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Content marketing is a marketing technique to create, publish and share content with the goal of promoting your brand with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Content marketing is all about adding value to your customers or clients. The aim is to drive more traffic to your website or landing page and get more sales. It’s about helping to position your business as an authority in your industry to generate more business.

We normally think of standard blog posts when we think of content marketing but also included are videos, podcasts and social media sites. People these days don’t want to be advertised to. They want social endorsement.

So where do you start? The Internet is incredibly crowded today so it’s a good idea to have a strategy or plan. You want your content to be shared so well that people get to know you, like you and trust you.
Here is a very simple plan so you can generate more business with your content marketing:

Keyword Research

It’s important to do some keyword research before you get started so you do your very best to get your blog post ranked well by Google and found. Although you should never stack your posts with your keyword or keyword phrase, it should appear in the title, the first paragraph and then a few times through your post. Use a good SEO plugin like Yoast so that you can make sure you have all your meta data filled out for the best possible result. This means the title and description and keyword that Google will crawl to rank the post.

Content Research

Research what your clients want to know about. Are they confused about anything that needs an explanation? What is their pain? How can you find solutions for their pain? Aim to set yourself apart from your competitors as the ‘go to business’ for providing solutions to problems. What is valuable to your clients? Do your research before you start writing and if in doubt, ask your clients!

Content Writing

Start your writing with a memorable heading. There are lots of websites that will help you craft a great heading. Just search on Google.  Write with passion, be generous in sharing your knowledge, aim to educate your readers and even weave a story for interest. Personal experiences that educate will always stand out and help you build rapport with your audience. You can be humorous if it’s appropriate to your subject or style of writing and include some kind of action you want your readers to take.

Graphic Design

Images are very important. We all know the saying – ‘a picture tells a thousand words’. It’s often the image that will attract attention before the words or heading. Social media sites are all image based now especially sites like Instagram and Pinterest. Other sites like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn also allow you to upload images with the post. Make your post easy to read by using H1, H2 and even H3 headings and lots of paragraphs with bullet points to break up the text. There is a lot of noise online so make sure your writing is easy on the eye and not overwhelming.

Promote and Share

You can make it easy for your audience to share your posts to social media sites by having share buttons on all your posts. We recommend plugins like Social Warfare and Super Socializer. You can also use an author box like Fancier Author Box so that you can add your image and your bio below the post. This helps with promoting yourself as an expert in your field. As well as sharing your posts on all your social media pages, remember to also ‘ping’ your posts on sites like Pingler. Pinging is used to notify the blog search engines of changes made to your blog. Another great way to share your blog posts is to include them in your newsletters.

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Once you have your piece of writing, you can then turn the blog posts into other formats like video, podcasts and infographics. Same content or part of your content, but it is expressed in a different format. And remember, everyone responds differently to those mediums. Some love images, others love video and others still will enjoy a podcast.

If you’re interested in blogging and having a strong content marketing strategy but don’t have the resources to dedicate to it, HotsWots has an expert copywriter. Our copywriter has a background in marketing and advertising and can research your target audience and write your posts for you. She will then post and share to the appropriate sites around the Internet. Get in touch if you would like to discuss this service today.

So, if you want to generate more business, we highly recommend having a good content marketing strategy.

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Judith Shuttleworth

Judith Shuttleworth is the owner of HotsWots Digital and a Director of Open House ID, an app for real estate agents. We have a range of expertise in all aspects of digital marketing and provide personal customer service. Your success is our motivation.

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