Content Marketing Is Still King (key word's)
Even in the age of video, live streaming, and social media, content marketing is still the reigning King when it comes to building successful campaigns that will drive in traffic, and bolster sales and prospect activity. It’s also still the most effective way for both new and seasoned marketers to connect with potential leads, and to build organic traffic funnels from the major search engines. But the days of writing a short article, getting a few backlinks, and sitting back while the traffic pours in are long gone.
There’s just too much competition for those forms of marketing to be effective, and the search engines have changed the way they place value on content in terms of providing exposure through keyword searches made by those in your niche. Successful content marketing requires more effort and thought, and it requires a more complex strategy than ever before, but it’s certainly not difficult to do. If you create a powerful strategy based on the smarter content marketing tactics in this report, you’ll be able to quickly funnel traffic into your websites while ensuring that your campaigns are designed to achieve long-term success.
In this guide, you’re going to learn about some of the key metrics you can use to judge whether or not your content marketing strategy is a success, and how to formulate a winning strategy right from the beginning, requiring fewer tweaks and limited trial & error. There is a system – an absolute formula – for creating successful content marketing campaigns, and I’m going to lay it all out on the line for you in the coming chapters. You’re also going to learn about some very specific ways you can generate even more traffic to your website through content-based campaigns, and how to figure out exactly what your visitors are interested in, so you can deliver the best possible on-site experience to your prospects...
Out With The Old
To begin, I want you to know that the older (and outdated) methods of
content marketing are simply no longer effective. They’re either
marginally useful, not useful at all, or, at worst, damaging to your ability
to generate leads and create effective traffic-generating campaigns that
will stand the test of time.
For many years, content marketing relied almost exclusively on search
engine traffic, but that strategy is no longer as viable. There’s just too
much competition and search engines highly favor older sites that have
established trust and authority, over new sites that have yet to build on
an overall quality score, or history.
Getting ranked as a new site is very
difficult, though definitely not impossible.
At one time, all you had to do to rank well in search engines was use
targeted keywords throughout your website content. In addition,
repeating keywords throughout different areas of your website (such as
meta keywords, page title, header tags, etc.) would also help score a
better ranking in search engines. This was often referred to as
“keyword stuffing”.
When ranking based on keyword stuffing became extremely
competitive, and search engines grew wise to the methods people were
using to manipulate their website’s ranking, it became far more difficult
to get anywhere by using those methods.
They simply became outdated and ineffective.
To combat the changes in the way search engines determined what
websites should appear when specific keywords were entered, website
owners started to focus instead on building backlinks from authority
websites, essentially leeching credibility from other established pages.
With a decent number of backlinks pointing to your website, and with
on-page SEO used to optimize your pages to target those keywords,
you could usually count on your website ranking in the first few pages
of the major search engines.
Then, the search engines changed their algorithms yet again, and
webmasters were scrambling to figure out exactly what the search
engines wanted to see on their website to assign decent ranking.
Here are a few tactics that either don’t work anymore, or don’t work as
effectively as they once did. Keep an eye out for these, so you don’t
end up penalized by the major search engines:
•
Keyword Stuffing – Never, ever include the same keyword any
more than necessary to convey the point of your article. You
could get penalized or even banned from search engines if you try
stuffing too may keywords into your content.
• Backlink Farming – While it’s still important to build backlinks to
your websites from authority sites, getting too many backlinks too
quickly, or obtaining a lot of low quality links will do nothing for
you and may even cause your site to be penalized by the search
engines. Instead, focus on building quality links over a longer
period of time. Slow, and steady.
• Keyword Domain Names – The tactic of registering keywordbased
domains in order to rank better in the search engines isn’t
always successful. While it won’t get you penalized, it won’t
necessarily help your ranking either. Instead, register domain
names that are easy for visitors to spell, are relevant to your
website’s content, and help you build brand recognition. And
make sure they’re memorable!
Look for My Next Post in This Series on Content Marketing !
