate remains poor.
Nobody finds it useful, relevant or topical.
Your repeat traffic is very low.
Nobody promotes your links but you.
Not many people link to your blog or website.
Nobody talks about what you publish.
Even if people promote your link, it is due to some controversy regarding your views or opinion.

High-quality content on the other hand gives you a voice. Whereas people tend to ignore a noise, they pay attention to a voice. So what features of your content make it a voice?

It improves your search engine rankings for relevant keywords.
Your visitors find your content useful and they subscribe to your RSS feed updates or email newsletter, if available.
People share your links with their visitors, followers, friends and colleagues using social media and social networking websites and they respect your opinion.
The other bloggers and publishers love to link to your content as valuable reference.
You are eventually able to establish your authority.

As a professional content writer and online copywriter I’ve observed client fall into the "noise" content trap when they quickly want to improve their search engine rankings without putting sufficient emphasis on the quality. Sure, noisy content does increase your search engine traffic, but then that traffic is simply a crowd. Only quality content, content that carries a voice, gets you customers and clients, and loyal readers.

Why your website or blog needs unique content

There are basically two reasons why your website or blog needs unique, fresh content: the search engines prefer unique content compared to commonly and easily found content, and people who are active on various social media and networking websites prefer to promote something unique, something highly useful and something that attracts immediate attention.

Search engines looking for unique content

Various search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! are constantly competing with each other. Just because they get millions of visitors daily don’t assume they have it easy. Even a small fluctuation means millions of ad dollars lost. So they are constantly trying to improve their ranking algorithms and trying to find and index content that is unique.

The uniqueness and the usefulness of the content they find for their users keep those users from switching over to another search engine. Why would the users use a search engine that finds the same stuff that can be found on scores of other websites? Hence, in order to get higher rankings you have to make sure that the content published on your website or blog is unique as well as highly relevant.

Social media users want to promote unique content

Nobody likes to promote content that is being promoted by 500 other users. Social media websites can bring you tons of traffic if you can lure their users to your website by providing highly interesting, topical and relevant content that they cannot find anywhere else. But do they promote your links just for altruistic reasons? Not at all.

Take for instance Twitter and Facebook. Why do people keep posting interesting links on these websites? They want to show that they can locate and share interesting stuff. They want to be useful to their followers and fans. This way, if they are posting 10 useful links from other websites and blogs, they can also post a few from their own website without looking spammy. Besides, on Twitter, interesting tweets get retweeted and this is beneficial both to the owner of the link and the one who tweets it because both gain exposure.

Then there is conventional logic too. When you publish useful content on your website it tells your visitors that you take pains to keep them informed. If you share important information with them you establish yourself as an authority, and in more than 99% cases authority brings respect and trust, and respect and trust leads to loyal customers and clients.

Increase your sales and conversion rate by writing useful content

Content doesn’t just mean text full of numbers and hypothetical statements. It needs to solve a purpose, your visitors and prospects must find it useful. After all people don’t visit your website or blog out of some altruistic reason — they are always looking for something, whether it is information or entertainment. If they don’t find your content useful, if it doesn’t appeal to them, they are going to leave your website quickly without doing business with you, and they are never going to come back if they remember you or your website. Whenever somebody visit’s your website, he or she is thinking, "What’s in there for me?"

But how do you make your content useful; how do you make it cater to a particular need? It’s very simple — by putting your visitors’ interest first. This may seem like a cliché beaten to pulp by various "copywriting experts" but you know what, consider it a miracle, but it really works. Whenever you are creating content for your website, or whenever you are getting it written, keep in mind what you can offer in the best manner and how it can help your visitors. A few days ago I wrote about instilling confidence and trust with your copy. If your visitors can trust you and have confidence in what you have to say they are not apprehensive when they have to purchase a product or service from you. This trustworthiness can be established by encouraging your visitors to come to your website again and again, and this can only be achieved by providing something extremely useful and informative, and on a regular basis. Once trust is established they buy from you even if you don’t ask them to and simply mention that you offer a particular product or service.

Every product or service has a niche market and people are constantly looking for useful information. Let us assume that you sell an accounting software. Instead of mentioning on every second page of your website or blog how great an account package you’ve got, you can publish interesting trivia about your product. Recognize your market and generate content accordingly. If you are targeting small businesses with not much knowledge about accounting and bookkeeping you can publish lots of tips and tutorials on how to easily maintain books with your accounting software. You can also talk about various accounting procedures and how your software tackles them. You can publish objective reviews of other accounting software products so that people can compare and make educated decisions. You can also publish cheatsheets that make it easier to use your software. Sky is the limit when it comes to creating useful content around your product.

The same goes for a service that you provide. Take for example my online content writing service. You may think what is the use of publishing content that helps others become better content writers and online copywriters? When I am sharing my knowledge and experience I am establishing my authority. I agree…90% of my visitors must just be coming to learn content writing and copywriting, and I’m really glad, and humbled, that I can teach them something, but the remaining 10% can see how much I know about content writing. By going through various pages and blog posts they can make out that I can improve their conversion rate as well as search engine rankings by my writing experience. I may not be one of the best writers on the Internet but I definitely know what I’m doing and I abundantly share that on my website.

By constantly generating highly useful content I also increase my chances of getting linked to by other Webmasters and bloggers and consequently, increase traffic and search engine rankings.

Creating useful and valuable content may seem like an uphill task in the beginning but you will find in the end that it is genuinely rewarding. You increase your goodwill, you strengthen your brand, and you encourage people to pay close attention to what you’re saying and offering.

The value of your content in the context of social media

There was a time when in order to promote your content you had to focus on search engines and external links. Even today both these entities matter a lot but there is a third force that could prove to be far more penetrating when it comes to distributing your content: social media.

Some prominent examples of social media are blogging, Twitter.com, FaceBook.com, Ning.com, Youtube.com, Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. Some of these are interactive tools and some are social bookmarking and recommendation websites but their basic function is helping people promote and generate content.

The compelling reason for having great content, and lots of it

These days it is an aberration if an organization or a professional individual providing services on the Internet does not publish a blog. A blog helps you communicate with your audience unhindered by geographical and technological barriers. Blogging has almost become a “traditional” content publishing platform as many people are quickly switching over to micro-blogging. Nevertheless, blogging still rules when it comes to publishing and promoting content; in fact most of the links being promoted on the social media and bookmarking websites belong to blogs.

So what is the value of your content in the context of social media and what all should you consider while creating and publishing content? It is very similar to creating a viral marketing campaign.

Your content on social media websites thrives upon the users’ tendency to recommend interesting and relevant links to their followers and friends. In fact some users produce no original content; they simply forward and promote other links with their own comments sprinkled here and there.

There are two interesting features of users active on social media websites:

They promote content
They discuss content

In order to leverage the power of social media, first of all you have to create content on a regular basis and the content must be interesting and valuable enough so that they feel compelled to share it with their friends and followers. On websites like Twitter.com people tweet your link and then their followers retweet it if they feel like it and that is how your content spreads. The same thing happens on FaceBook. On Digg.com the users “digg” your link if they like it and the more “diggs” your link can garner the more prominent spot it gets on the website. In the case of StumbleUpon the more thumbs-ups you can get, with greater frequency your link is put in front of its users.

In the case of bloggers if they like your content they link to it and write about it. From there, further, other bloggers and social media users can write about your content, link to it or promote it.

Does your content always have to be likeable and acceptable? Not always. Sometimes people will write about your content, link to it and promote it to show disagreement or express a totally different point of view. Just make sure that whenever you are publishing highly controversial and contradictory content you are sure of what you are doing. This is more important amidst social media websites where it takes a long time to build reputation and very little time to dismantle it.

The moot point is if you want to generate and publish content for the purpose of spreading your ideas and getting more business you have to work on it keeping social media in mind. The power of social media is so great that some Internet marketers have already started claiming that you no longer need the whimsical search engines to get quality traffic. In fact the traffic that you get from social media websites and blogs is more targeted because it is promoted by real people rather than ranking algorithms.

There was a time when the search engines like Google asked for more and more content so that that content could be indexed and ranked. There was a lot of talk, there still is, about creating content that is search engine friendly as well as human friendly. Sometimes if you didn’t face much competition you didn’t even have to generate lots of content. But this is not the case when you want to promote your website through social media websites. You constantly have to publish content that creates buzz among social media circles.

This trend spells trouble for organizations and individuals that have always been downplaying the value of quality content. On social media you cannot create a credible presence unless you have credible content.

Of course, by simply creating and publishing great content you cannot become a social media darling; you need to have a following. It is very hard to make people listen to you if they haven’t listened to you in the past, and that too, repetitively. People on Twitter and FaceBook sometimes have thousands of followers and they themselves are following thousands of people. This means a continuous stream of messages in front of them. How to develop a following that eagerly listens to you? This topic is beyond the scope of this blog post but yes it is an important part of leveraging social media. You cannot hack into that. Either you have to be a celebrity or a well-known person in your niche, or you have to build your followers from scratch and this may take many months. Collaborating with people who are already highly active on various social media websites may help.

Is email marketing content different from web marketing content?

Of late I’ve been getting plenty of assignments that involve writing content for email marketing campaigns. Intermittently a few clients want to know what is the difference between writing content for marketing on the web and through e-mail. I’m sure they want to know whether I know the difference or not and I am writing this blog post to share my thoughts on the subject of writing content for email marketing as well as web marketing.

Fundamental difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing

Let me tell this at the outset that I am not writing this as a marketing person; I am a content writer who knows a thing or two about Internet marketing. Most of the things that I know have been learned by constantly working and interacting on the Internet with other professionals and also with clients hailing from different fields.

Marketing, as we will all agree, is an exercise to promote a product or service in order to increase business. It may involve running advertising campaigns, organizing events and distributing content that makes the recipients aware of the product or the service and its features. Of course I will be talking from the perspective of a content writer.

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign cannot be easily reused

An e-mail marketing campaign is most of the time a one-time affair, or there have to be long intervals before you send the same e-mail to the same recipients. Do it with regularity and it becomes spam. E-mail marketing is kind of push marketing even if you are using an opt-in e-mail list. It normally survives on numbers unless the targeting is phenomenal. The content for an e-mail marketing campaign, most of the times, is not reusable – you cannot send the same e-mail again and again. Every time you send an e-mail, there must be something new in it.

E-mail marketing content must always be to the point

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign must be concise, to the point, and use as direct a language as possible. Say your thing and get done with it. Remember that the person opening your e-mail would be having scores of unread messages in his or her inbox and it just takes one click to open another message.

This makes it more important to highlight the greatest benefits of your product or service at the top of the message. There should be minimal scope for confusion and misunderstanding.

It is debatable what should be the length of an e-mail marketing campaign. It depends upon what you want to convey and who is your target market. For instance if you are a real estate company selling real estate property then your customers will naturally prefer to read more and more before deciding to call you. On the other hand a less important product (for instance, an MP3 player) may not demand that much attention to detail. So write your content according to your market and the product or service you are offering.

E-mail marketing content should be personal

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign also needs to be personal because an e-mail is a personnel message. It is like knocking at somebody’s door in order to convey something. So the least you can do is address that person by his or her name. Even if the e-mail is going to a business e-mail address it will be opened by a person. Create a sense of familiarity.

Content for a web marketing campaign

A web marketing campaign stays where it is as long as you keep it. The content written for a web marketing campaign performs for a longer time. I am not implying that you don’t need to update your web content; I just mean to say it can stay up there for a longer period of time.

You don’t need to be as personnel as in the case of an e-mail marketing campaign because when it comes to your website it is not you who are knocking at people’s door but the other way round. People coming to your website are already inclined towards reading what you have published on your website. They have either found you on a search engine or have clicked a link on another website.

According to me the greatest difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing is that web marketing content is re-usable and it performs for a longer period of time whereas e-mail marketing content is usually created for a one-time affair so you have to make the maximum impact in the very first attempt otherwise it all goes waste. Web marketing content can be altered and tweaked according to the response you are getting; you cannot do this with e-mail marketing content, it’s like the bullet that has been fired and now you can do nothing about it.