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When I say
content marketing,
you probably know what I mean. You
don’t? Then let me explain. Content
marketing is any marketing that
involves sending out
relevant content to market your
company. This
article is content
marketing. Email newsletters
are content marketing. So are
blog posts, e-books,
podcasts, etc. Anything you
write and put on the internet that
you expect someone to react to is
content marketing.
You should
be marketing your business through
some form of content marketing. It
is a phenomenally large part
of online marketing and can
give almost instant feedback from
your target market. The most
effective and time saving method is
to pay someone (a professional
someone) to handle your content
marketing for you. But, content
marketing is something you can DIY.
If you do choose to do it
yourself, the easiest forms of
content marketing are email
newsletters and blog posts. You can
always try to write a relevant,
exciting and informative e-book, but
be prepared to spend a lot of
valuable time and effort on creating
one. For those who are about to
market, we salute you (and give you
a few handy hints).
If you want to blog,
here’s what you need to know:
• Blog weekly,
more if you can. Give your readers
something new to read at least once
a week and you’re getting
there.
• Make it
relevant, make it good. If
you run a trucking company, don’t
write about cake decoration. Talk
about
what would be relevant to your
readers. For example, write about
the easiest way to handle
cross-border logistics.
Always
remember to write good content.
Bad content will not get
read.
•
Give advice. It’s
free and everyone benefits. Your
readers come back for more and you
experience return
customers and that
all important following.
• Update it in
your social media. Tweet a
link, add a like button and tell
people about it in your Facebook
group,
update it in Google+.
Anything, really to let people know
that you have something new for
them. Also, remember to
allow people
to get your blog as an RSS feed.
• Write for your
readers, not for search
engines. Keep in mind that when you
write a blog that, while it is great
for
SEO, you need to remember that
humans will read your writing too.
Write for them and they’ll come
back.
•
Always remember the Rule of
24. Whenever you write
something, leave it for 24 hours. If
you come back after
that and it’s
still great, then publish it. But, I
can guarantee you’ll find something
to change.
When it comes to
email marketing,
things get a little trickier. If you
don’t have someone’s permission to
send them mail, it’s spam.
Spam is bad. A blog can
help you get people to sign up for
your newsletter, but once they have,
you have to keep them interested.
Below is a short list of what to do
when creating your newsletter:
• Use an
autoresponder. These are
programmes that answer mails for
you. When someone sends you a mail
in
response to yours, your
autoresponder can thank them and let
them know that someone will deal
with their mail
shortly. This lets
people know that someone real can
help them. It builds a
relationship and
relationships with your
readers are
good.
•
Reply. It really is
that simple. Have a real human send
your subscribers a personal
mail every now and then. It
makes
people feel as if their voice is
heard and that it matters to you.
• Write for
people, not spam filters.
It is an unfortunate fact of online
life that some of your mails will
end up in
spam folders or junk email
boxes. The easiest way around this
is to ask people to
white-list you as soon as
possible. Always keep your end user
in mind when writing.
• Make people
feel like a part of a group.
More specifically, an
exclusive group. Humans
want to belong, but
they mostly want
to belong to something only a few
people belong to. Nothing makes us
feel better than a sense of
exclusivity. In your sign up form,
mention that your potential reader
is going to be one of an exclusive
number to
receive your news.
• Use a direct
call to action. Instead of
“please feel free to sign up for our
email newsletter” use direct
commands
like “sign up now
to get our free newsletter!”. Human
beings respond better to commands
than they do to requests.
It’s all
very well and good to be polite, but
you also want to be read.
• Make it easy
for your readers to unsubscribe.
We know you don’t want them to leave
and we don’t want them
leave you
either, but sometimes they will. You
have to make it easy for them to
find that unsubscribe button.
People
are afraid to commit
so you have to give them a chance to
go when they want to. Most email
marketers have
found that the easier
your unsubscribe button is to find,
the less likely people are to leave.
• DO NOT SPAM!
When people sign up, give them what
they signed up for. Nothing less,
maybe sometimes more. Do
not use
false advertising or fill their
inbox with badly written junk that
they don’t want to read. Do not
waste your
readers’ time or they
will leave.
To round up the handy
hints in this article, here is a
summary of the most important
content marketing tips (in my
opinion) in this article:
• Write for your
users.
•
Write relevant, good content.
• Keep your
readers interested.
• Do not flood
them with useless junk they
don’t want to read.
• Be honest
with your readers.
If you follow
my advice, you are well on your way
to getting a good content marketing
following. Next week, we’ll stick to
the topic of content. I’ll teach you
all about how the content on your
website will help with your
marketing and how to make your
website content work for you.
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