You’ve heard it once and you’re going to hear a thousand more times; CONTENT IS KING. Consistently writing great content is key for driving traffic to your website.
The more you write the better chance you have of becoming a top thought leader in your industry and the more opportunities that will arrive to rank in search with each piece of content you publish on the web.
Your entire marketing strategy is dependent on the content you create. You can’t optimize your website without great content, you can’t have paid ads without having a landing page to send your audience to, and you don’t have anything to promote on your numerous social media channels unless you have content.
What about once you have created a very compelling piece of writing, posted it to your blog, and then wiped your hands clean of it, only to come back to check the search results a week or so later and realize that it has generated very few hits?
Creating Fertile Ground for Content Seeding
Cue your outreach campaign. One of the best, although still challenging, ways for you to promote your content is through the numerous social media channels that are available – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google +, etc.
You need to create a community by building an engaged audience who is willing to like, share, and favorite your content. Without this community of followers promoting your content is just a waste of your valuable time.
How do you do this? You first need to identify the key influencers in your industry. Retweet, repost, and like their content. Drop them a comment every so often on a piece they have written. You need to get noticed by them in order for them to notice your content.
The more often you do this the better chances you have of someone reading and reposting your content.
Use Smart Guest Blogging to Expand your Reach
You can also dedicate a post or two per month to be published on someone else’s blog. Plenty of people out there are looking for guest bloggers for their own blog. Just be sure that you are posting on a reputable blog. If a website seems like they will post just about anything, stay away. Work the relationships you have been building for guest blogging opportunities.
But isn’t guest blogging dead? Not quite. You just need to make sure you follow some basic guidelines in order to avoid being penalized by Google. If you’re guest blogging, be sure to avoid links with optimized anchor text.
Branded links to the homepage of your website at the very bottom or top of the post are fine, and highly contextual links that add value to the content and aren’t attempting to exactly match anticipated search queries are OK, but if you’re an SEO company in New York City, for example, don’t link “SEO company in New York City” to your company’s website anywhere in the post.
Sooner or later that’s going to incur a Penguin-related penalty.
Guest blogging is great for building relationships, not links. That’s the ultimate goal with your outreach program, to build relationships with other trusted leaders in your industry who will help share your content. Links will naturally come after that.
Paid Exposure Provides Fantastic Targeting Opportunities
Another great outreach technique you can use is through paid advertising on the social media channels. Spending as little as $5 on Facebook to promote a great piece of writing can go a long way. Say you reach an additional 25 viewers with that $5 and only 2 (obviously the goal would be for more of them to share, but let’s just say 2 for the sake of this article) of them share it.
It will then get picked up by all of their friends/followers, which could be hundreds or thousands. Your viewership may have just sky rocketed with very little monetary investment. Facebook in particular offers some amazing targeting options; a little money can go a long way if you’ve done your homework to target the right people
Before any of this can be completed you must have great content. Content marketing is the core of your digital marketing campaign. Anything you do you after that all depends on how compelling your content is.
A version of this post originally appeared on the ClickSeed blog.