Duncan Wierman
By DUNCAN WIERMAN— If you want to promote your business and stand out from the crowd online, then content marketing might just be the best strategy for your business. To understand precisely what content marketing is though, it’s helpful to put it in the wider context of web marketing, SEO and SMO. Content marketing will generate more leads for you and stand you apart from your competition.
Online Marketing
Often when someone says ‘online marketing’, they primarily mean ‘SEO’ or ‘Search Engine Optimization’. This is essentially what it sounds like: the process of optimizing a website such that it will show up at the top of the search results on Google and potentially other search engines.
SEO then involves building links to your site across the web, as well as adding content to your own site that is written in a particular way (often involving the subtle inclusion of ‘key words’ that people are likely to be looking for). To gain links on other sites, optimizers and webmasters will often contact other bloggers and send them free content that they can publish in exchange for linking back to the site. This is called ‘guest posting’.
SMO meanwhile is ‘Social Media Optimization’ which essentially entails creating and editing social media accounts in order to gain followers who you can then promote your site and your content to.
The Crucial Role of Content
Ultimately then, both SMO and SEO rely heavily on content. Copy is what people are searching for when they use search engines, so websites need lots of great writing in order to show up on Google and in order to provide any value to the user. Meanwhile, social media is often used mainly to share the content that’s on that blog, so again it relies heavily on content being written.
Content marketing takes this idea and runs with it – putting the creation of great content right at the fore of the strategy. Content marketing involves creating regular, compelling content for your site that people are going to want to come back to keep reading. This will then not only demonstrate to Google that you are delivering value and create more potential ‘long tail’ keywords within your text – greatly helping your SEO – but it will also allow you to build a relationship and trust with your readers and potential clients.
With Google clamping down more and more on spam tactics and low quality sites, content marketing is more and more becoming the approach of choice for countless scenarios.
Duncan Wierman
Duncan Wierman is an Ex Software company CEO turned full-time Real Estate Investor and Internet Marketer. Duncan teaches how real estate investors can take their business to new levels using creative marketing methods to promote their business and get more leads. Get your free 14 day internet marketing e-course at http://www.duncanwierman.com/blog
